Every year around this time, American Jews reenact a ritual of belonging. Some roast turkeys, some order takeout, and some (parents) sit through Jewish day school Thanksgiving plays.

I’d been practicing lines for one of those plays with my kid, and it struck me: these pageants are America telling a story about itself. 

This year’s play had a few Jewish “ancestors” — my son among them — explaining that we came here just like the Pilgrims: for religious freedom, eager to join a country that honors many cultures.

For a long time, we Jews seamlessly read ourselves into that story. 

It’s sweet, well-intentioned, and deeply familiar. It is the story many American Jews have told themselves for decades: Jewishness and Americanness harmonizing, reinforcing each other, no tension at all.

But this year, listening to those lines, something in me snagged. Not because the story is false, but because it no longer feels like the whole truth.

This Thanksgiving, many of us will sit at tables feeling both grateful and unmoored. Grateful for America, which has been extraordinary to us. Unmoored because our particularity — our ties to Jewish peoplehood, to the land of Israel, to a complicated nation of our own — no longer fits easily into many Americans’ stories.

So what story do we tell instead?

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I read Vayetzei, this week’s parsha, last week, right after........

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