So tomorrow we’ll celebrate Thanksgiving and Hanukkah together for the first time since 1888 – an event that won’t come again for another 77,798 years! This is because the Gregorian calendar is a solar calendar while the Jewish calendar is a lunar-solar calendar. But while they rarely overlap, they both share a very important message.
The pilgrims, guided by very strong religious fervor and faith saw themselves as establishing a New Israel. They read their Bible and many scholars point to the Jewish fall harvest holiday, the Sukkot, as the basis for Thanksgiving.
