Americans do gratitude differently. Other countries remember victories or mourn tragedies. We feast. We gather around a table, not a monument.

We quarrel over stuffing rather than ideology. Football replaces fireworks. And once a year, on a Thursday in late November, we practice something at once deeply American and quietly Jewish, as we allow ourselves to be thankful.

Thanksgiving has no liturgy and no prescribed theology. That is its gift. For Jews, it is one of the few American holidays that feels not only permissible but genuinely resonant. Like Independence Day, it honors a national idea rather than a religious doctrine.

But unlike the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving orbits not around spectacle, but around home, food, family and reflection — the building blocks of Jewish ritual life.

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