The Rituals That Bind and Unbind

On the link between thanksgiving and sacrifice.

“No animal is capable of self-transformation, but we are.”
—Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

I met my wife at an Irish Pub in Rome on Thanksgiving Day nine years ago while watching a Detroit Lions football game.

This is proof that your fantasies about the magical things that might happen to you in the real world—if only you were to escape your awkward family gathering today—are all true.

I’m kidding about that last part, of course. (But not the first part.)

There is an inextricable link between thanksgiving and sacrifice. Even if that sacrifice is just, in the words of novelist

Walter Kirn

, the “additional tension Americans suffer from showing up at their mother-in-law’s houses in media-driven states of quivering vigilance.”

Let me explain.