Rav Avigdor Miller zt"l on Jewish Thanksgiving

if a gentile wants to eat turkey on Thursday afternoon with his family watching football by all means enjoy it it's the best of all the idolatrous holidays at least there's no tree in the middle but if a if a Jew wants to do it if they've already done it once in their life there is no permission whatsoever for them to do it according to anybody's opinion we have our extraordinary series by the konish the Jewish ideology and what better time is there to learn about what is the right asfa what is the right ideology other than the week of the uh the holidays of the go uh where you have now the holidays of the go are rampant like we have our high holidays of andk and Yip and the rest of the extraordinary and beautiful holy holidays million times difference they have their holidays where they have their celebrated one after another whether it be the Halloween the the holiday where everyone has to pretend that ghosts and demons are a good thing uh or they have their Massacre holiday that's coming up this week that's called Thanksgiving ironically the same holiday they massacred millions of people they celebrate as Thanksgiving or they have their uh their Idols holiday in uh in December that everybody's familiar with which I don't even want to say the name uh but the key is to understand that these holidays are very very important for us to know why because you need to know what are what are the laws of the Gentiles and what you're not allowed to do so of course in the uh in the western society and especially here in America it's become a uh I'm not really sure how and you know exactly who started this whole uh thing but it's become a very uh common custom among Jewish households uh to celebrate than Thanksgiving as if it is a neutral non-religious holiday now we've had several times that we've discussed this whole issue about uh Thanksgiving uh you know not being a holiday that a person is supposed to celebrate but of course there's always people that either don't watch it or forget or they think they're going to bring us some type of new source that they found under the blanket or they saw on the internet perhaps maybe we reconsider well vido Miller is quoted saying that uh the uh the holiday of Thanksgiving is in fact a religious holiday because even if you look it up in a dictionary which in those days was still in books today it's on the internet you'd actually see that the go themselves say that this particular day of Thanksgiving is a day you're supposed to go to church so the roots of this holiday are indeed religious but needless to say even if you remove that for a moment uh even if you remove that for a moment it's still forbidden for a Jew to celebrate this holiday like people do today and what do I mean like people do today someone brought the uh the uh uh leniency if you want to call it a leniency by Feinstein Shalom one of the Giants among giants he was the from the you know from mosu to Moshe the ROM to MOS MOS Feinstein there was no one else like these Giants and Moshe Feinstein you know when was when he was asked about this Thanksgiving again in his day he said if you do it once in your life in a non-religious fashion you know then this is something that can pass meaning it's not a problem but he never gave a hex share on Thanksgiving for anyone to celebrate it on a annual basis that would actually turn it into a h what's called a h which is in since a new decree which is not only adding to the Torah but it's also which is a following the laws of the go of the Gentiles which is forbidden for a Jew so now if a gentile wants to eat turkey on Thursday afternoon with his family watching football by all means enjoy it it's the best of all the idolatrous holidays at least there's no tree in the middle but if a if a Jew wants to do it if they've already done it once in their life there is no permission whatsoever for them to do it according to anybody's opinion not MOS Feinstein or not anyone else but again people will always look for an excuse to justify their sins and suddenly they become alic meticulous alic fanatic suddenly they know the laws or they think they do and again this has everything to do with our sh why because when a person truly learns Al and they learn the laws the emotion are removed because now they know what's right and what's wrong and where they're supposed to go and where not the same applies in every other aspect of B whether it's the Thanksgiving nonsense that's in people's minds today or it's wasting seed or it's Shabbat or it's nid or or it's you know um Family Family Purity or it's a modesty or any other law out there a person needs to know that if you want to follow the way of hem you have to remove your emotions so long as you're emotional you're not going to make the right decisions needless to say you're going to be living a very sinful life now that's what the Kish has chosen to SP to speak about anyone actually still believe in coincidences when he watched ISU for so many years this is exactly what the k is talking about this week right now in chapter 4 section 8 the Kish says exactly what I'm going to tell you I'm going to read it off so everyone knows up to here is the section we're going to read this section is a little longer but we're going to read this particular first paragraph and last week just to remind everybody we talked about in essence the importance of observing Al importance of learning M knowing that one cannot live without the other they must coexist if you learn ala but you don't learn m then you're going to be a crazy person that's going to be meticulous in the wrong places if you learn M but you don't learn Al then you're just simply going to hate everybody because you're going to think that you're the most righteous people person in the world even though you're violating much more laws than they are so it's important for a person to know that they have to work on their character traits by learning M but the best way to work on the character traits is by learning Al and fulfilling the Ala itself and to be very specific about Ala itself and now in essence what the Kish is doing is continuing to build on that foundation and he says the following when a man gets accustomed to being meticulous in the observance of ala in oppositions to his natural and inborn tendencies this accustoms him to have his deep understanding Rule and his intellect control him it enhances his constant awareness of the importance of submitting to his inner sense and elevated conscience and trains him to be a spiritual person distancing him completely from coarseness see here the Kish is telling us a whole lot of thing we're going to break it up one line after another to truly understand the beauty of the words that the kazun is choosing here to try to teach us how to stop being animals now the kazun is saying that when a person is is accustoming themselves person learns T learns mitv learns all the things that they need to do she's learning the things that she needs to do she's not going to use the excuse oh listen women are not obligated to learn Torah so you know all I do is I just watch whenever I have time that's not going to fly in sh why because if you don't learn the basic laws that you are responsible for such as the laws of Shabbat the laws of modesty the laws of the holidays the laws of Kash all of these different laws that are pertaining to you guess what your you know things that you're doing may be nice but you're not going to know what you're doing when the time counts and when does the time counts when all hell fails everything fails everything goes wrong Shabbat one of the kids turns off the light exactly where the dinner is supposed to be what do you do hint nothing but if let's say for example one of the kids turns on the hot water what do you do if one of the kids turns off or turns on one of the uh things the stove the oven or something else what do you do with these things naturally you're going to say yeah well I remove the danger I increase the convenience I'm having guesss this is the natural inclination of every person but you have to know what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do and you cannot use your emotions when it comes to these very difficult decisions and the reason why is because your emotions will lie to you they will mislead you and that's one of the tools Satan will use most often