This ritual of Thanksgiving is a ritual of identification. A traditional American parade ritualizes the sacredness and centeredness of money in American life.

This Deuteronomic ritual identifies God as the center of thanksgiving and is our way of saying so. One does not thank anybody if self is the center. Thanks, then, may be little more than the oil of social facilitation. The thanksgiving of this text expresses a relationship of debt. It calls forth one’s history - not of one’s lifetime alone, but that of all previous generations.

Once the Israelites came to the land that God had promised to give them, they were called to remember that their ancestors were once homeless, that they became powerful in Egypt, that they were humiliated and ill-treated, suffered all kinds of cruelty, even …