By Dani Hemmat, Special to JTNews
Every Thanksgiving, David Rabin serves turkey dinner to over 100 homeless people in Pioneer Square’s Occidental Park. He fills their bellies with a wholesome meal and warms their hands with a cup of coffee and maybe a new pair of gloves. For the last 10 years, it’s been a family tradition — one that requires a lot of planning and money, but is also looked forward to each year by him and his two young sons. And while Rabin feels he’s been blessed with an abundance of everything, he doesn’t go to such lengths to ease his guilt over his own good fortune. He just wants his children to appreciate theirs.
Rabin lives with his sons, Alexander and Asa, on Bainbridge Island. After he divorced, he found himself responsible for more roles than a married parent fills. Alone with his boys, he wanted to give them the experiences a two-parent household would provide.
“I just wanted to make sure that I could give them things by myself that would’ve been a lot easier together with somebody.” Rabin says. “It started off with the idea that we would just go down to Pioneer Square on Thanksgiving and hand out dollar bills to the homeless, but then I realized that [his children] wouldn’t understand; it wouldn’t really teach them anything.”
So Rabin and his boys, who were 5 and 2 at the time, came up with the idea of handing out hot turkey dinners to people in need. Preparing all the food with the help of Rabin’s parents, who were visiting from Philadelphia on the Thanksgiving that Rabin began his tradition, they assembled 50 meals in takeout containers on the dining room table and hauled them across the water to Seattle. Although they intended to hand them out to any homeless passersby, the streets were empty. Cruising around, they saw some people huddled by the Fireman’s Memorial in Occidental Park. Rabin parked and offered them the hot meals. While his father stood guard with a discreetly held baseball bat, Rabin opened up the trunk to his car and his sons began handing out the meals. Although he’d had to approach those first few people, within minutes the empty park filled with people wanting to partake.
“It was like sending out a radar signal,” said Rabin. “People came out of the woodwork and congregated outside our car, and those meals were gone in 20 minutes.”
For the next two years, the Rabins packaged the meals in individual containers until the family dining table couldn’t hold any more takeout boxes. Reaching 100 dinners, David decided they had to change their methods. Takeout boxes gave way to catering trays, and instead of handing out the meals from the trunk of the car, they began serving them off of banquet tables.
The Rabin family Thanksgiving tradition just completed its 10th year. Although Rabin and his two boys cook all the food together, David has always made sure the children are serving it.
Asa, 12, and Alexander, 14, bring along school friends, and there are always kids from Bainbridge Island’s Congregation Kol Shalom, where the Rabins are members. Though hungry people benefit from their effort, the kids themselves are also beneficiaries.
“People always tell me, ‘I want to go and do it with my family, what a good idea.’ And I tell them to come on down and see it happen. Because I don’t do it out of guilt. I do it because it’s important for the children to see how lucky they are,” Rabin says. “That, there by the grace of God they won’t be sleeping out on a cold sidewalk tonight. It’s not always such an easy lesson to teach them, living on Bainbridge.”
Those lessons stay with them. While Asa doesn’t remember his first time handing out meals, he recalls a time when he was five. “I was serving food and a lady hugged me and thanked me. That felt good.”
Asa now says that Thanksgiving only means one thing to him — feeding people in need. The Rabins have never spent the holiday any other way.
And they’ve never let anything get in their way. Last year, David was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Kol Shalom members volunteered for nine weeks to feed his boys and shuttle them to Hebrew school and lacrosse practices. The newly formed Kol Shalom Brotherhood stepped up to help them carry on with their Thanksgiving tradition.
“It’s a lot of cooking, a lot of food,” says Rabin, referring to the 12 turkeys, 120 rolls, 100 apples, 40 pounds of potatoes, five pounds of green beans and two gallons of gravy that he and his boys used to prepare. While he still directed the operation this year, the Brotherhood helped with the planning and carrying it out, preparing the food and shuttling it to Seattle. Congregants collected clothing and blankets for the effort, and a Bainbridge Island barbecue restaurant helped smoke half of the turkeys. It seems that after giving of himself for years, Rabin has banked a lot of goodwill and love to draw on.
That spirit of giving and gratitude moves between those who give and those who receive, until the distinction blurs and it’s hard to tell who benefits more. Marvin Gnad, a homeless man battling Stage 3 melanoma, scored a warm velour blanket during the event. Clutching his blanket and beaming, he said that his backpack had been stolen a few days earlier, and he was thrilled just to have a warm blanket.
“Something like this, you don’t know what it means. A blanket’s just a blanket, but it sure means a lot to me. When you don’t have anything, little things mean an awful lot.”