With India swirling all around us, there's been really no time to think about spinning the dreidel. Despite where we've been until now, we've felt each holiday as if we were home. We miss people because we aren't.
Hanukkah always seems to slip by easily when it's this early – even at home. One year like this, my cousin Laureen – at the time a single mother with two five year-olds – was so busy with her psychology practice and the demands of raising twins in her own that she "moved" Hanukkah until later in the month when her practice slowed down.
I was sort of horrified at the time and felt like the kids were somehow being insidiously robbed of the truth. But since then, I've wanted to move Hanukkah a few times myself. This year would be one of them. It would be so nice if the Assyrians and Maccabees could have held it all to line-up with when we're all settled in Kerala for three weeks – when things will seem a little more relaxed and we can think less about being hit by vehicles and more about the fate of dreidels.
But yesterday evening, issues of ancient religious and cultural battles came to mind walking down the streets of Mumbai. India is a place where religion abounds. In the streets, taxis, homes, businesses, temples and on people's bodies.
While we certainly saw it in Nepal, Hindu idols and icons are even more pervasive in India. If you're a taxi driver, you sort of pick your key god, goddess or combo of up to three to take around the city streets with you.
In every location and way possible, Indian Hindus have representations of their deities with them. And everywhere the Hindu gods go, incense is sure to follow. Even in the back of taxis. I still have a jacket that's recovering from a serious backseat incensing during a taxi ride in Nepal.
I take in all of it, I watch the devoutness with which men and women approach temples dedicated to Krishna and Shiva. You see people with nowhere else to go and nothing else to do take themselves before a god or goddess and throw themselves at his or her mercy. In a place where faith may be the only thing keeping people going, it makes sense that not only would people seek a higher power, but that they would want to make God tangible.
As a Jew, I find idolatry so interesting. It's one of the big no-no's of Judaism – featured prominently in the Big Ten. My concept of the Divine is so completely intangible that it's hard for me to wrap my mind around the idea of a pantheon of human-like gods and goddesses complete with personalities, faults, passions, feuds and the whole set of issues that make our lives complicated and problematic.
After all, if God doesn't have it down better than us, what's the point of being divine?
However, when learning about Hindu once in a previous trip to Nepal, I got what felt like some insight. It was explained to me that the multiple hands and faces sometimes featured on the depiction of Hindu gods are representations of the multiple aspects of a deity. Although I'm sure some learned person who knows far more about Hindu than me may one day beat me with a stick for saying so – I have made better sense of Hinduism by figuring that the pantheon of gods and goddesses are essentially representations of different aspects of God as I know God.
Perhaps it's my Jewish upbringing and the foundation it gave me for my own spiritual explorations – but for me personally, the commandment to avoid idolatry seems a little like laws about putting seat belts on children. In both cases I see them and I think, "Yeah, of course…."
Looking around the world, it's clear that not everyone believes in either of those things. There seems to be a very strong human need to give God a human face and to make the divine tangible. In Greece, it was hard not to think of the Orthodox Church's use of icons as a form of making the divine physical and tangible.
When I lived in Thailand, I discovered than many Thais pray to the Buddha. These same people don't all know his teachings let alone endeavor to follow them. To them, the Buddha is a deity who hears prayer and gives solace and help. He's physical and real in statues of all sizes an in so many convenient locations.
In Taiwan, every alleyway and small street led to a shrine to a Taoist god also shrouded in an endless supply of incense.
The human desire to bring the divine down from the heavens to be understood and seen clearly is strong. Some of us go about it in different ways than others.
Still, however you look at it – India is full of believers.
Besides the Hindus who make their gods so visible, there are also plenty of muslims. In the past, when I thought of India, I knew there were muslims, but my images were always of powerful and colorful Hinduism. And while the Hindu of India is much as I expected it to be – there's so much more Islam than I realized.
Most surprising to me is how many burqa-clad women there are. I've seen men walking with multiple burqa-dressed women with them. It's hard not to wonder if there are still polygamous marriages here. There certainly is no shortage of people keeping the muslim faith – in both traditional and modern attire.
The thing about India that strikes me regularly is that faith, religion and prayer are so ubiquitous. It's almost a national theme. When trying to explain the power of religion in India, it's tempting to become a middle-class, educated elitist and say that the better the better a country's GDP and political stability, the more likely it is to become secular – that the struggles of the poor and uneducated lead them to religion.
Then what do we say about ourselves? Why do middle and upper-class Jews from the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles go to synagogue? Or why should they go to synagogue? If we succeed financially, why not release our claims on the divine, on tradition and on religion?
I believe that perhaps there's something more – or at least something else at play in India. There may also be the notion that life isn't all about "success" and the material. Perhaps – and especially – if you're locked into a caste where your lot in life is determined before you're born, you instead focus on the search for meaning. You can fill your life with sorrow, with stuff or with lightness.
In that way, I'm not sure it's all so different than those of us who would go to a synagogue on an average Friday night – looking for something to bring inspiration, heal the pain of loss or to find greater fulfillment.
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