An Indian Catholic’s journey to Jewish discovery

It is said in the Rig Veda, the oldest Hindu sacred text, that Truth is One but the Wise speak of it by many names.

For anyone who’s ever visited India, I’m sure you understand why that makes sense. India is characterized by micro climates, ethnicities, languages, cuisines, costumes & religions. It is a land of pluralism, of many dimensions, where people coexist in the past, present & future. Nowhere else in the world can one encounter a mosaic of Gods & Goddesses, traditionally archaic parents with modern educated children, villages unchanged since Independence, running without electricity, unpaved roads, mud houses yet incredulously juxtaposed with bustling metropolises, billionaires & Bollywood. In the Daawat of Indian history, minorities that fled persecution in their own lands, Zoroastrians, Jews, Tibetans, even Sikhs & Kashmiris, became a welcome addition to the flavorful Indian landscape.

Mumbai, the financial capital & richest city, is the crown jewel of multicultural society & religious tolerance in India. I was born into a Catholic family in Mumbai—my ancestors having surely been Hindu converts at some point in the last 200 years —In the summer of 1993. Well, summer in the West, but in the stormy monsoon season of India. Yes, for the unenlightened readers, Christians do exist, even in India, where they are a so-called “minority” of roughly 30 million. The Christian community in India are predominantly settled along the west coast regions of Goa, Kerala, Mangalore & Mumbai (although they are free to migrate anywhere internally) & are usually spread out into different sects – Catholics, Protestants, Malankara Syrian Orthodox, Baptists, Marthomites, Born Again Christians, Pentecostians so on & so forth. By virtue of birthplace, I was introduced to Persian & Jewish culture through the Fire Temples & Synagogues dotting Mumbai.

I was baptized at the Church of the Sacred Heart, in a former fishing village, in South Mumbai & like good Catholic girls, I studied at an all girls convent school (that is, a government aided school run by nuns belonging to different Catholic orders), attended Sunday school & received my First Holy Communion and confirmation. A well packaged Catholic. I’d been schooled about the Old & New Testament by the time I was 16 years old & had even ‘seen’ Jesus, in some of the Biblical DVDs that my father would collect. Ben Hur, Quo Vadis, Passion of the Christ, Oliver Twist—He wanted to broaden our horizons, but in doing so, he was also unwittingly exposing us to some cinematic antisemitism. Few catholic families in Mumbai, in the late 1990s and early 2000s were even remotely aware of antisemitism or of DVDs for that matter.

Naturally, during mass, some priests preached that our “Savior” was crucified by ancient Jews and that Easter was the ultimate fulfillment of Christmas prophecy. Yet the cognitive dissonance at Mass and in real life was a standard occurrence. We’d stand and listen to the priests singing the Passion every year on Good Friday, sometimes dozing off to its slow, mournful tune.

 “….Then Pilate said to the Jews, “Shall I crucify your King?.” 

“And the crowd answered him, “We have no King but Caesar!“

“Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him! Crucify him!…”

Followed by a sermon on righteousness, sin & hyper individual ambitions of the ancient Israelites. But once Mass was done, we’d default to our multicultural lives, our own ambitions & sins, mingling with non-christian friends & neighbors, haggling with vendors in the marketplace, at work and that’s how life just moved on. I even have a fond but hazy memory of my Confirmation teacher recreating a Passover Seder meal & explaining the significance of bitter herbs for us teenagers. It is a very unique memory because it is a Jewish memory, although I didn’t realize it at that time, but as a Catholic, it had nothing to do with being Confirmed to the New Testament. In hindsight, I’m glad that we students weren’t actively schooled in prejudice & that it was simply reserved to myopic musings of the priests.

My mother grew up in Mazgaon & Byculla area, colonial neighborhoods of South Mumbai in the 1960s & 1970s where she had Bene Israeli, Parsi & Muslim friends & teachers, with whom she had celebrated numerous birthdays with & even visited each other’s homes for festivals. The Bene Israelis were ordinary people just like us, she would reminisce. They were middle class folks, worked regular jobs, spoke Marathi, revered regional hero’s like Shivaji Maharaj & revere Ganesha, cooked Maharashtrian food. Mama would fondly remember one of her school teachers at St Isabel’s Girls School, a Mrs. Reuben, who was the wife of “Umpire Reuben”, one of Indian cricket’s famous umpires in the 1960s & 70s.  They were truly assimilated Maharashtrians. On free days, sometimes my family & I would visit the mystical Magen David Synagogue & Knesset Eliyahoo Synagogue among other British Era tourist attractions, on family outings to South Mumbai.

It didn’t exist in our sub-conscience to perpetually hate or boycott—apart from occasional political flareups—any one particular religion or community, because Indians and Mumbaikars in general are just too diverse to give a damn about those things. With time, sab bhool jaate aur teekh ho jata (with time everything is forgotten & settles down), is the Indian philosophy for every scandal & controversy, right from religious insult to roads with potholes & celebrity extra marital affairs. All the Communities had & still do contribute to Mumbai society. No one community strictly belonged to the elite classes or the poor. Although these are not the motives for practicing tolerance. For instance, one can still find Parsi charities providing financial assistance to Indians of all faiths & backgrounds. Catholic & Jewish schools & colleges teach students of different faiths & status. Sikhs serve Langar (free meals) to anyone who visits their Gurudwara. Most Indian companies & hospitals are owned & operated by non-Christian communities, employing & treating people from diverse backgrounds.

2006

The Da Vinci Code was a fire cracker of a book. The church priests wrote warning sermons around it. It had my devout aunts & uncles clucking about Dan Brown’s audacity & impunity in writing such blasphemous garbage. But they’d also lost their marbles a few years before when Harry Potter was promoting devilry & witchcraft & ushering the End Times. I mean honestly, giving JK Rowling credit for the coming global apocalypse was over estimating even her literary skills. But still my parents would play it safe & instruct me not to prod my cousins with questions on faith whenever we’d meet at family get togethers. A decade of catechism, put to the test by a couple of fictional books.

I remember making a mental note to check the figure sitting on Jesus’ right side every time I came across an image or sculpture of it in any church or Souvenir Shop. A habit that I subconsciously would indulge in until a few years ago. Nowadays, I just see 12 confused Jewish men arguing at Passover dinner.

I mean, if someone is going to write a fictional book about Christianity that still upset the Church, then it must be factual, to some extent.

Blind Faith ≠ Critical Thinking 

I remember the exact turning point in my life, the day I truly doubted. Not out of suspicion, but out of awareness of facts. There’s a fine difference. I recollect an important point that helped shape the foundation of reason. I had been watching a few videos produced by the organization Jews for Judaism. These videos taught me the context and structural environment in which Jews (including Jesus) existed 2000 years ago. Now I’m no Indiana Jones or anything and I’ve learned through self discovery, but if you’ve ever played ‘Chinese Whispers’ as a kid, (I don’t know why specifically China, since everyone exaggerates) you will understand the analogy of how Pauline Christianity was spread & accepted across ancient pagan lands of the Roman Empire. One simply didn’t need to (and couldn’t) verify, before believing in it. For me, finally reading the Gnostic Gospels and listening to Torah portions, was like seeing the very human & intellectual side of Jesus & the early Jewish-Christian movement.

A scandalous question, I know, but wouldn’t it be like rediscovering a long lost Secret if even a single parish priest would read passages from the original Torah instead of the Septuagint at church every Sunday? Would antisemitism have played out the way it so catastrophically did, if the Christian Bible included the Gnostic Gospels of Philip, Peter, Thomas, Judas & Mary Magdalene to give a grounded, human & Jewish backdrop to my faith? How much antisemitic persecution & strife could have been avoided over millennia, simply through dharmic tolerance?

As a Catholic from Mumbai, someone who came from a society where being a Catholic meant we were perceived as “somewhat foreign”, as followers of a western religion, it meant losing that Indian idea of being culturally Christian as well. Learning about Judaism for me meant all the praises I got from my non-Christian colleagues—about Christians being well dressed, modern, Anglicised and being the cool fun types who speak Hindi weirdly—- all of those stereotypes would suddenly disappear…

Everyone fears a mid-life crisis, losing their faith and what anchors them. Honestly, I’ve weathered those roller coaster emotions, all those days, weeks and months of confusion, of disbelief and Sorrow. Not being able to go to church and also not being able to replace the spiritual hole by just walking into a synagogue without formal initiation, suddenly losing my G-d and not having anyone to pray to, Yeah, I’ve been through those extremely painful realizations. And I’m proof that despite the massive punch to the gut and soul, you can still come out breathing even if your idea of heaven and hell is shaken. The transition from a Catholic with blind faith, to a Catholic with common sense was a growth inducing experience.

It is not lost on me that the current Indian Government and Non Christian Indians in general have a better appreciation and engagement with Israel, in politics and in media verse, than the Indian Catholic community. The tendency to view Israel & Jews not as a modern country with typical societal problems like economy, crime, progress, war, politics etc but through the narrow minded lens of romantic New Testament, unfortunately gaslights Jewish heritage. It might do Indian Christian pilgrims a ton of good in terms of spiritual & intellectual growth, to actually chill with Jewish folks in Israel, break some Shabbat bread & spend a few days exploring Jewish monuments, sampling Israeli cuisine in Mahane Yehuda market or sunbathing in Tel Aviv as much as they do retracing the Via Dolorosa, praying in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre & visiting Bethlehem.

So how do I go about my Catholic life, knowing what I know? Well I am not a Jew. I am also not a Messianic Jew. I’m not the Catholic that I used to be. But I hope to one day learn more about the Noahide Code. I thank Jesus for his lessons. In a broken system and society where justice, atonement & accountability isn’t the structural norm, his lessons on forgiveness & redemption have helped me as a child, as a teenager & in the recent past. And if he happened to work any miracles in my life in the past, I am thankful for that.

My Dear fellow Catholics, you want to be a good Christian, want peace in the Middle East & want to usher in the age of Messiah? How about some mutual respect & acceptance? Throw out your rose tinted glasses, check out the Torah, the Dead Sea scrolls, Gnostic Gospels, forge friendships with our Jewish brethren personally and then take a call. It’s really, really that simple. You won’t be struck by the ten plagues of Egypt if you pop into a synagogue for an educational tour or reach out to the Jewish & Israeli community in Mumbai. As Indians, dharma is in our genes.