Mumbai Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving for me this year was overshadowed by the attacks in Mumbai, especially being at my father-in-law’s home, where cable TV—absent in our home—meant the coverage on CNN was available to me for days. I couldn’t pull away. It’s taken me some time to distill my thoughts and emotions after the attacks in Mumbai. This reaction takes the form of two stories, separated by decades and continents.

First, there's the story of the Taj Mahal Hotel. It was my first stop in a year spent backpacking across Asia in 1986. Deborah, my girlfriend at the time, and I left from London on New Year's Day 1986, flew overnight and arrived in the pre-morning darkness. We headed straight for the 5-star Taj Mahal Intercontinental Hotel which we'd heard was a landmark from which we could get to a hotel we could afford, one on the other extreme of the luxury scale. On the bus into town from the airport, Deborah became angry with me that I’d discouraged her from bringing her sleeping bag with us on the trip. By the time we reached the hotel, our fighting was full-blown.

We "broke up" under Mumbai’s most famous monument across the street from the Taj Mahal Hotel, the Gateway to India, a grand arch built to commemorate the visit of King George V and Queen Mary. It’s a huge structure, complete with turrets and intricate latticework carved into the yellow stone. Next to the arch, there are steps leading down to the waterfront of the Arabian Sea.

There, under the arch, she and I began pulling our backpacks apart, separating our gear in anger ... Eventually we stormed off in different directions. I was twenty-four and sleep deprived (or so that’s my excuse in hindsight).

That breakup didn't stick. We’d have a daughter two years later. But the memory of that incredible place did stick.

The streets of Mumbai were just coming to life as the sun rose in a big fiery ball casting the entire neighborhood in hues of orange. Down every nearby alley behind the ultra luxurious Taj Hotel, locals were rising from where they slept on the street on flattened cardboard boxes or on rickety string beds. As dawn broke, the fishing boats that were moored on the waterfront were also starting to teem with movement. Fishermen emerged from under blankets on deck and leaned over the side of their boats to wash their faces in the sea. This was where we experienced our first sunrise in Asia, a stunning opening act to a year spent on that amazing and vast continent.

We would spend nearly four months in the magical, complicated, and diverse country that is India: from Trivandrum at the subcontinent’s southern tip to Kashmir in the north, the territorial objective of the Mumbai attackers; from Jaisalmer in the far west, less than 100 miles from the Pakistani border, to Calcutta in the east. We weren’t in Mumbai long. But notwithstanding our own interpersonal melodrama and in spite of stark contrasts of poverty and wealth, on that particular morning Mumbai’s waterfront by the Gateway to India felt like an incredibly peaceful place. Seeing death, explosions, and gunfire over this past Thanksgiving was jarring and profoundly upsetting in a way that felt personal, like an attack on a friend.

Then there is my story triggered by the killings at the Nariman House, the Chabad Jewish community center in Mumbai where the young rabbi and his wife and others were killed ...

Two decades after being in Mumbai, my wife Dawn and I went to visit the Jewish ghetto in Venice, the "original" ghetto, where the word originated. I saw a few Chasidic-looking men walking around, bearded and in black suits and black hats. I thought OK, we've seen the Jewish ghetto. We can go. A young red-bearded and bespectacled guy, one who looked not unlike the rabbi who was killed, invited us through a door off the ghetto’s small piazza into what was evidently Venice's Chabad House. It reminded me of Israel where random religious Jews in Jerusalem on Friday afternoons would ask me, "Are you Jewish?" If I said yes, they'd invite me to their homes for Shabbat dinner. I never went then, secular and resistant 22 year old that I was.

This time, with Dawn’s nudging, we went inside. It was a small study room, lined with books, four or five guys, all reading and studying. One was British, the rest Americans, all in black pants, white shirt, beards and kippas on their heads or black hats. The one guy asked if I'd been bar mitzvah'd. I hadn't, a legacy of my mother's ambivalence about organized religion despite (or perhaps because of) her father the Cantor, my father's gentile background, and their separation right at the age when bar mitzvah training might have begun. Oh, and my mom had open heart surgery around that time. So they kind of had other stuff on their mind.

“Why don't we bar mitzah you now?” the redhead asked me. At forty-five, you can do that, I asked? In effect, he said, we can. So, for the first time in my life, I put on tefillin, that odd set of black boxes, with leather straps that are wrapped around the head and left arm. The young man had me repeat a long torrent of Hebrew prayers which I didn't understand. It went on for a while. But compared to actually learning Hebrew, this was easy. This was Bar Mitzvah Lite.

When I finished, the young man smiled and said "Mazel Tov." He sang and danced with his arm around me. He exuded joy. It was infectious.



As I left the Chabad House, I was no more than a dozen steps outside the door when I broke down in tears. I actually wept. I still don't know why to this day. I hardly became a more observant Jew. Nor do I even feel more identified with that part of my background than I did before. In fact, recently when Obama was asked what kind of dog he'd get his daughters, he said he'd like to get a dog from the pound, "a mutt like me," he said. THAT is what I still identify with, feeling like the perennial mutt, foot in more than one culture, heart and head (in my case) not quite in any.

That European trip ended in Barcelona with my old friend Jacquie, a Southern Baptist raised in Alabama who moved with her husband Jed to raise their children in Spain. She'd become drawn to the Chabad movement in her own spiritual quest and she shared the following with me: "This is related to a Torah passage about the temple, describing in great detail how the temple had to be set up: the measurements of every part, where everything must be, the kinds of material to use, the colors, etc. In the Holy of Holies, where the ark of the covenant lies, there is a fire for the sacrifices. This is the place where the high priest goes to communicate directly with God, to be actually in the presence of God. Then outside in an outer patio, there is also a fire for sacrifices. In the Talmudic interpretation, the Rabbi comments that normally we would imagine that the priest would take fire from the inner Holy of Holies, the place where God is and take this fire outside to light the fire out there. But in fact, it is just the opposite. It is the fire from the outer patio's sacrificial altar which is taken inside to light the fire in the Holy of Holies. What is this telling us? We also think many times that first we have to light our inner fire, work on ourselves, get ourselves together before we can help others in the world, that we are no good to others until we have lit our own inner fire. But the Torah passage is telling us otherwise. It is through our work in the world, through what we do to help others that our inner fire is lit."

I am one who, through my work as a therapist and as a social worker in an urban high school, has spent over fifteen years "lighting fires," so to speak, by helping others in my own small way, in the world of my community. Yet still I have an inner fire that often flickers or dims with doubt. So I'm not sanguine that the Talmudic point of view quite works for me.

Perhaps I need a venue that allows me to light larger fires. Perhaps this blog is a start.

Nonetheless, this spiritual approach of giving to others as among the holiest things one can do is something even my secular self can buy into. It's not limited to Judaism by any means, but it touched me. And I think it likely informed the vision of those Chabad members who place themselves far from home and family, in places where they can light fires outside themselves.

So as images of violence saturated the airwaves over Thanksgiving, I grieved for the dead, wounded and traumatized, for their families, for the locals in Mumbai and for the foreigners (including Alan and Naomi Scherr, the American father and daughter whose photo reminded me of the father-daughter trips Nora and I took together)... and I grieved for these infectiously joyous young Jews whose love of life and community and warmth had touched me deeply. I’m thankful for the people I met in India. I'm thankful for that young man at Venice’s Chabad House.

It doesn't always work for lighting my internal fire, but I'll keep lighting those fires outside me...

Peace.

dani