Heschel speculates somewhere (I think in God in Search of Man) about what Judaism would have turned into or, let’s say, looked like if major Jewish communities had found themselves settled in India as opposed to Europe. Perhaps more iconic than the way we tend to think about it. I found this photo at Twitter, suggesting something to this reader about the changing, adaptive contours of Jewishness, the secular and the sacred, the utterly strange and perfectly normal in a place which for most Jews in the world today would represent an unfamiliar cultural context.
@b_judah This is the statue of David Sassoon, the opium and textile tycoon and leader of the Baghdadi Jews in India, at the Sassoon Library in Mumbai. What I like most of all is how the librarians have placed a garland on him and left him fresh flowers like a Hindu saint.
