India & Israel

Children of Abraham, sent to the East

The book of Genesis records a mysterious detail about Abraham — the first person in history to stake his life on the One invisible God. In his old age, Abraham had sons besides Isaac, and the Torah says: "And to the sons of the concubines that Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts; and he sent them away… eastward, to the land of the East" (Genesis 25:6).

The Talmud and the Zohar teach that these "gifts" were forms of spiritual knowledge — real power drawn from Abraham's wisdom, which traveled east and took root there. Jewish tradition has long seen in the spiritual genius of the East a distant inheritance from Abraham's own house: profound, ancient — and waiting to be reunited with its source. When an Indian seeker feels strangely at home in the Torah of Israel, our sages would not be surprised at all.

India in the Hebrew Bible

India appears in the Bible by name: the scroll of Esther opens with an emperor who ruled "from Hodu to Kush" — from India to Ethiopia (Esther 1:1). To this day, "Hodu" is the Hebrew name for India — and, in a beautiful coincidence of language, hodu is also the Hebrew word for "give thanks." Jewish commentators discussed India's location and its legendary wealth; the ships of King Solomon brought treasures of the East — ivory, apes, and peacocks — to Jerusalem (I Kings 10:22).

Two thousand years of friendship

Jews have lived in India for some two thousand years — the Cochin Jews of Kerala, the Bene Israel of Maharashtra, the Baghdadi communities of Mumbai and Kolkata, and the Bnei Menashe of the northeast. And here is the remarkable fact that Jews around the world know about India: India is one of the very few lands on earth where Jews were never persecuted by their neighbors. No inquisitions, no pogroms, no ghettos. Indian kings gave Jewish communities land and honor; Indian neighbors protected them. The Jewish people does not forget such things.

In our own generation the friendship has come into the open: full diplomatic relations since 1992, deep cooperation in technology, agriculture, and security — and hundreds of thousands of young Israelis who come to India after their army service, many of whom find their way to our Shabbat table here in Dharamsala. Ask them: they will tell you the people of India received them with a warmth they found nowhere else in the world.

What comes next

The Torah's prophets say the story ends with all nations united in the knowledge of the One God: "For then I will turn to the peoples a pure language, that they may all call upon the name of God, to serve Him with one accord" (Zephaniah 3:9). We believe India — the nation that never stopped seeking — has a leading role in that future. The bridge is the universal covenant: the Seven Laws given to all of Noah's children.

The gifts went east with Abraham's sons. Perhaps you, reading this, are part of how they come home.