Yeah, this weekend we went to a Hindu/Jewish wedding, in that order. Friends of ours of different cultural backgrounds got married and wanted to have both a traditional Hindu ceremony and a traditional Jewish ceremony. So they did - one right after another (with a brief cocktail interlude between them) - and it's extremely interesting how many similarities there were between the two seemingly different cultures.
Hindu wedding:
- Starts with a special prayer to all of the gods in the pantheon
- The couple must circle each other 7 times
- There is a lot of blessing with food and fruit
- The couple performs actions together while holding each others hands
- The entire ceremony takes place under a traditional four-posted canopy of fabric
Jewish wedding:
- Starts with a special prayer to God
- The couple must circle each other 7 times
- There is a lot of blessing with wine and discussion of fruit
- The couple performs actions together while holding each others hands
- The entire ceremony takes place under a traditional four-posted canopy of fabric
I thought that was an extremely interesting number of coincidences. I mean, Christian weddings don't have that many similarities with those two sets of practices. And a drive-thru wedding for damn sure doesn't have any similarities with anything else.
Well, accept maybe another place that has a drive-thru wedding package.
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Most religions are the same... Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim religions have more similarities than differences but then some jerk 5,000 years ago disagreed on how to kill a fish and made a whole separate religion off of it. Then everyone killed each other for thousands of years... then they got nuclear weapons... and now they have joint ceremonies...
Of course, I'm going from micro to macro instances there... but whatever... what's the Hindu equivalent of the coktail weenie?
Tough to say. The catering was actually Pakistani food made by an Iranian caterer.
It was a pretty worldly wedding.
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