The Jew in the Lotus

Rodger Kamenetz

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061745935
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

While accompanying eight high–spirited Jewish delegates to Dharamsala, India, for a historic Buddhist–Jewish dialogue with the Dalai Lama, poet Rodger Kamenetz comes to understand the convergence of Buddhist and Jewish thought. Along the way he encounters Ram Dass and Richard Gere, and dialogues with leading rabbis and Jewish thinkers, including Zalman Schacter, Yitz and Blue Greenberg, and a host of religious and disaffected Jews and Jewish Buddhists.

This amazing journey through Tibetan Buddhism and Judaism leads Kamenetz to a renewed appreciation of his living Jewish roots.

1

Sparks

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1990, FRANKFURT—DELHI

I joined the stream of disembarking passengers in the Frankfurt airport, bumping and jostling in the narrow corridor to the main concourse. I was nervous, nothing new in itself. Nervous is my religion.

On previous visits to Europe I had always avoided touching down on German soil. Now I knew why. Seeing German on posters put me on edge. So did the voices of German citizens around me. This was nothing I could help, an involuntary reaction, a stubborn prejudice.

The mass of travelers surged into the main concourse and split up in all directions. I wandered around, hoping to bump into other members of my party, who were arriving from New York, Boston, London, and Israel. We were all to meet at the New Delhi departure gate. Near a ticket counter, a man with a briefcase was berating a clerk. My ears pricked up at the sound of his voice. A few syllables of German spoken in anger and already the grainy newsreel was unwinding: Hitler at a podium, the crowds at Munich, goose-stepping soldiers, the crowd responding with a massive Heil Hitler salute. And then, inevitably, the stacks and stacks of bodies…

But these businessmen and tourists hurrying through the concourse were not storm troopers, and it would have been a stretch to imagine myself as a Jewish victim in striped pajamas. I am a grandchild of immigrants, Jews with the luck to get to America soon after the pogroms opened the long twentieth-century European Jew-killing season.

So I had no rational reason to feel uncomfortable in the Frankfurt airport. Surely these good German citizens would wish me no harm. Why hold a grudge with ghosts?

Yet, despite my ongoing turbulence about my Jewish identity, my discomfort was visceral. German posters, German language, German people made me nervous, and I wanted very much to find the other members of my group. I wanted to be with other Jews.

That’s when I saw the Torah.

In a crowd of German students, a tall man held it to his chest like a father clutching a chubby toddler. He was balding, with a fringe of wild hair and a thin goatee. With his wire-rimmed glasses and blue serge jacket, he looked like a café revolutionary. He was, in fact, Paul Mendes-Flohr, a distinguished professor of Modern Hebrew Thought at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

What surprised me was my surge of joy upon seeing Paul’s Torah. It wasn’t particularly pretty. It wasn’t even familiar-looking. This was a Torah in a tin case, used by the Sephardi Jews of southern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East and meant to be read standing upright on a table. The case was decorated with an uninspired orange floral pattern. Yet it drew me and not just me. From all corners of that vast waiting room, our entire party gathered around it.

A Jewish mystic would have understood the Torah’s magnetism. For the kabbalah teaches that the Jewish soul is composed of many brilliant sparks. I like the idea of a sparkling, multifaceted soul, with bright bits of reincarnated rabbinic sages jostling around with earthier types, nightclub owners, and peasants. In a way, the Jewish soul is like an airport concourse, crowded with competing sparks of life. And in that German concourse, even for a rather secular jumble of sparks like me, a Torah still has strong powers of attraction.

As Paul explained later, the Torah had been purchased in Tel Aviv that morning as a gift for the Dalai Lama. It was a printed replica, actually, not a real scroll, but that didn’t matter. From the start of our journey it served many purposes. Symbolically, of course, we Jews were bringing our Torah—our wisdom—to Dharamsala. But at a far more visceral level, during a sometimes difficult journey through India, the Torah acted as a magnet, keeping the sparks of our Jewish souls aligned and, some believed, keeping our Jewish bodies safe.

That morning in Frankfurt, as we gathered around the Torah, I felt myself to be an unlikely candidate for this journey. I had hardly ever been what one could call a spiritual seeker. I was deeply interested in Jewishness—as culture and history. But I wasn’t looking to Judaism—the religion—for answers to the deepest problems in my life.

I presumed that the participants in this dialogue would have strong religious commitments. I would be standing outside of that.

As for Tibetan Buddhism, I considered myself too stubbornly loyal a Jew to go shopping. I’d never been much for gurus. Were it not for the efforts of an old friend, Dr. Marc Lieberman, it would never have occurred to me to seek spiritual wisdom from a Dalai Lama.

Marc, a San Francisco ophthalmologist, was the first person to ever describe himself to me as a JUBU—a Jewish Buddhist. I’ve since learned that he is one among many, in a long line that goes back at least one hundred years.

The history of the spread of Buddhism to the West is complex and includes many different strands and influences, ranging from the impact of early translations of Buddhist texts on Emerson and the Transcendentalists to the nineteenth-and twentieth-century immigration of Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian Buddhists. Charles Prebish, a scholar and JUBU himself, has written of two distinct American Buddhisms. One consists primarily of traditional, conservative Asian-American Buddhist groups, which, like other ethnic groups, have brought their religion from the old country. The other, distinctively Western, Buddhism is both more innovative and less stable and draws primarily on non-Asian Americans.

In the past twenty years, JUBUs have played a significant and disproportionate role in the development of this second form of American Buddhism. Various surveys show Jewish participation in such groups ranging from 6 percent to 30 percent. This is up to twelve times the Jewish proportion of the American population, which is 2 1/2 percent. In these same twenty years, American Jews have founded Buddhist meditation centers and acted as administrators, publishers, translators, and interpreters. They have been particularly prominent teachers and publicizers.

The very first Westerner to take refuge in the Buddha on American soil was a Jew, Charles Strauss. He dramatically proclaimed himself a Buddhist at a public lecture that followed the World Conference on Religions in 1893. Strauss set a pattern for American JUBUs by becoming an author and leading expositor of Buddhism in the West.

Similarly, a more recent phase of American Buddhism owes much of its impetus to the beat generation of writers in the 1950s, who were led by a self-proclaimed “Buddhist Jew.”

Allen Ginsberg’s openness, and his role as a very public personality, made his personal quest for wisdom influential, even paradigmatic, for a generation. Buddhist references are sprinkled throughout his poetry, but he did not become a serious practitioner until the 1970s. He remains a committed Buddhist, as the title of his most recent biography, Dharma Lion, indicates.

In a much more quiet, but perhaps deeper way, other Jews have been very important Buddhist teachers. In the early 1970s, four Jewish practitioners of Vipassana meditation—Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Jacqueline Schwartz, and Sharon Salzberg—returned from their studies in India and Thailand to found the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, which is today one of the most successful Buddhist teaching institutions in America. Goldstein and Kornfield have also collaborated on very popular books on basic meditation technique.

When a big surge began in the mid-1970s, Joseph Goldstein told me, “a strong predominance of Jewish people took an active, leading role. I came back from India in 1974 and that year Naropa Institute first started a big summer program—like a spiritual Woodstock. That’s when I first started teaching. That was a seminal year.”

The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, was founded by the late Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan teacher from the kagyu tradition. That tradition is not strictly monastic, and Trungpa became controversial for teaching a “crazy wisdom” that allegedly justified his own public drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, and violence. But perhaps in part because of his wildness, Trungpa could reach large numbers of disaffected young people who were, as Allen Ginsberg told me, “coming off the flower power accumulation of trips of the sixties.” Many were Jews, and Trungpa used to joke that his students formed the Oy Vay school of Buddhism.

A number of Trungpa’s intimates were Jews who moved high up in the hierarchy of Vajradhatu, the Buddhist community in Boulder. David Rome served as his personal secretary. Robin Kornman, now a professor of Buddhist studies and a translator, was also in the inner circle. Sam Bercholz founded Shambhala Books, the first major publisher of Tibetan Buddhist works in this country. Others, like Nathan Katz, who came to Naropa to study Tibetan language, became scholars of Buddhism and translators of Tibetan texts. Today in American universities there is an impressive roster of Buddhist scholars with Jewish backgrounds, perhaps up to 30 percent of the total faculty in Buddhist Studies. Among them are Anne Klein of Rice University, Stanley Weinstein at Yale, Alex Wayman and Matthew Kapstein at Columbia, Charles Prebish and Steve Heine of Penn State, and many more.

The big star at Naropa that Woodstock summer of 1974 was a teacher of Hinduism, Ram Dass, a.k.a. Richard Alpert, yet another Jew. He told me in an interview that the percentage of Jews involved in the early boom phase of Buddhism was “inordinate” and “outlandish.” He said, “I can give you nine explanations that are glib, but I don’t think I can get hold of it.”

I could think of a number of reasons myself, none entirely satisfying. Where I came from, leaving Judaism for another religion seemed like a big betrayal.

That’s why I related very personally to Marc Lieberman’s change of direction. We have been close friends since I was fifteen. We met in the Sunday School of a Reform synagogue in Baltimore. After college, he went to Israel and studied briefly in a yeshiva. Living in Jerusalem he had picked up a much greater depth of Jewish learning and a much more Orthodox practice than we’d been raised with. He married a lovely Israeli woman and returned with her to our hometown. During that period in the late seventies, Marc was a very observant Jew and he taught me a great deal. We had long discussions about Talmud, midrash, and Hasidism. We often prayed together at an ancient rundown shul near Corned Beef Row in East Baltimore.

In the early eighties he moved to San Francisco, and shortly after that his marriage broke up. Meanwhile, I’d moved to Baton Rouge to teach at LSU. We stayed in touch. Soon I noticed that Marc was talking more and more enthusiastically about Buddhism.

At first I figured that, postdivorce, he was hungry for new answers. If he wanted to be a Jew in a lotus for a while and meditate, that was fine with me. Just a phase, I figured. But then a few years later, he married a fellow Buddhist practitioner, Nancy Garfield, in a Vietnamese Buddhist temple in San Francisco. Not just a phase anymore. Still, when I visited them in San Francisco, I noted that he made kiddush on Friday night and sent his son from his first marriage to Hebrew school. Even as a Buddhist he seemed a better Jew than I was, certainly more knowledgeable and observant than most I knew.

Then some interesting things began to happen. Marc spent three months on a Buddhist retreat in total silence. Marc met with the Dalai Lama. Marc and Nancy started a Buddhist foundation and began holding meditation sessions in their home. They made trips to Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in India.

Finally, in the fall of 1989 Marc told me he was organizing a dialogue session between rabbis and the Dalai Lama in New Jersey.

This remarkable project began with a visit from David Phillips, who is active in the American Jewish World Service, a relief agency helping Tibetan refugees in southern India. The Dalai Lama was very grateful to AJWS and told Phillips he wanted to learn more about Jews and Judaism. The Buddhist leader had also noticed that an impressive number of his followers in the West were from Jewish backgrounds.

In the spring of 1988, Phillips was Dr. Lieberman’s guest for Shabbat dinner. Phillips must have observed the unusual combination in Lieberman’s San Francisco home: at the table, Shabbat candles; in the living room, incense; at the doorway, a mezuzah; in the meditation room, a five-foot-high Buddha. If he glanced at the bookshelves, he would have seen dharma and kabbalah competing for space, and one was as likely to find Pali as Hebrew.

So Phillips asked Marc Lieberman for a list of books on Judaism for the Buddhist leader to read. Marc responded with a far more ambitious plan. Jews needed to learn about Buddhism, too. Why not have a dialogue with the Dalai Lama? Better yet, why not immerse rabbis and Jewish scholars in the life of a Buddhist community? They could bring the Torah to Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan exile, and they could return—he hoped—impressed by Buddhist wisdom. In the glow of Shabbat candles, it sounded like a marvelous idea.

Phillips agreed to get word back to the Dalai Lama. Marc set out to work on the Jewish side. Over the past decade, the Dalai Lama had had extensive dialogue with Christians, but none formally with Jews. Such a meeting seemed long overdue to Dr. Lieberman, but that wasn’t a perception shared by the organized Jewish community.

Some work was being done with interfaith dialogue, mainly with Catholics, and with intergroup dialogue, mainly with Blacks. But at the time, Jewish philanthropies were preoccupied with Soviet emigration to Israel. And to most Jews the Dalai Lama was too exotic. They couldn’t see the value in meeting with him. After sixty-five turndowns, Lieberman knew he had to find a way to break the ice.

Along the way, he had teamed up with Michael Sautman, another Bay Area Jew with strong Buddhist ties. A pilot active in relief work with the Tibetans, Sautman is also a personal student of the Dalai Lama.

With the Buddhist leader coming to New York in the fall of 1989, Lieberman hit on the idea of organizing a preliminary meeting in the United States. Sautman brought word from the Tibetans that the Dalai Lama would grant a few hours’ time. Lieberman, with the help of Dr. Moshe Waldoks, a Jewish scholar and editor, arranged the rest. They invited rabbis and scholars representing all four branches of organized Judaism in the United States: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist. Lieberman hoped the historic nature of the event could attract publicity and, eventually, funding for the more ambitious dialogue he had in mind.

They met at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Washington, New Jersey. After lunch and a tour of the grounds, the Jewish visitors entered the Buddhist temple and sat down with the Dalai Lama and his senior monks and translators. A Torah scroll was unwrapped and the Dalai Lama was photographed by the New York Times peering respectfully at its long lines of script.

In the animated discussion, the Dalai Lama expressed his admiration for the Jewish people and showed a particular interest in Jewish mysticism. But his request for details about kabbalah went largely unanswered. And the whole subject of the survival of exile peoples needed much more elaboration. These would have to wait for a full-length dialogue.

What did emerge into view was the warmth and energy between these two groups. Tibetans and Jews shared a similar sense of humor. When the Dalai Lama was presented with a tallis, in return he handed his guests the traditional gift of a silk katak. “I give you a scarf and you give me a scarf,” he joked, and as the session ended, he walked away with another gift, a shofar, tucked into his robes. Though Marc later referred to it as a “crash course in Judaism 101,” the initial encounter got great press, especially when, just a week after, the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1989. Now the Nathan Cummings Foundation offered to support the major dialogue in Dharamsala that Lieber man had been dreaming of for two years.

Not everyone in the Jewish community applauded the news. An influential New York Jewish newspaper ran a sarcastic headline about the session, “Dillying with the Dalai.” In the article, the two Orthodox participants, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg and his wife, Dr. Blu Greenberg, were attacked for consorting with idol worshipers.

But even in liberal denominations the received idea is that all Eastern religions are “cults.” Many assimilated Jews were horrified in the late sixties and seventies when charismatic leaders such as Ram Dass, a Jewish Hindu, or Allen Ginsberg, a Jewish Buddhist, led many other Jews out of the fold. Moonie, Hare Krishna, or Buddhist—what’s the difference? They all ran together into every Jewish mother’s nightmare—walking into a shopping mall and finding her boychik—or daughter—with a shaved head and a saffron robe, shaking a tambourine and chanting.

To some in the Jewish community, Dr. Marc Lieberman personified the danger. His mother was active in Baltimore’s Jewish affairs, his late uncle Morris had been a prominent Reform rabbi, and his brother Elias had followed in his uncle’s footsteps. What had happened to this quintessential “nice Jewish boy,” and a doctor yet?

When the question of his background came up in the Jewish press after the first session with the Dalai Lama, Marc described himself with a mixed metaphor. “I have Jewish roots and Buddhist wings.”

I knew what Marc meant by wi...