Jew in the Lotus Part 8

The Jewish Sabbath is above all a family affair, and as it turned out, we had gathered to us an extraordinary group of Jewish Buddhists living in Dharamsala. The next day would take on all the joy and some of the pain of a family reunion.

11.

Jewish Buddhists, Buddhist Jews.

SAt.u.r.dAY, OCTOBER 27, DHARAMSALA.

A stroll through the Tibetan market at McLeod Ganj on Friday morning had already convinced me that a good number of Jews were seeking spiritual wisdom in Dharamsala. On a narrow street crowded with shops, the Tibetan merchants sold ma.s.s-produced thangka thangkas, for two or three hundred rupees (about twenty dollars), and other rarities such as a yak horn snuff box (good for a perfume bottle, though you can also buy the snuff). The street ran uphill to a view of the Dhaula Dhar range, where it looked as if you could step off the edge of McLeod Ganj into a vast mystical depth. Since the sixties Dharamsala has been a way station for spiritual travelers, including Thomas Merton, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg. Now a new generation, the long-haired and the monastically shorn, mingled freely with Hindu beggars by the steps of the Lhasa Guest House.

Marc Lieberman bought some very handsome mala mala beads, dark circles of wood strung on a leather thong, with inlays of Himalayan coral, silver, and gold. The beads were the size of a man's knuckle, heavier than the ones around the Dalai Lama's wrist-108 per string, used for counting mantras. During breaks in the dialogue Michael Sautman had been clicking away on his. Hundreds of thousands of repet.i.tions were required at certain stages of the practice. beads, dark circles of wood strung on a leather thong, with inlays of Himalayan coral, silver, and gold. The beads were the size of a man's knuckle, heavier than the ones around the Dalai Lama's wrist-108 per string, used for counting mantras. During breaks in the dialogue Michael Sautman had been clicking away on his. Hundreds of thousands of repet.i.tions were required at certain stages of the practice.

I bought some beads of my own from a wrinkled Tibetan woman who sat in front of a card table. Marc said they were very old. "What kind of wood is this anyway?" I asked him. "Mahogany?"

That's when I learned those dark little wheels had been bored out of a human skull-intended to make you reflect on impermanence. It sure worked for me. I gave them a sniff and they smelled slightly salty, a faint perfume of their previous owner.

The Tibetans made quite a trade in human bones: in various shops I saw trumpets made from a human femur, with skeleton intaglio. In old Tibet a dead body would be carried up into high places for a sky burial-to feed the vultures. Ground burial was impractical in frozen soil, but the custom also reflected a Buddhist view of the body-as an impermanent frame that the mind stream entered and left, one with no personal value. Buddhist texts argue, I am not my body, nor does the body belong to me.

I was tempted by the novelty of a ceremonial skull bowl, imagining it br.i.m.m.i.n.g with Cheerios. But I settled for an embroidered hat with fur ear flaps, and a pair of bra.s.s ting sha ting sha bells joined with a leather thong. They made a sharp soul-awakening sound that gradually diminished into silence, along with the noise of the mind. bells joined with a leather thong. They made a sharp soul-awakening sound that gradually diminished into silence, along with the noise of the mind.

I overheard some voices speaking Hebrew, then saw Moshe Waldoks in front of a T-s.h.i.+rt shop in an animated conversation with three Israelis in khaki shorts. Moshe was buying Tibetan yarmulkes for himself and his kids: beautiful pillbox caps with fancy, thickly threaded embroidery and bits of blue gla.s.s glued in. They were very princely. He introduced us and told the Israelis about our meeting with the Dalai Lama, but they'd already heard about it from the buzz in the streets. Moshe told them that all of Yiddishe Dharamsala was invited to the Sat.u.r.day morning service, and they promised to come. According to what Thubten Chodron told me later, there'd been a flood of Israelis in Dharamsala in the past few years.

Still, when I hiked the quarter mile up from my quarters to Kashmir Cottage Sat.u.r.day morning, I was surprised by the size and variety of the crowd we'd gathered. More than a minyan minyan.

Traditionally, the Torah portion for the coming week is divided into sections, intended for daily meditation. It had made a running commentary on our week-or was our week just the latest midrash on the story? Melchizedek and the Dalai Lama, shalom shalom and and tashe delek tashe delek. Having opened myself to the beauty of the Buddhist spiritual tradition, I was reawakening to my own as well.

Rabbi Schachter and Rabbi Greenberg officiated at Congregation Beth Kangra in delightful suns.h.i.+ne. Our old traveling companion, the Sephardi Torah, stood upright in its case, once more showing its power to bring Jewish sparks together. Rabbi Greenberg announced the portion we'd been mulling over all week, Lekh Lekha Lekh Lekha. The Hebrew means: Take yourself out. Go travel. Seek foreign lands. So Reb Zalman announced an aliyah for "those, like Abram, who travel, those who seek truth in other places." Most of our guests identified with that one and crowded around the Torah, including an academic couple from Ma.s.sachusetts traveling through India with their kids, some backpacking spiritual seekers from Los Angeles, a young Israeli doctor, and four Jewish Buddhist nuns in maroon robes and close-cropped hair. From Hada.s.sah to Dharamsala in three generations! I was only disappointed that Max Redlich, the former Israeli paratrooper I'd heard about, bailed out at the last minute. He sent word that he was working hard on building a stupa stupa, a Buddhist reliquary. But Ruth Sonam came, and Alex Berzin, and Thubten Chodron. So did George Chernoff, the monk from Chicago, looking for more lessons on how to become one of Hashem's Hashem's messengers. messengers.

With the ma.s.s aliyah of Jews and JUBUs a.s.sembled, Yitz and Zalman chanted the Torah. They spot translated the Hebrew into English. At the same time, they maintained the Hebrew cantillation. It was a gracious and nimble performance that showed a remarkable command of the text. I realized that whatever their differences in outlook, they shared a deep reverence for the Torah.

Sitting around on lawn chairs, and in the cool gra.s.s, we later discussed a pa.s.sage from the Torah portion. One nun asked if Abram's wars against the kings of Sodom could be interpreted as spiritual struggles against delusion.

But to Rabbi Greenberg at least, the wars were real. They ill.u.s.trated an actual struggle to establish religion against violent opposition. They were like the wars Israel has to fight today. For Yitz, "Humans live in history. We have to make choices, sometimes painful choices."

A Western Buddhist challenged him. "What are we faced with in our present culture? Many of us see that Buddhism provides the balance we need in this world today."

Yitz Greenberg admitted being impressed by the Buddhist commitment to nonviolence. But he felt pacifism was only possible in the context of a balance of terror between larger nations. Neither Buddhists or Jews could afford to be pacifists if their survival was at stake. For instance, on a.n.a.logy to Israel's battles, Yitz very much supported the Tibetans fighting for their freedom and was skeptical of their winning in any other way. Likewise, to Dr. Isaac Bentwich, the young Israeli I'd met the night before, spiritual growth was always colored by historical circ.u.mstances. He compared the Dalai Lama to Abram, and the kings of Sodom to the rulers of China.

The discussants tried to resolve the conflict between survival and spiritual values. Could Buddhists fight to preserve a tradition of nonviolence? Many Buddhists thought not. Chodron put it this way, "If you get angry and you start acting unethically to protect a doctrine that preaches patience and ethics, then are you protecting the doctrine or by your own behavior are you destroying it? If all the Buddhists start becoming terrorists, then what's the use of preserving Buddhism? The preservation of Buddhism is preserving your own internal heart. If Tibetans became terrorists they might win back Tibet, but Buddhism would be destroyed by that att.i.tude."

We moved on. The Jewish Buddhists had some of the same questions I had. They wanted to know if Judaism was flexible enough to adapt to our times. Could it respond to feminism, the ecological crisis, and the need for individual spiritual growth? Zalman Schachter, in the Hasidic style, offered a story as an answer. "A man opens a bank account in Switzerland. He's dying and he believes in reincarnation. Thirty years from now, he tells the bank officials, someone will come with a syllable. I want you to give him control of the account.

"Thirty years later a man comes and asks to withdraw all the money. When they question his judgment, saying that, after all, the original depositor told them to hold on to it, he says, 'I gave you the order last time around, but now I want to do what I want to do.'

"We're invested in a tradition so we have a continuity. The best people to invest in tradition are conservative. But the best people to spend it are those willing to take a risk.

"Our treasures-what a fantastic bank account we have grown. The past and the tradition have a vote but can't have a veto, because we are in unprecedented conditions. Now there's an understanding emerging that we are an organic part of all species, that religions are the organs of humanity."

The Jewish delegates and Jewish Buddhists replayed an old family quarrel. Jewish Buddhists felt that the bank account of Judaism had been empty for them when they came to make a withdrawal, whereas they had found real spiritual wealth in Buddhism.

I knew the immediate defensive reaction to that, it was the mountain or barrier I had put up in my own thinking: the Jewish community tends to dismiss such people as flakes or apostates. I had come to Dharamsala with a few of these att.i.tudes myself.

But in the Shabbat sun, those mountains were melting. I'd been deeply impressed with the Dalai Lama and the other Buddhist masters, and having felt firsthand the attraction of another religion, I could no longer be judgmental about Jewish Buddhists. I'd been moved when the Dalai Lama addressed our group as his Jewish brothers and sisters. Well, the JUBUs were certainly my brothers and sisters! So I was eager to talk to them, to learn in depth about their Jewish backgrounds, how they came to Buddhism, how they feel about Judaism.

Extremely open about their lives and beliefs, what they had to say that morning seemed revealing not just about them, but about the problems of gaining access to Jewish spirituality-and the need for a new way of teaching it, for a Jewish renewal.

I approached a tall woman in her late thirties, in a maroon robe and with shorn hair. She'd seemed to enjoy the service and had partic.i.p.ated in the discussion afterwards. I wanted to hear more from a Buddhist nun with a Brooklyn accent.

She told me her name was Thubten Pemo; her family name was Landsman and she "grew up in Brooklyn in a middle cla.s.s Jewish neighborhood." We sat in the shade and I scribbled her answers in a notebook.

Her grandmother was the chief Jewish influence in her life. "I remember she was always praying. She'd get up before sunrise, pray all day and at night. She was extremely strict and she followed her rabbis. She kept kosher, and on Sat.u.r.days she wouldn't turn on a light bulb." As for synagogue, "I used to enjoy it. I'd go and feel happy that everyone was praying."

Yet her formal Jewish education was a disappointment-though she did learn to read, write, and speak Hebrew at age eight or nine-because she was the only girl in the cla.s.s. Eventually she gave up Hebrew school.

Even as a young girl, Pemo had been deeply concerned with spiritual issues. "I used to lie in my bed and think about my life. I would make up rules of morality: I'm not going to kill. I'm not going to steal. I'd make up all these rules. I didn't want to have any children. I thought that marriage was suffering. I decided, I'm not going to get married, that means I'm going to be a nun. Then I'd have to be a Christian nun, but I didn't know anything about Christianity. I had a very strong wish to have wisdom."

Later, at Brooklyn College, she had some contact with Hillel. But in 1967 her mother died suddenly. "One day she had a heart attack and she was gone. Then I had to support myself. I switched to night school. I had a full-time job. That went on for years. My aunts and uncles couldn't take care of my grandmother and they put her in an Orthodox old-age home in Brooklyn."

She dropped out of school and in 1970 decided to quit her job and travel for six months. "I went with some girlfriends. We flew to j.a.pan for the World's Fair and started traveling west." However, soon she found herself alone in India. She was twenty-seven. "I got on a thirdcla.s.s train to Nepal. I thought I'd go for two weeks and look at a snowy mountain. I went to a Tibetan lama for a teaching. I didn't know what Buddhism was.

"Lama Yeshe sat and spoke for two hours in horrendous English. But Lama was radiating love at everybody. I thought, this is the nicest man I've ever met in my life and I'd like to be like him. That was twenty years ago. His point was: the ego was a demon and had to be destroyed. I thought, gee, they'd never taught me that in my psych cla.s.s.

"I ended up staying for two years in the East. I went back to New York to earn money. I'd heard there would be a Kalachakra initiation." (This is a special teaching about the cycles of time.) "I wrote Lama Yeshe, 'Should I come?'" The answer was yes. And then, after a one-month meditation course, this Jewish woman from Brooklyn shaved her head, took vows of celibacy, and became a Buddhist nun. Now she was Thubten Pemo, and she had vowed to cut herself off from worldly things. She went to Brooklyn to dispose of her furniture, jewelry, and personal items, still hoping her relatives would understand. But her aunts and uncles refused to see her. And her final encounter with her grandmother took on a poignant and comical aspect. "I visited my grandmother in an old-age home. She didn't notice I was wearing my robes.

"'When are you going to tell me the good news?' she said, meaning, When are you going to get married? There was no way to tell her I was a Buddhist nun. She was just happy to see me."

I was impressed by Pemo's intense preoccupation with religiosity at a very early age, her search for some way of living a spiritual life, a search unfulfilled for her in Judaism as she knew it. Growing up in the Eisenhower years, she knew no women rabbis or cantors. She had no access to a spiritual life outside the traditional roles of wife and mother. When I asked her about her knowledge of the Jewish mystical tradition, she said she might have been interested but it was never taught to her.

But Pemo's new path had not been easy either. Though I'd heard questions about the Jewish response to feminism, from Pemo's account I gathered there were also problems for women in the Tibetan Buddhist monastic world. Tibetan and other Asian cultures give women a very low social status, and this is reflected in the treatment of an ani ani or female monastic. In any case, all Western Buddhists had to be self-supporting. For Pemo that meant years of hards.h.i.+p. or female monastic. In any case, all Western Buddhists had to be self-supporting. For Pemo that meant years of hards.h.i.+p.

Sometimes she had to return to secular life. "I worked in New York and saved money to last for twelve years. It lasted six. From 1979 to 1989 I had nothing. Sometimes I had no money for food. In Switzerland the monks wouldn't give us nuns anything. I went to the cook for the food he was throwing in the garbage. I lived on the carrot ends for a month."

She had medical problems as well. "You get hepat.i.tis. Diarrhea. Tapeworms." Yet she didn't want to give up her nun's vows. She was afraid that living with laypeople, she would "get sucked into attachment."

"I found I had to rely on faith. Certain deities we pray to in the Buddhist tradition can help us. One is Tara, the female Buddha. You pray to Tara to get you safely on a plane. When I have no money for Buddhist practice, I pray to Tara."

Despite all her difficulties, Thubten Pemo remains convinced she has found answers to life in Buddhism. "Most religions teach morality. A lot of religions say to love others. The special thing in Buddhism is, we are given the methods of development. We aren't just saying to have compa.s.sion for others, but how to train your mind for compa.s.sion."

I thanked Pemo and took her photograph. Cutting her Jewish roots had caused her enormous pain from her family. Although I could understand their reactions, this total rejection seemed cruel and unnecessary. I was also impressed with how she had stuck to her convictions. And that she had a gentle sense of humor.

I'd met Thubten Chodron at the Shabbat the night before. Born Cherry Green in 1950 in a Los Angeles suburb, she received a B.A. from UCLA in 1971. In 1975 she attended a meditation course. Lama Yeshe had struck again, and Chodron decided not long after to put on the robes.

There's something definitely vibrant about Chodron's demeanor. She seemed a.s.sured, happy with her choice, radiant. "I felt very comfortable," she told me Friday night, "making the switch from Judaism to Buddhism. I thought I was finding answers to my questions and also techniques that helped me get along better with people and a direction to help make my life meaningful.

"From my parents' point of view, they didn't understand very well. I was married, I was beginning my career. 'She's going to have a career, she married a nice Jewish boy, she's going to have children.' Then all of a sudden their daughter left her husband, shaved her head, went to India, and became a Buddhist nun. It's completely out of their American Jewish suburban experience."

Both Chodron and Pemo have found work as teachers of meditation. Chodron has written several books on Buddhist practice and regularly gives lectures and cla.s.ses in the United States. (Among her recent books are Open Heart, Clear Mind Open Heart, Clear Mind and and Taming the Monkey Mind Taming the Monkey Mind.) Now I saw her seated on the garden wall, having an animated discussion with Rabbi Joy Levitt. Chodron told Joy that she had been really apprehensive before coming to the Friday night service, worried about how the rabbis would feel about her. But she felt relieved now.

Chodron and Joy started comparing notes-how each had found her way onto a spiritual path. It was fascinating, because the rabbi and the ani ani were about the same age and had similar backgrounds. were about the same age and had similar backgrounds.

"I asked to go to Sunday School as a teenager," Chodron said. "I was really searching for something. Sunday School turned me away from Judaism. What I learned there I couldn't accept. I wasn't able to understand it in a way that brought meaning into my life.

"I went into a period of agnosticism and atheism. In college, I joined Hillel for social reasons. Later, I saw a poster for a meditation course. What they were talking about started to provide answers to questions I'd been asking a long time: Why am I alive? What's the purpose of life? What does it really mean to love people?"

Rabbi Levitt listened intently and then answered, "Astonis.h.i.+ngly, I had an identical experience of asking questions as a teenager. But I got the answers. It's dependent on personality, community, and place, what answers are out there."

In Joy's case, "My anger was transformed. My purpose in life was to end suffering in the world. The quality came from my people. I was part of a people who had suffered and said I am responsible for you because you are in my community. That leap of action required further leaps of action-beyond the community."

Rabbi Levitt learned that as a Jew, "you are part of a people who have experienced pain and salvation, rejection and acceptance. You have a choice to accept the experience.... Our choice as a generation was either to opt out of society or be totally cynical. But I found a third alternative in the Jewish community, some texts, and teachers."

Chodron also felt that her feeling of responsibility for others came from her Jewish upbringing.

"But," she complained, "there was so much emphasis on Jewish suffering. First our group, then others. The Jews are living well in America. What about the suffering of the blacks, the Mexican Americans? I wanted to reach past Jewish suffering."

Joy replied, "The point of understanding Jewish suffering was only that it gave you insight into the suffering of others."

"But," Chodron said, "I fit in. I didn't feel that same defensiveness in American life as my father did, experiencing anti-Semitism."

Then Chodron smiled and just looked Joy over. The rabbi had led the singing of prayers that Shabbat morning, and she was still wearing a pet.i.te, blue knit kippah kippah pinned to her hair. Finally Chodron said, "It's so incredible for me to see female rabbis. Hurray for you. It must be difficult." pinned to her hair. Finally Chodron said, "It's so incredible for me to see female rabbis. Hurray for you. It must be difficult."

I thought of the difficulties Joy had faced in Dharamsala leading prayers. She admitted to Chodron that "our religion is still patriarchal." But she found some real advantages in that.

She explained, "I go to Orthodox services on Sat.u.r.day to daven. I love not not having to sit next to men. I find it much easier. There's no s.e.xual overtones. I find it a relief I won't be called to do anything. I'll be fundamentally unequal, but I won't be pestered. I want to choose the environment in which I pray." having to sit next to men. I find it much easier. There's no s.e.xual overtones. I find it a relief I won't be called to do anything. I'll be fundamentally unequal, but I won't be pestered. I want to choose the environment in which I pray."

As for the questions about the meaning of life that so haunted Chodron, Joy said, "Jews are supposed to live as though each day were their last." She paused, smiled, and said, "I'm depressed a lot." We all laughed, but she added quite seriously, "As a child I felt very much-and still do now-that death is an end."

Later I asked Joy to elaborate. She told me, "My sense of where Chodron and I divided probably has to do more with our psyches and upbringing. She found it impossible to accept the fact that when you die you're dead, that's it. And I never had that question. I don't know why I didn't have that question and she did. And she found that question resolved in Buddhism, which is when you're dead, you're not dead."

The sun was getting quite warm, and I decided to go into the living room of the cottage, where I found Alex Berzin chatting with Ruth Sonam, the translator for Geshe Sonam I'd met the night before. It tickled me, in a way, that the Jewish folks all knew each other and seemed to have formed a society within a society. It was a silly game of Jewish geography, but there were times I felt, the Jews are doing very well here in Dharamsala.

Certainly Alex and Ruth were. Both are very conscious of their Jewish background and ident.i.ty. Alex quite explicitly thinks of himself as a Jew, though he has been a practicing Buddhist for many years. Berzin grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, attended an Orthodox Hebrew school, and was a bar mitzvah. However, this scholarly man, who has something of the demeanor of a metropolitan rabbi, told me he was taught Judaism "without any intellectual stimulation." Though he went on to be a professional translator and knows Tibetan, Chinese, and Sanskrit, he never mastered Hebrew because "they never explained the grammar."

"I attended graduate school at Harvard. I was always interested in how Buddhism came into China from India. What was the translation process? To really understand it, I had to study the Indian side as well. I studied Sanskrit, then Tibetan. I've studied translation and transmission, the bridging of cultures back and forth."

But when Berzin came to Dharamsala on a Fulbright in 1969, this interest changed its character. "I came in contact with a living, accessible tradition. It wasn't a matter of academic detective work to decode the ancient texts, but of people who have a full oral tradition going back unbroken."

Berzin returned to Harvard to complete his Ph.D., but he changed from an academic studying the transmission of Buddhism to something of a transmitter himself. He serves at times as the Dalai Lama's interpreter and edits and translates Tibetan Buddhist texts for the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives. "Because of the love of clarity and scholars.h.i.+p, one feels at home in this tradition. This has allowed Jewish people to make a contribution here."

Ruth Sonam, an Irish Jew born to German parents fleeing Hitler, has also devoted most of her time in Dharamsala to translation work. Ruth feels that Jews bring something special to the task of explaining Buddhism to the West. "We bridge," Ruth Sonam said.

She added that given her parents' background as refugees from Hitler's Germany, "the concept that there is suffering was most alive to me and opened me up to the Buddhist concepts."

Alex said, "The Jewishness of my background adds something to my Buddhism, a life-affirming, creative approach. This is one of the main contributions we have given to Buddhism, being more creative with it to help make it more accessible to Western people, and more affirming, more secular." Alex has made two world tours, teaching Buddhism in more than twenty-six countries.

As a translator, Alex took as his particular task the job of finding exact English equivalents to Buddhist concepts. The first people to translate ideas from Sanskrit were Christian missionaries, who used terms like sin, salvation, and suffering to translate the Buddhist concepts of klesha, nirvana klesha, nirvana, and dukkha dukkha. In part Alex has devoted himself to de-Christianizing Buddhist English, which somehow seems apt for a Jewish Buddhist.

Despite their serious commitment to Buddhism, both Ruth Sonam and Alex Berzin were moved by the Jewish visit to Dharamsala. Following the Shabbat service, Ruth mused, "Maybe I could have been a Talmudic scholar if things had been different." Alex said, "After the audience with His Holiness the only way I could explain it to my friends was that it made me so proud to be Jewish, to see Jewish customs presented in such an intelligent and open way."

Meeting Alex at Shabbat, my view of him changed. He seemed more comfortable and relaxed, more flexible than I'd thought after our first encounter. Although I didn't understand how a Jew could also be, in effect, a Buddhist missionary, I could see that he really felt he was both Jewish and Buddhist, however contradictory that might seem.

I was curious to learn more about Israelis in Dharamsala. Recently India had issued the first visas to Israel and several of the Jewish Buddhists had commented on the influx. Pemo told me of a meditation course she taught in Nepal. "We had several Israelis, including one who is becoming a rabbi. A great person, strict, he wouldn't come to the teachings on Sat.u.r.days. He'd pray in his tallis. When I gave the lecture on Emptiness, he interrupted, calling out that I was wrong."

She spoke to Max Redlich, who'd fought in the Six Day War. "He'd leapt from a plane into a ditch and they shot off his boots. In Australia he became a millionaire butcher, exporting meat to Canada." He met Lama Yeshe there, and now, as a Buddhist monk, "he's purifying his killing karma."

She asked Max "to speak to the Israeli in Hebrew. Afterwards, the boy apologized to me for being rude. He was quite interested in meditating, still wearing the yarmulke. One day he fainted. He'd had an experience of emptiness-the one he was fighting against-and pa.s.sed out. At Bodh Gaya, he took refuge in the Buddha. But he saw no contradiction with being a Jew."

Not every Buddhist pract.i.tioner in Dharamsala had left Judaism behind. Friday night I'd met Isaac Bentwich, a twenty-nine-year-old Israeli and a recent graduate from the medical school at the University of Beersheva. He insisted that studying and practicing Buddhism "does not diminish my Jewishness. I'm much more Jewish than I was before."

Bentwich was spending several months in Dharamsala, learning about tantrayana tantrayana, the advanced visualization practice of Tibetan Buddhism. Yet for him, "Judaism is an extremely profound heritage, philosophy, religion, way of living, way of looking at the world. It's an extremely spiritual path not inferior to any other."

Instead he finds that studying Buddhist practices helped him "to understand better hidden and dormant parts of my religion. For example, the philosophy of Maimonides is extremely similar to Buddhist philosophy."

Both Maimonides, a twelfth-century philosopher, and Buddhists advocate the virtues of following a middle path, balancing between extremes of behavior. In the Mishneh Torah Mishneh Torah, Maimonides also advocates certain practices for curing the ills of arrogance or anger. "If one is irascible, he is directed so to govern himself that even if he is a.s.saulted or reviled, he will not feel affronted. If one is arrogant, he should accustom himself to endure much contumely, sit below everyone, and wear old and ragged garments that bring the wearer into contempt, and so forth, till arrogance is eradicated from his heart and he has regained the middle path, which is the right way."

But Bentwich, descended from a distinguished Israeli educator and knowledgeable about Jewish wisdom, was an exception. The Jewish Buddhists felt they had chosen a more complete and richer path in Buddhism. To Pemo, "Buddhism includes all living beings. Any person can come to my teacher. He has compa.s.sion for all of them. In Judaism, I'll help you because you are the same as me. As long as we have a discriminating mind, we are going to harm each other."

Alex Berzin, who is something of a historian of Jewish Dharamsala, felt that a remarkably large number of Jews had been prominently involved. For instance, he mentioned that the first foreigner ever to receive the t.i.tle of geshe geshe is a Swiss Jew named George Dreyfus. is a Swiss Jew named George Dreyfus.

Later that evening over dinner, I asked Joy Levitt how she viewed the loss to Judaism of such sensitive, intelligent, and spiritually motivated people. She said, "I don't feel they represent a symbol of some kind of Jewish failure. Their impulse has more to do with the nature of those individuals and their souls in a free and open society. There is enough richness and spirituality in Judaism to go around tenfold. Although we can always teach it better, for some people it will simply not resonate.

"The Jewish problem is not that a few people find Buddhism attractive. The Jewish problem is that most people don't find anything attractive. I don't know why we pick on the people who are spiritually alive and blame them for not helping us. Alex Berzin, from the standpoint of the world, seems to me a fulfilled person. Is he a loss to the Jewish community? Sure. But when you put the Jewish commitment in the context of the repair of the world, tikkun olam tikkun olam, he's partic.i.p.ating and lots of other people aren't."

Joy's was a familiar complaint. There is a very strong streak, especially among more liberal and secular Jews, against anything that smacks of excessive concern for G.o.d or piety, against any overt religious display. When asked their religion in a recent survey, one out of five Jews answered "none." It must be terribly frustrating for rabbis to encounter such Jews and have them complain about too much Hebrew, too much praying, too much Jewishness in the synagogue. And she was being quite generous to say that an Alex Berzin, because of his spiritual commitment, was at least partic.i.p.ating in tikkun olam tikkun olam.

Still, after the Shabbat was over, others in the Jewish delegation reported greater ambivalence and even anguish about the JUBUs. After eleven years of studying and writing about mysticism in Jerusalem, Rabbi Omer-Man had been invited in 1981 by the Los Angeles Hillel council to set up an outreach program for religiously alienated Jews, especially those involved with alternative religions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism. He worked for a number of years on a one-on-one basis. In fact, while Zalman debated with the monks, Jonathan had struck up a conversation with some Jewish kids from Los Angeles. When they heard that Jonathan would soon be opening a school of Jewish meditation, they immediately signed up to study with him. Jonathan found that episode more than ironic.

As for Professor Katz, his Shabbat encounters with the Western Buddhists he called dharma people had been very unsettling. Before the trip began, he had told me, "I came to Judaism through Buddhism." He explained that in the seventies he had studied Buddhism with Chogyam Trungpa at the Naropa Inst.i.tute and had taken bodhisattva vows, as well as receiving a number of tantric initiations.

Yet in the end, Trungpa had encouraged Nathan to explore Judaism more deeply. Following his teacher's advice, he had eventually made his way back to Jewish life and for many years now has been a very committed Conservative Jew in his own personal practice.

So it was with some anxiety that Nathan Katz had encountered the Western dharma people, many of whom, such as Alex Berzin, he'd known for years. He thought Alex was doing marvelously well. Perhaps he saw in him the path his life had almost taken. Nathan had also been tested by the ubiquitous Chodron in an intense dialogue that afternoon on the patio of the Kashmir Cottage.

To Nathan the discussion combined the rapid-fire question-and-answer style of yes.h.i.+va-and Tibetan debate. When she asked him questions, he had the feeling she was looking directly at his mind for answers. Having heard about Zalman Schachter's presentation, she wanted to know in what way Judaism was a path. It was the first time someone else had directed such Buddhist questions to him about Judaism-though he told me later, "I do that all the time in my own mind."

Borrowing from Rabbi Greenberg's lecture to the All Himalayan Conference, Nathan answered that in Judaism, studying Torah was a path. "At each meal we study, at Shabbas we study." He explained that the second part of the Jewish path was what Jonathan Omer-Man calls the vertical connection-prayer. Nathan explained "about life cycles, about seasons, about memory, loss, mourning, circ.u.mcision, the meaning of brit brit," or covenant. He told her as well about what Rabbi Omer-Man calls the horizontal direction-"acts of loving-kindness, ethics, repairing the world, tzedakah tzedakah, the basic principle of menschlichkeit menschlichkeit, and moral responsibility." He said, "That's our path, those three. Study, tefilla tefilla, acts of kindness or compa.s.sion."

But Chodron pressed him. "How does each of these aspects cultivate or transform the mind?" Nathan answered that question, but then, with geshe-like rapidity, she stumped him with another.

"Tell me," she asked, "your traditions, your teaching, your view on the origin, the arising, and the cessation of suffering. How is it that we suffer, and how do you ultimately overcome suffering?" He told Chodron, "I can't answer that, because I don't think my tradition explains suffering away. Or can explain suffering. I think my tradition holds that suffering is ultimately utterly inexplicable. And of course I'm of a post-Holocaust generation. So that the traditional answers to such questions are unacceptable to many Jews today. Also, we don't believe that suffering is ultimately overcome. Our tradition mediates how we suffer and thereby makes suffering sufferable through rituals, life cycles, pa.s.sages, and so on. But it doesn't promise, doesn't really entertain the idea of ultimately overcoming suffering, except in a future universalist sense, the messianic hope."

In reply, she told him what as a student of Buddhism he already knew-that is, "how with great clarity and elegance the Buddha taught about the arising and cessation of suffering."

He said, "I know that. You've got me, I have to concede. My tradition does not answer that question as clearly as Buddha did, but nevertheless, I'm not sure it's a weakness of my system that it fails to explain suffering because I believe that's closer to the truth of suffering, that-medieval arguments about free will to the contrary-it remains inexplicable."