Part 1 (1/2)

The Jew in the Lotus.

Rodger Kamenetz.

Acknowledgments.

My deep thanks to Dr. Marc Lieberman, for bringing the dialogue together, and for asking me along. His intelligence, energy, innate kindness, and deep fund of knowledge are valuable in themselves, but I especially treasure them in my longtime friend.

Thanks too to all the partic.i.p.ants who were generous with their time and themselves, both in Dharamsala and since. Dr. Nathan Katz, Rabbi Joy Levitt, Dr. Marc Lieberman, Dr. Blu Greenberg, Dr. Moshe Waldoks, Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man, and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi gave generous postdialogue interviews and shared with me photographs, doc.u.ments, tape recordings, and videotapes. Special thanks to my fellow reporter, Shoshana Edelberg. I am also grateful for interviews and conversations with Rabbi Irving Greenberg, Michael Sautman, Marc Lieberman, Joseph Goldstein, Rabbi David Wolfe-Blank, Rabbi Leah Novick, Joseph Mark Cohen, Greg Burton, Robert Esformes, Andy Gold, Nancy Garfield, Rabbi Paul Caplan, and Dr. Arthur Waskow. Elie Wiesel was kind enough to share a few anecdotes with me that were of great help.

Several Western Buddhists were very generous with their time, Ven. Thubten Pemo, Dr. Alex Birzen, Ruth Sonam. I want to particularly thank Ven. Thubten Chodron for a lengthy interview at my home.

Also gracious in providing time for an interview was David Rome. I want to thank Allen Ginsberg for taking time from his busy schedule for our interview sessions. I also want to thank Ram Da.s.s for a very generous and stimulating interview.

While working on this book I've had the opportunity to consult informally with a number of Buddhist scholars and pract.i.tioners on the computer net-thank you denizens of Buddha-L and BUDDHIST for your generosity, especially Dr. Richard Hayes and Dr. Robin Kornman, for your clarifications. Any errors in either Jewish or Buddhist doctrines are all my responsibility.

Of my Tibetan friends, I want to thank Laktor, our able translator; Karma Gelek, our official host in Dharamsala; and Rinchen Choegyal and Tenzin Choegyal, our hosts at Kashmir Cottage for their many kindnesses. Getting to know Tibetan people has been a wonderful bonus of this work. I want to remember as well the late Geshe Khenrab of Montreal for his insights and generosity. I am immensely grateful for the opportunity and privilege of having met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Most of all I owe a debt of grat.i.tude to Mr. Charles Halpern, who urged this project upon me with gentle persistence.

During the time I worked on this book, I received generous financial a.s.sistance from the Nathan c.u.mmings Foundation, from the National Endowment for the Arts, from the Louisiana State Arts Council, and from the College of Arts and Sciences of Louisiana State University. I thank all of these inst.i.tutions. I especially acknowledge the a.s.sistance of Patricia c.u.mmings and the Nama Rupa Foundation for the use of a transcript of all the Jewish dialogues with the Dalai Lama.

My warm thanks to Luann Rouff, who shepherded me through the transformation of ma.n.u.script to book and answered my many questions, and to Laurie McGee and Dahlia Armon, whose copyediting and proofreading were extremely helpful. Thanks too to Rachel LehmannHaupt for her time and energy. And to my agent, Katinka Matson; my editor, Amy Hertz; and all the professional staff at Harper San Francisco who have helped in so many ways-thank-you so much.

Introduction.

In late October 1990, I traveled to Dharamsala, a remote hill town in northern India. I came to write about a religious dialogue between a group of Jewish delegates and the XIV Dalai Lama of Tibet.

I was looking forward to this trip. I'd never been to India and the idea of shlepping mezuzahs and matzahs through remote corners of the Punjab appealed to me. I also thought I would learn a lot. I'd written about Jewish life before, but I had little knowledge of Buddhism. And though in recent years I'd become increasingly aware of the Dalai Lama's activities, as a personage in my consciousness, he seemed as fabulous as the Unicorn.

Before I left the United States, I studied the modern history of Tibet. Her great national tragedy began with the Chinese Army occupation in 1950, which overturned centuries of mutual nonbelligerence. Years of empty negotiations followed between Tibetan and Chinese officials. Finally in March 1959 a dramatic uprising against Chinese rule broke out in Lhasa, the capital. Feeling the Dalai Lama's life was in danger, ordinary Tibetans surrounded his palace. Hoping to avert bloodshed, he fled to India. He has been joined in exile by more than 115,000 refugees. In that terrible month alone, Chinese soldiers killed 87,000 Tibetans in Lhasa. Since then the Chinese have continued a systematic effort to destroy Tibetan resistance. One out of ten Tibetans has been held in prisons or forced labor camps for ten years or more. The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has repeatedly fired on unarmed Tibetan demonstrators. All told, an estimated 1.2 million Tibetans have died as a result of the occupation.

Destroying Tibet's religion has been a key Chinese policy. Public teaching of Buddhism is forbidden. Monks and nuns have been singled out for public humiliation and torture. Temples have been used for granaries and monasteries for machine shops. The huge Ganden monastery in Lhasa, once the world's third largest, has been reduced to a heap of rubble. The Chinese forces have systematically pillaged and then razed more than 6,000 Buddhist monasteries.

The Tibetans have lost their land, their temples, their leading religious teachers. And now they risk losing their ident.i.ty as a people altogether. The Beijing government, by encouraging a ma.s.sive influx into Tibet of Han Chinese settlers, is perpetrating a slow-motion genocide that escapes the notice of most of the planet. Today, in Lhasa, the ethnic Chinese outnumber the native Tibetans.

To anyone conscious of Jewish history, parallels to the Tibetan situation leap to mind. As Rabbi Irving ”Yitz” Greenberg, a member of our delegation to Dharamsala, wrote, ”This is what the destruction of the Temple must have been like in Jewish history.” He referred to events two thousand years ago, when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and expelled the Jewish people from their spiritual homeland, beginning nineteen centuries of exile and dispersion. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner made a different parallel when he told the Dalai Lama in 1989, ”The Chinese came to your people as the Germans came to ours.”

Faced with the destruction of his people and their tradition of Buddhism, the Dalai Lama has been tireless in his efforts to bring freedom to Tibet. Restricted in travel by his Indian hosts and by difficulties obtaining a visa, he was not able to come to the United States until 1979. But since then, through personal appearances, and dialogue with religious and political leaders, he has gained increasing respect and notice for the Tibetan cause. In 1989, the same year he was awarded the n.o.bel Peace Prize for his nonviolent efforts, the Dalai Lama turned for the first time to the Jewish people for help. ”Tell me your secret,” he said, ”the secret of Jewish spiritual survival in exile.”

3 As my grandfather might have said, Who would have thought to ask?

Jews have survived twenty centuries of exile and dispersion, persecution and vilification, economic hards.h.i.+p, expulsion, forced conversion, Crusades, Inquisition, blood libel, pogrom-you name it, Jews survived it. But up until now few outsiders have ever looked upon this as much of an accomplishment.

In the Dalai Lama's eyes, and to many of the Tibetans, Jews are survival experts. The idea that Jewish history, with all its traumas, is relevant to another exiled people was inspiring.

But another attraction to Dharamsala was equally important. This dialogue would be an unprecedented meeting of two ancient religious traditions, an opportunity for leading religious Jews to immerse themselves in a living Buddhist community-that had never happened, as far as we knew, in thousands of years of Jewish and Buddhist history.

The Dalai Lama is not only the head of the leading sect of Tibetan Buddhism, but its most innovative thinker. In exile, he has carefully directed the preservation of the spiritual treasures of the Tibetan people. Dharamsala itself, though a small town, has an extraordinary number of learned monks, abbots, and Buddhist sages and is a worldwide center for Buddhist study. The Dalai Lama is considered a spiritual master by most of the world's Buddhists.

Another important feature of the dialogue was the Dalai Lama's request for teaching about kabbalah and Jewish meditation. And he in turn would respond to questions about Buddhist esoteric teachings and practices. This exchange of secrets proved to be even more powerful and fascinating than I could have imagined when I set out. The exploration of Buddhist tantra and Jewish kabbalah opened me to whole new ways of thinking and feeling.

The main organizers of the encounter in Dharamsala were two American Buddhists from Jewish backgrounds. And they in turn represented another important aspect of this dialogue. Over the past twenty years, many spiritually curious Jews have explored Buddhist teachings, and some have left Judaism altogether. A surprising number have become spiritual leaders, teachers, and organizers in the Western Buddhist community. Among them are Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Bernard Gla.s.sman Sensei (a Zen ros.h.i.+), Stephen Levine, and Jeffrey Miller (Surya Das), the first Jew to become a Tibetan lama.

I was also aware that the Jewish community views with a mixture of fear, alarm, and regret the loss of such Jews to other religions. This dialogue would address that concern as well.

These were the prospects I had in mind as I made my way to Frankfurt for the first leg of our journey together.

But I could not have imagined then how the actual experience would be much more radical and transforming, not only for me as an observer, but also for the Jewish delegates.

What follows, then, is the story of a historic dialogue between Jews and Buddhists. It is also the story of the movement of some Jews toward Buddhism over the past twenty years, and what this has to tell us about the problems in Jewish religious life today. But most of all, it is a story of the possibilities for Jewish renewal as I first encountered them in Dharamsala.

1.

Sparks.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1990, FRANKFURT-DELHI I joined the stream of disembarking pa.s.sengers in the Frankfurt airport, b.u.mping 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 ma.s.s of travelers surged into the main concourse and split up in all directions. I wandered around, hoping to b.u.mp 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 p.r.i.c.ked 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 ma.s.sive 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 ident.i.ty, 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 gla.s.ses and blue serge jacket, he looked like a cafe revolutionary. He was, in fact, Paul MendesFlohr, 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 partic.i.p.ants in this dialogue would have strong religious commitments. I would be standing outside of that.