Part 3 (2/2)
I was beginning to feel quite uncomfortable myself sitting through the barrage of incomprehensible language. I looked his way and our eyes met. Just a glance and a playful smile as if for a moment the whole scene, the afternoon's fading light, the hundred and fifty Asian scholars and monks, the speech, the plates of rice and raisins, the Buddha with a thousand arms had all come down lightly to rest and we were the only two in the room, sharing a private joke.
It was a simple human moment. He read my discomfort. Then, by a barely perceptible motion of his hand, he dispatched monks among us. They stooped in the aisle and translated the speeches in low whispers. That's where we first met Laktor, who would serve us as translator during our visit.
After a final formal greeting to the Dalai Lama, three Tibetan monks chanted with deep dignity. I closed my eyes and imagined ancient caverns, shadowed forests, yet within the notes was also a plaintive call, a longing for peace. Plangent chords filled the room-h.e.l.l on the throat tendons. Occasionally one heard scattered coughs floating above like ghost birds. They finished abruptly in a kind of ”talking blues” effect-the rapid recitation of a dedication prayer. The silence that followed seemed purified.
The Dalai Lama spoke, his voice also deep. Laktor explained that he was welcoming the Buddhist scholars from all over Asia who'd come in spite of the civic unrest. Then in the stream of Tibetan I heard the word ”Jewish.” I didn't have to wait for the translation. All eyes fell upon us. I was fighting tears. For the first time in history, a group of religiously minded Jews had come to the heart of the Buddhist world to teach and to learn.
5.
Blessings.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 24, DHARAMSALA.
Each morning before breakfast, the Jewish group a.s.sembled outside Kashmir Cottage for shakharit davening shakharit davening-morning prayers. The men strapped leather tefillin tefillin on the left arm and just above the third eye. In our brightly colored tallises and our headgear, which ranged from knit on the left arm and just above the third eye. In our brightly colored tallises and our headgear, which ranged from knit kippahs kippahs to sateen to sateen yarmulkes yarmulkes to Blu Greenberg's gray silk scarf to my own neo-Hasidic Indiana Jones fedora, we were quite a sight to the Tibetan kitchen workers, who always managed to break away for a glimpse. The davening was delightful: vigorous, l.u.s.ty, witty and raucous, quiet and joyful. to Blu Greenberg's gray silk scarf to my own neo-Hasidic Indiana Jones fedora, we were quite a sight to the Tibetan kitchen workers, who always managed to break away for a glimpse. The davening was delightful: vigorous, l.u.s.ty, witty and raucous, quiet and joyful.
This was all new to me. On any free a.s.sociation test, I'm sure after prayer prayer, I would have checked boring boring. As a boy I'd served time in Orthodox shuls, where the Hebrew was babbled at supersonic rates, and I spent most of my time trying to figure out what page we were on or when it was okay to sit down. Of course, this was all my own ignorance. I'd been raised primarily as a liberal Reform Jew and had learned only a handful of prayers. My family belonged to a giant cruise s.h.i.+p of a synagogue, with comfortable wooden pews and lofty architecture. Huge concrete Jewish stars framed the windows and a lovely north light filtered through them down to the cool gray carpet. I used to watch the dust motes suspended in the air instead of following the prayers. The cantor and choir sang beautifully while the congregation sat in silence, like an audience at a concert. This is where Reform Judaism had gotten off the track in the fifties. It felt like our employees were praying for us.
My father's father, an immigrant from the Russian Pale, was, nominally at least, Orthodox. At family gatherings, he mocked our synagogue, which he called a church. But my father was the first in his family with a college degree, and the handsome and affluent Reform synagogue fit his sense of his place in the world. I'd been bar mitzvahed there, a terrifying and elaborate social event that most resembled marrying my mother in public-but one devoid of large religious significance. Our cantor worked hard with us, but the pressure on him was enormous: two bar mitzvahs a week. The extent of my Hebrew scholars.h.i.+p at that time was memorization of syllables whose exact meaning remained obscure.
In short, I'd grown up the typical liberal American Jew, loyal to his tribe and family, and very proud of the ethical heritage of the Jewish people. My Jewish ident.i.ty was like a strongbox, very well protected, but what was inside it?
The interior meaning of being a Jew was indistinct, smuggled, inchoate-much like the Hebrew letters I could p.r.o.nounce but not truly read.
The irony is, I had to travel halfway around the world to Dharamsala to discover the utility of Jewish prayer. Our davening brought us together and changed the environment around us, transforming Kashmir Cottage, a Buddhist guest house, into Beth Kangra, the open-air synagogue of the Himalayas.
Maybe Jews ought to pray outdoors more often. Our morning blessings echoed down and around the Kangra valley and were answered back by the call of barking dogs, the cackling of jungle crows, and the sweet chirping of sparrows in the cedars. Often eagles attended, floating overhead-soaring down from the great sparkling granite peaks of the Himalayas to the east as Moshe Waldoks chanted, ”Hallelujah, Praise the Lord, praise the Lord from the heavens, praise him in the heights.... Mountains and all hills, fruitful trees and all cedars. Beasts and all cattle, crawling things and winged fowl. Kings of the earth and all governments, princes and all judges on earth. Young men and also maidens, old men together with youths. Let them praise the name of the Lord...” We became the prayer we recited.
Another great help to me was that Waldoks prayed with a running commentary, teaching and chanting in a baritone, sometimes bursting into aria for major prayers and other times transitioning with a peppery recitative, ”We're moving now from verses of praise to Shema Shema and its and its brakhot brakhot and some-would-say and some-would-saykaddish-here-if-they-had-aminyan-but-wedon't-have-aminyan-so-we're-not-going-to-saykaddish-here-but-Iwanted-to-bring-it-up-anyway-and-invite-everyone-who-is-along-tocome-along-because-” and then he chanted-”Blessed is the Lord, King of the universe, who forms light and creates darkness.”
To Moshe Waldoks, who travels the country trying to enliven Jewish prayer, ”The shul in Dharamsala was unique and shows how Jewishly sophisticated people could take advantage of being six thousand miles from Jewish politics and learn how to be human beings and Jews together.” Each shaliakh tzibbur shaliakh tzibbur-prayer leader-brought a different style. Rabbi Joy Levitt favored us with quite beautiful singing whereas Jonathan Omer-Man, the mystic, conducted his service entirely in silence.
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi brought his unique combination of Hasidic energy and existential confrontation. The morning he led the davening, he came up to me during the last part of the Shema Shema, touched me on the shoulder, looked straight into my eyes, and said, ”Your G.o.d is a true G.o.d.” I found that a powerful challenge.
I usually felt as I prayed in a group that I was a.s.senting to ideas and images that were very foreign to me or that I didn't have time to check out. Zalman's gesture had cut through that in a very personal way. Something about his statement struck me in the heart as true, even with my intellect marshaling a thousand reasons why it couldn't be. My G.o.d is a true G.o.d? Which G.o.d was he talking about? Long white beard, old Daddy in the sky? Autocrat, general, father, king? Master of the Universe, doyen of regulations and punishments? These were the images that made me reject the very idea of G.o.d.
But in a funny mental jujitsu, the more I struggled with these images, the more what Zalman said came through. ”Your G.o.d is a true G.o.d” meant to me that the images and the language weren't going to be supplied in advance. I would have to find them for myself out of my own experience, and in my own language I wasn't the only one taken aback. Moshe Waldoks, an all-star veteran of Jewish prayer, was also moved by Zalman's direct challenge. He told me it was his peak moment Jewishly in Dharamsala.
”We always say it at the end of the Shema Shema, but I understood it for the first time: that I ultimately will find the G.o.d that will work for me and it will be the true G.o.d. That was a tremendously potent moment. It gave me a lot of energy that I still carry with me. My eyes filled with tears. It was a loving act of support and affirmation that we live our lives and all we can do is help our people-all people-find what their G.o.d is and help them be true to it, live with a certain truth in their lives.”
For Waldoks, that truth in his life was evident in the energy he brought to his prayers. But his chanted reference that Wednesday morning to not having a minyan minyan touched on a sore point. Ten Jews, the required quorum, were present, but only if Jewish women counted. However, for Yitz Greenberg, the women did not count because the Talmud defines a touched on a sore point. Ten Jews, the required quorum, were present, but only if Jewish women counted. However, for Yitz Greenberg, the women did not count because the Talmud defines a minyan minyan as ten Jewish males. as ten Jewish males.
Moreover, he could not partic.i.p.ate when Rabbi Levitt's turn came to lead the service.
I expected Rabbi Levitt to be upset. In fact, I expected her to come out fighting. After all, a prayer-illiterate like myself counted for the minyan minyan, while she, who sang the prayers so lovingly, didn't. But she didn't see it as a civil rights issue. In fact, she asked not to be included in the rotation of prayer leaders, hoping to spare Yitz the embarra.s.sment of being unable to join her. As she put it to me, ”It's not a personal decision on his part, so there's no reason to blame him. He's following halakhah halakhah as he understands it, so I'm not personally offended.” as he understands it, so I'm not personally offended.”
The group rejected her request. Instead, on the morning she led the service, Rabbi Greenberg came a little late and stood a little apart.
It was an irony that for the Orthodox, interfaith work meant praying with Reform or Reconstructionist Jews. Another irony was that Yitz was the holdout at Beth Kangra, since no one in Orthodoxy had done more to promote Jewish unity than Yitz Greenberg's organization, the Jewish Center for Learning and Leaders.h.i.+p. Its acronym, CLAL, recalled the ideal that all Jews belong to clal yisrael clal yisrael, the congregation of Israel. Yet clal yisrael clal yisrael often faded from sight, especially in recent years as a resurgent Orthodox movement challenged the legitimacy of more liberal Jews. There was no peace for a peacemaker among warring Jews. (Moshe Waldoks joked that a great benefit of the Dharamsala group was that ”it gave Yitz a chance to be on the right for a change. He's constantly being battered by the right wing of his own group and seen as a traitor to his fundamentalist faith. Here was a chance for him to be the most conservative person vis-a-vis ritual and theology.”) often faded from sight, especially in recent years as a resurgent Orthodox movement challenged the legitimacy of more liberal Jews. There was no peace for a peacemaker among warring Jews. (Moshe Waldoks joked that a great benefit of the Dharamsala group was that ”it gave Yitz a chance to be on the right for a change. He's constantly being battered by the right wing of his own group and seen as a traitor to his fundamentalist faith. Here was a chance for him to be the most conservative person vis-a-vis ritual and theology.”) That conservativism emerged again only hours before our first meeting with the Dalai Lama. Marc Lieberman, our reluctant leader, was anxious to tighten up the agenda, but that was not to be.
In the Talmudic tradition, young students often matched wits over theoretical fine points, arguments twisted like peppers, called pilpul pilpul. Example: If a child is born with two heads, which one wears the yarmulke? Long debate: some say the right head, some say the left. All quote Torah.
Now we were faced with a new age pilpul pilpul: what brakha brakha do you make for a Dalai Lama? do you make for a Dalai Lama?
True to form, Zalman had composed a brand new Hebrew prayer for the occasion, and Nathan Katz had prepared a Tibetan translation. But there were questions and objections. Rabbi Omer-Man wanted to know ”the inner ch.o.r.eography” of the event, who we were saying the brakha brakha to and what it meant. Rabbi Levitt thought the prayer too original, that it risked being ”disembodied” from tradition. Blu Greenberg also disliked creating new to and what it meant. Rabbi Levitt thought the prayer too original, that it risked being ”disembodied” from tradition. Blu Greenberg also disliked creating new brakhot brakhot, if traditional ones could be used. As the discussion dragged on, Marc Lieberman, obviously frustrated, broke in. ”Folks, I think we're drifting into some real minutiae, and I'm not getting the big picture.”
”This is not minutiae for us,” Yitz told Marc firmly. ”Deal with us two minutes. We're negotiating now with true respect for Buddhism that doesn't violate anyone's integrity.”
Negotiating was an interesting word. I settled in for another long discussion. Zalman's prayer was attacked from right and left-perhaps logical, since he considered himself postdenominational. But Zalman, in turn, could quibble and quarrel with the best of them. Maybe this was the real secret of Jewish survival. We'd last forever because there wasn't time in the universe to finish our arguments. I felt like a kid in shul sitting on shpilkes shpilkes. My deepest prayer was to go outside and play. The weather was perfect, and I wanted to hike the mountain paths winding up to Thekchen Choeling, the Temple mount of Tibetan Buddhism. It was a religious obligation to make solemn perambulations around the Dalai Lama's residence there, on a special path known as the lingkhor lingkhor. From what I'd seen the day before, the paths would be full of Tibetan pilgrims, holy men, and beggars, whirling small Buddhist prayer wheels of wood and silver.
But my impatience partly abated as I came to understand the issues. It seems our encounter with the Dalai Lama presented a unique challenge in the long history of Jewish blessings. Their delightful variety covered almost every situation. There is a blessing on seeing a rainbow or an extraordinarily beautiful person. On seeing fruit trees in bloom or for an a.s.sembly of more than six hundred thousand Jews. There is a blessing on seeing the ocean and on seeing a mountain.
The Jewish tradition can stretch to accommodate new situations for blessing, but only by extension of old ones. There is probably no extant blessing for a computer chip, but there is a blessing for a pizza, fas.h.i.+oned from a blessing for bread.
In the case of the Dalai Lama, he could be blessed two ways, as a political or as a religious leader. There is a Jewish blessing upon seeing a Gentile king. There is another on seeing a Gentile sage or wise man. But instead of using one of them, Zalman proposed an entirely new brakha brakha. He wanted to specially honor the Dalai Lama by blessing him as the equivalent of a Jewish Jewish sage. sage.
The traditional prayer for a Jewish chokham chokham, a wise Torah scholar, ends, ”Who has apportioned of his wisdom to those who fear him.” For the last part, Zalman subst.i.tuted: ”to those who honor his name.” I did wonder how the Dalai Lama, who did not believe in a creator deity, nevertheless could be said to honor his name. But Zalman's point was that for the first time Jews would create a prayer to recognize the sacred in other religions.
He answered the objections about being too original by citing his source for the language, chanting the Hebrew from memory in an enchanting way. He claimed that the prophet Malachi had chartered a dialogue of spiritual equals when he wrote, ”Then they that feared the Lord/Spoke one with another;/And the Lord hearkened, and heard. /And a book of remembrance was written before Him./For they that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name.” (Malachi 3:16) Rabbi Greenberg delighted in the quotation. I could see that despite his differences with Zalman, he was closer to him in his thinking-at least about this issue-than I might have thought. Yitz felt the Dalai Lama, though his tradition has ”direct cognitive dissonance with ours, is nevertheless thinking about G.o.d-as we see it.”
But Blu, who tended to work these things out through her gut feelings, still objected, and she eventually turned the tide. Now Joy Levitt declared that the situation was already radical, ”so the liturgy doesn't have to be.” Zalman was caught in a pincer movement-right and left, Orthodox and Reconstructionist.
So they came back to the traditional blessing of a Gentile sage. But Zalman objected that this blessing was a put-down, because it ended with the phrase bsar vdam bsar vdam, flesh and blood. The implication was that a Gentile, however wise, is only a creature of flesh and blood.
Yitz replied, ”That he's human is not a put-down. First, because I don't believe he's a G.o.d. The fact that his own people do, I'm happy to dialogue with them, but I want to make clear where I stand on that.” Yitz felt the Dalai Lama himself had removed such claims in his latest autobiography by describing himself as ”a simple Buddhist monk.”
In the end, Zalman agreed to recite the traditional prayer in Hebrew and his more innovative prayer in Tibetan. G.o.d presumably would handle the simultaneous translation with an appropriate sense of irony. The Tibetans would feel respected, the Jews uncompromised, and the dialogue could begin.
Unfortunately for Marc Lieberman's agenda, Yitz Greenberg's two minutes had stretched to a half hour and there was little time left for other discussion before lunch.
I understood Marc's frustrations. The Dalai Lama pilpul pilpul seemed a paradigm for the problems Judaism faces today. Yes, there are always dangers of becoming disconnected from the tradition. But there is an equally grave danger in ignoring contemporary realities. seemed a paradigm for the problems Judaism faces today. Yes, there are always dangers of becoming disconnected from the tradition. But there is an equally grave danger in ignoring contemporary realities.
For instance, the question of the minyan minyan. Although I respected the difficulty of Rabbi Greenberg's position and admired the deftness of his maneuvers, I feel that to have to worry so late in the twentieth century about whether a woman's prayers count in the eyes of G.o.d is silly. Nor do I buy the explanation the Orthodox offer that somehow a woman praying with men is a distraction.
In fact, as the rabbis debated, I wondered if the Dalai Lama wasn't ahead of the game in facing up to contemporary realities. The previous afternoon, when he spoke at the All Himalayan Conference, the Buddhist leader had stressed that Buddhism had to find ”a synthesis between modern science and traditional teachings.”
His audience included rather conservative monks and abbots, who'd come to talk about traditional sciences. Yet he boldly counseled them to ”find new ideas in Buddhism.” Interestingly, the suggested method amounted to Buddhist midrash. Words ”not fitting with reality if taken literally, should be interpreted.”
The Tibetan people are in an entirely critical situation. The millions left behind to Chinese rule have lost their chief spiritual leader. Their monasteries and temples lie in heaps of rubble, their libraries and precious religious objects are destroyed. The Chinese are devastating a country that has been isolated geographically and politically and thereby, up until now, has preserved intact a tremendous treasure of ancient wisdom. Now that the great spiritual bank of Tibetan Buddhism has been broken open, its wealth threatens to be scattered and lost.
In this crisis, the burden of preservation falls heavily on the religious leaders.h.i.+p in exile, and particularly to the Dalai Lama and his fellow monks and abbots living in Dharamsala.
One could imagine in this situation the Dalai Lama being a rather conservative restorationist, such as those ultra-Orthodox Jews Moshe Waldoks had referred to, who are busy reconstructing the shtetl shtetl in Israel and Brooklyn. Yet instead, he has become a Buddhist reformer. He has stated many times that if science can disprove a Buddhist doctrine-such as rebirth for instance-then the doctrine should be put aside. Modern science and Buddhism cannot contradict, because Buddhism is based on reality. in Israel and Brooklyn. Yet instead, he has become a Buddhist reformer. He has stated many times that if science can disprove a Buddhist doctrine-such as rebirth for instance-then the doctrine should be put aside. Modern science and Buddhism cannot contradict, because Buddhism is based on reality.
In some ways, the Dalai Lama enjoys a greater freedom to innovate than the rabbis. First, he is the undisputed leader of Tibetan Buddhism, a position no rabbi, not even the Chief Rabbi of Israel, could ever claim. There is no pope in Judaism. At a more subtle level, it appears that Jews and Buddhists have strikingly different att.i.tudes toward language. In Judaism there is a profound reverence for the written word-and a profound literalism. For instance, the Orthodox believe it is better to pray in Hebrew without understanding than to pray in one's own language. Even Zalman, at his most innovative, felt compelled to tie his prayer to a specific verse in Malachi. I thought again of the Frankfurt airport, how we'd been drawn to that Torah. I should think that anyone visiting a synagogue and seeing Jews revering and kissing their Torahs would think we wors.h.i.+ped our scrolls. Certainly my experience of Judaism was an experience with language-my quarrels, a quarrel with language.
<script>