Part 6 (1/2)
Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai had had good reason for such caution. He had seen that excessive messianic faith had led the Zealots to challenge Rome, only to bring destruction on all of Israel. He is quoted in the Talmud as saying, ”If you are holding a sapling in your hand, and someone tells you the Messiah has come, plant the sapling first, then go look for the Messiah.” Maybe I'd been in Dharamsala too long, but I could almost hear Rabbi Greenberg saying much the same to Rabbi Schachter.
Yitz had another point that he wanted the Tibetans to consider: democracy. The rabbis succeeded because they had democratized religious education. ”If G.o.d is not going to speak in visible ways, if we don't have the Temple that's so awesome to the average person-then we have to educate every single Jew.”
This was another interesting proposition to thrust into the Tibetan exile context, especially as the Dalai Lama and his high lamas were more Sadducee than Pharisee, more aristocratic high priest than democratic rabbi.
Like the Tibetan gelukpa gelukpa monks, the first-century rabbis became an elite religious group and held themselves to a higher discipline than ordinary Jews. I suppose they were a little like Yitz and Blu, keeping strictly kosher while others kept plain kosher. But at the same time, ”they taught everyone to study and brought everything they knew to the people.” monks, the first-century rabbis became an elite religious group and held themselves to a higher discipline than ordinary Jews. I suppose they were a little like Yitz and Blu, keeping strictly kosher while others kept plain kosher. But at the same time, ”they taught everyone to study and brought everything they knew to the people.”
Without mentioning it too pointedly, Yitz brought up another difference between rabbis and monks. ”The rabbis are not celibate, so that in their answers and teaching, they would speak with the credibility of sharing the problems of everyday people.”
What the rabbis did in teaching the people-they often traveled from town to town-was to utterly transform and reinterpret every feature of the old Temple cult.
He told the Dalai Lama, ”Each of the holy days was reinterpreted to bring in a stronger historical element, and additional holy days were added to remember the tragedy. On Tisha b'Av, they would retell, relive, and reenact the actual destruction. Why? So that no Jew anywhere would ever forget the destruction or accept the world as it is. Such holidays reminded the Jews, 'We are in galut galut [diaspora], we are in exile, we are not in our homeland.'” [diaspora], we are in exile, we are not in our homeland.'”
In the New Jersey session, the Dalai Lama had already expressed admiration for Jewish home ritual. Now Yitz explained in detail how keeping kosher or making blessings over bread and wine became the equivalent of the original Temple rites. He offered them now as potential models to share.
For instance, he said, the weekday blessings after the meal include the psalm ”By the waters of Babylon we wept.” ”Six days a week, before you thank G.o.d, you first cry, 'I am not home here, this is not my land, I'm in exile.' But on Shabbat, on the seventh day, the perfect day, we use a different psalm, a psalm of Israel. 'When we were in Zion, we were like dreamers and G.o.d restored us.' With that psalm, I'm back in Israel....”
The Dalai Lama interrupted, ”So it's a visualization.”
The Tibetan Buddhists, in their meditations, practice prodigious feats of visualization, such as have not been seen in the West since the time of the great memory theaters of ancient Roman rhetoric. They regularly envision colorful arrays of deities and bodhisattvas, with their precise clothing, jewelry, and gestures.
Obviously the traditional Jewish mental technology was different, but Yitz agreed with the Dalai Lama's characterization. ”For twentyfour hours they made believe they were living in Israel-visualization-which was so real that it kept alive that land.”
But this went beyond prayers to customs. ”Every Jew is to be reminded of the exile in the sacred round, during the holidays, and daily life. At the end of every wedding, we break a gla.s.s. Why? To remind people they cannot be completely happy. We are still in exile, we have not yet been restored. When you build a new home, you leave one little place unfinished. Why? As beautiful as the home is, I am not at home.”
The Dalai Lama listened with great attentiveness, nodding thoughtfully, and then responding, softly, almost to himself, ”Yes. Always remind.” Remind the people that they are in exile and they must return.
But then Rabbi Greenberg took this thread further, by explaining that these practices were not only devices for memory. In time, especially in mystical thinking, Jewish exile took on a deeply spiritual meaning: the world is broken. G.o.d is in exile.
That last phrase puzzled the Dalai Lama, who asked for an explanation.
First, Rabbi Greenberg made a comparison to the bodhisattva who cannot accept a personal nirvana while others are suffering. Likewise, G.o.d cannot be happy or satisfied but is also in exile. Then he turned to Zalman's turf, the tradition of the Lurianic kabbalah, for Isaac Luria and the sages of Safed had reexperienced the bitterness of exile after the Spanish expulsion in 1492. In response, Luria had developed a new teaching in which exile is a central metaphor. Luria stressed that Jews lived in a broken world.
Earlier, during his presentation, Zalman Schachter had outlined the Lurianic kabbalah. ”Rabbi Yitzhak Luria, great kabbalist of the 1500s, taught that in the first part of creation G.o.d made light and made vessels for the light. The vessels were too fragile, they broke, and from the broken vessels of the supernal lights, the material world was created. So when I sit in this chair with mindfulness, the spark of G.o.d that's in it gets raised. It all begins with a cosmic catastrophe, because bringing energy from the infinite to the finite is very hard. Even G.o.d had to try a few times in creation, and the first few times it didn't quite work the way in which it needed to be, according to the Lurianic tradition. And it says G.o.d creates worlds and destroys them. So depending where the spark was in the great scheme of things, it falls down and then has to go up and be raised. It's the purpose of human beings to come and find the sparks here and raise them up.”
Now Yitz added his explanation, ”In trying to create a world, the infinite cannot fit into the finite; the vessels break, and therefore there is something wrong with the world. It's the equivalent, if you will, of Buddha's discovery that the world of appearances is all wrong, out of sorts, not functioning properly.” Yitz was referring to Buddha's first n.o.ble truth, that the nature of existence is dukkha dukkha-unsatisfactory.
”In somewhat the same way,” he went on, ”the divine fullness of being cannot be as long as the world is disturbed. Or one can have a historical version: the world as G.o.d intends it to be is not here yet.”
The Dalai Lama was visibly moved by Rabbi Greenberg's presentation, especially the emphasis on customs and prayers. He told Yitz, ”The points you have mentioned really strike at the heart of how to sustain one's culture and tradition. This is what I call the Jewish secret-to keep your tradition. In every important aspect of human life, there is something there to remind, We have to return, we have to return, we have to return, to take responsibility.”
The Dalai Lama had grasped an essential Jewish secret of survival-memory. In the Dalai Lama's words, ”Always remind.” The Torah is full of exhortations to remember-to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy, to speak of the law constantly and teach it diligently to your children. The sacralization of memory has been an essential feature of Judaism throughout its history. We can see it today as Jews work hard to keep the memory of our Holocaust victims sacred.
The Buddhist leader had now gained a more specific understanding of how Jews transformed the painful memory of exile into a source of strength and hope. For almost two thousand years, Jewish rituals and prayers constantly reinforced the same message-we have to return to our homeland. This tenacity had its reward, and this was the Tibetans' favorite part of the Jewish story-the happy ending. Soon after Israel's success in the Six Day War, Jamyang Norbu, then president of the Tibetan Youth Congress, published a history of Israel, meant to inspire the Tibetans by example. The Jews had recaptured their homeland, why not the Tibetans? And Nathan Katz recalls in 1973 seeing a banner in Dharamsala that read ”Next year in Lhasa”-a clear reference to the perennial call at the end of the Pa.s.sover seder.
The glow from the Six Day War has long since faded, and these days many young militant Tibetans find more immediate a.n.a.logies to their situation in the struggle of the Palestinians, which shows how fickle and complex the uses of history are. But the Dalai Lama made it clear: he still found the example of Israel inspiring.
But can the Dalai Lama and the conservative lamas and abbots behind him transform their religion as Yochanan ben Zakkai had transformed his? Yitz focused on several possible problems. He seemed to be suggesting that the monastic isolation from ordinary life could be a problem in the new situation of exile.
”Judaism,” he declared, ”takes this-worldly activity much more seriously than Buddhism historically has. But I hear in your teachings already the recognition that it will never be the same. One of the new elements is this affirmation that the liberation of the Tibetan people-the improvement of the human condition, improved ecology-is a valid religious activity. This is in essence what the rabbis said. We are affirming life, we are called to take this responsibility, and we are going to correct this imbalance, we are going to get back to Israel. The genius was, you don't surrender to force. So if you prepare properly, whether it takes nine years or nineteen hundred years, you'll make it.”
The Dalai Lama p.r.o.nounced the presentation excellent and practical. And I wondered at that moment if Zalman's Buddhist seder hadn't been dropped prematurely. But the Tibetan leader's curiosity did not end there. He wanted a little give-and-take.
”So according to new circ.u.mstances,” the Dalai Lama said, ”a certain new idea developed. How was it developed?”
I could see that as the central figure in the Tibetan drama for the past thirty years, he was thinking about the rabbis from his own position, wrestling with the questions of leaders.h.i.+p Yitz had raised. How, he asked the rabbi, could profound changes be made in a religion, except through a single leader? How had the rabbis succeeded in democratizing religion?
Each of the various Tibetan Buddhist sects could trace their lineages back through a hierarchy of elite masters. In the thirteenth century, the Sakya Pandit, leader of the sakya sakya sect, became the religious tutor of the Mongol emperors, the descendants of Kublai Khan. In exchange, the Sakya Pandit was given political rule over Tibet, while acknowledging China's authority. A century later, with the decline of the Mongols, Tibet regained full independence. But the same pattern was reestablished in the seventeenth century, this time by the sect, became the religious tutor of the Mongol emperors, the descendants of Kublai Khan. In exchange, the Sakya Pandit was given political rule over Tibet, while acknowledging China's authority. A century later, with the decline of the Mongols, Tibet regained full independence. But the same pattern was reestablished in the seventeenth century, this time by the gelukpa gelukpa sect, and its leader, the Dalai Lama. sect, and its leader, the Dalai Lama.
In this way, the XIV Dalai Lama combined spiritual and temporal roles as the head of a religious hierarchy. Yitz Greenberg saw some advantages to this, since the person most exposed to the new realities also had the most authority. But at the same time, he was also challenging the Tibetan leaders.h.i.+p. He told the Dalai Lama that Yochanan ben Zakkai had saved Judaism not because he was its most profound sage, but because he had worked democratically, transferring the burden of religious practice from a hereditary Jewish priesthood, the Levites, to every Jewish household. ”His secret was to get the average Jew involved.”
In turn the Dalai Lama showed that he could challenge as well as be challenged. He asked a question, which if properly considered, really cut to the heart of the contradictions in American Jewish life. ”So after Israel was established, did some of these traditions change-or not yet?” He wanted to know if contemporary Diaspora Judaism continued to emphasize exile in its prayers and practices now that the problem of exile has presumably been solved, now that there is a state of Israel to return to.
He smiled mischievously. The Dalai Lama's sect is artful in dialectics and he had touched a Diaspora nerve, though in such a gentle way that Yitz was delighted by the question and the rest of the group broke into laughter. I'd often thought that ”Next Year in Jerusalem” had utterly changed its meaning now that Jerusalem is only an El Al ticket away.
”I think we are going to vote for you for Chief Rabbi of Israel after you finish here,” Yitz said with delight. ”I mean it.” Rabbi Greenberg admitted that today's Diaspora Jews are living through a theological crisis as profound in its own way as the original exile and dispersion two thousand years ago. Because the entire structure of remembrance built up by the rabbis is obviously undermined if exile is no longer enforced by outward necessity.
He explained that the Orthodox Jewish community is deeply divided over how to interpret the Jewish state. Many traditionalists resist the recognition that ”Israel is a transformational point that asks Jews to take more responsibility for their fate today.” Rabbi Greenberg and others see that ”as two thousand years ago, we are again being forced to face a major moment, where religion is called upon to its limits, where a people stretches its mind to preserve its past and its future.”
For every Jew in the Diaspora, observant or not, the fact of Israel raises gritty, personal questions. Most of us in that room had at one time or another seriously flirted with aliyah. But relatively few American Jews are willing to give up their material comforts for a life of struggle in the promised land. One exception was the next presenter, Paul Mendes-Flohr.
He'd made aliyah as a young man, on the idealistic principle that this was the most authentic path for a Jew in the twentieth century. His idealism also showed in his politics: he is a peace activist and had organized an interfaith dialogue group, Rainbow.
As Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at Hebrew University, and a prolific scholar, Paul specialized in the work of Martin Buber. The author of I and Thou I and Thou had emphasized dialogue in his work, and I sometimes felt Buber's spirit was hovering over our dialogue. There's also some evidence that Buber flirted with Buddhism in his youth. I first read him as a teenager, mainly his had emphasized dialogue in his work, and I sometimes felt Buber's spirit was hovering over our dialogue. There's also some evidence that Buber flirted with Buddhism in his youth. I first read him as a teenager, mainly his Tales of the Hasidim Tales of the Hasidim, and I also felt some affinity with his religious position. Buber had rejected halakhah halakhah as the basis for a Jewish spiritual life. As a result he'd won little favor with Orthodox Jews. But with his strong and early commitment both to as the basis for a Jewish spiritual life. As a result he'd won little favor with Orthodox Jews. But with his strong and early commitment both to Israel and to peace with Israel's Arabs, he would be a model for Paul. As a secular Zionist, Paul made a point of telling the Dalai Lama that he did not wear a yarmulke. Later, when the Dalai Lama sneezed, he said, ”Although I'm a secular Jew, I'll say, G.o.d bless you.”
As an Israeli, Paul had a very different answer to the Dalai Lama's artful question about continuing the memory of exile. Unlike Rabbi Greenberg, he did not interpret the return of Jews from exile as a problem in theology. It meant, instead, the reentry of Jews into the political world, ”a source of joy and of pain. The joy is the ingathering of our peoples from the four corners of the earth, of seeing our children dance and sing in Hebrew. The pain: our return has been accompanied by a tragic conflict with another people.”
He pictured for the Dalai Lama what it would be like when his own people returned, if they had to face conflict with the Chinese now living in Tibet. ”We have a similar problem with the Palestinian Arabs.”
The Dalai Lama asked him about violence. ”The use of force, from the spiritual viewpoint, what would you say?”
”A necessary evil. We're not proud of it, we're not happy about it.” The Dalai Lama reflected. ”This is reality, because of your own survival.”
I felt that subject would need a lot more ventilation but Yitz Greenberg, an ardent defender of Israel, steered the conversation around to a different point.
”I was thinking about how the resistance in Tibet began with some of the Khampas fighting.” The Khampas are fiercely independent tribesmen in eastern Tibet who began an active guerrilla attack on the Chinese in 1956. They are the Tibetan Maccabees.
”I'm not asking you to betray your tradition of nonviolence,” Yitz said, ”but in a way the rea.s.sertion of Tibetan dignity and the right to have Tibet began when certain Tibetans saw the oppression as so overwhelming that they had no choice but to fight. I know it's a conflict but...”
The Dalai Lama took it from there. ”Yes, from the Buddhist viewpoint, theoretically speaking, violence is considered just a method, so the method is not very important. What is important is motivation. The goal.
”Violence is like a very strong pill or drug. For a certain illness it's very useful, but there are a lot of side effects. So then the worst thing, at the moment when you are about to decide, is that it's very difficult to know what the result will be. Only when things happen, then afterward, time goes, then you see whether war or violence really produces satisfactory results. Like the Second World War or the Korean War, I think there were some positive results. But the Vietnam War, now the Gulf War, n.o.body knows what the result will be. So therefore always it's better to avoid, this I feel.”
As I interpreted it, the Dalai Lama was not saying that violence is justified. Justice and justification are very much Jewish and thereby Western concepts, foreign to the Buddhist worldview. Violence is a tool, a drug, only permitted if the perpetrator could know that there would be satisfactory results. The catch is, who would be in a position to know in advance the outcome of a violent act? Really, only an omniscient Buddha.
Paul Mendes-Flohr would state at the end of the trip that what really moved him in his encounter with the Tibetans was living in a community that so absolutely abhorred anger. He had worked for peace for years at the political level, and he was painfully conscious of the effect of constant war and conflict on the Israeli psyche. He particularly grieved over its effects on Israel's children. So he was speaking from the heart when he asked the Dalai Lama for advice about ”learning how to deal with our conflicts in a more imaginative and nonviolent way.” Unfortunately the dialogue had run an hour overtime already. There was a long pause. ”It's almost five now,” the Dalai Lama noted and called an end to the session.