Part 8 (2/2)

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.”

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