Part 14 (1/2)

The poem, one of his most deeply moving, not only uses the kaddish as its framework but also employs the rhythm of the ancient Aramaic prayer to undergird its sound.

YIS-bo-RACH v'YISH-tab-BACH, v'YIS-po-AR, v'Yis-ro-MAM, v'YIS-nas-SEH...

MagNIFiCENT, MOURNED no MORE, MARRED of HEART, MIND beHIND, MARried DREAMED, MORtal CHANGED...

This shows a deep a.s.similation of Jewish religious experience in spite of Ginsberg's own self-declared ident.i.ty as a ”delicatessen intellectual.” They don't say kaddish in the delicatessen.

In general, Ginsberg definitely fits the prophetic Hebrew modes: the angry prophet demanding society's attention and denouncing its hypocrisies-whether the issue is the CIA or nuclear waste; the anguished prophet keening and mourning for lost Edens of kindness and brotherly love; and the comic prophet exploding with humor and rage. He has been crucial in opening up our awareness of human suffering and bringing to focus those previously at the margins-and I see this activity as well in the prophetic tradition.

Again, like some of the prophets, such as Isaiah and Ezekiel, Ginsberg sought and cultivated visionary experiences. He saw visions. He heard voices. And he clung to these visions with tremendous courage and at high personal cost. Because, in our society, to be obsessed with a vision about how to make a better automobile makes you a genius, but to be obsessed with a vision about the nature of reality makes you a nut.

In the avant-garde literary circles of his time, such prophetic obsessions were viewed, at best, wryly. In a 1959 poem, the essential New York poet Frank O'Hara has a line, ”And Allen's back in town talking about G.o.d a lot.”

The actual visionary event has been retold many times by Ginsberg. It took place in a tenement building in Harlem in 1948. He heard the voice of the English mystical poet, William Blake, and saw a tremendous order, coherence, purposiveness-intentionality-in the universe. The vision unsettled him, especially since, at the time, Ginsberg's mother, Naomi, had been recently hospitalized for paranoid delusions.

He went around to leading intellectual and literary figures recounting his vision. He was advised to see a psychiatrist. The vision itself did not return. In part to recapture it, Ginsberg experimented repeatedly with LSD. All he had to show for himself after a string of bad acid trips was a bad case of writer's block. So, in 1962 he traveled to the East, looking for a language, ”babbling to all the holy men I could find about consciousness expansion.”

But the first holy man he babbled to was Martin Buber. On the way to India, he stopped off in Jerusalem and asked the great Jewish thinker how to handle bad acid trips. ”He had a beautiful white beard and was friendly; his nature was slightly austere but benevolent.” As a result of taking drugs, Ginsberg had been frightened by a nightmare vision of writhing insect forms in a nonhuman universe. As Ginsberg recounted it to me in 1992, ”Buber said, 'Mark my words young man, our business is with the human, not the nonhuman. You'll remember my words years from hence.'”

Since Buber was a leading authority on the wisdom of the Hasidim, it's possible to conceive that this answer might have been satisfying, and the encounter might have led Ginsberg toward exploring Hasidism and Jewish mystical texts. Based on his poetry and his whole approach to life, Ginsberg's natural spiritual home would appear to be Jewish. But although Ginsberg did mark Buber's words, he told me-”That was a very good answer, but it wasn't quite good enough. It didn't explain the experience. I wanted to see how to absorb it and integrate it.

”Whereas the Buddhist view from Dudjom Rinpoche, in that same year, 1963, was if you see something horrible, don't cling to it. If you see something beautiful, don't cling to it. In a sense Buber was saying cling to a certain aspect of life.”

Ginsberg now feels he ”fell into a theistic trap because I couldn't find any words for it, so I began to refer to it as a divine vision or G.o.d and so forth, but that solidified the experience into a concept, and once it became a concept I became very totalitarian about it and aggressive and nuts.”

As a result, Ginsberg continues to be critical, even vituperative, about Jewish religious language-what he calls ”Jehovic” conceptions, feeling that ”sooner or later, where you have the Jewish thing, one tries to sneak in a central intelligence agency...a central divinity” and this leads to spiritual and political problems.

Here is where the crux of the JUBUs' quarrel with Judaism comes in: the language about G.o.d. Because within Judaism there's certainly plenty of authoritarian, masculine, and even paranoid language: G.o.d is a father, G.o.d is a king, G.o.d is a source of wrath and punishment-there's plenty to back up Ginsberg's claim about ”the Jewish thing.”

It's fascinating, then, that had Ginsberg explored Hasidism, he would have encountered a very different language about G.o.d, one that would have been far less likely to have made him ”aggressive and nuts.”

In fact, in that same seminal summer at Naropa, 1974, he came very close to encountering it, in the person of Zalman Schachter, who was also teaching there.

Zalman's father died that summer, and being rather isolated-as the only religious Jew on the faculty-he asked Ginsberg to help him organize a minyan, so he could recite kaddish. And remembering the power of Ginsberg's own ”Kaddish,” he asked the poet to read Psalm 49. The whole experience in Boulder was deeply moving to Zalman-he told me Ginsberg read the psalm as if he'd written it himself.

And at that emotional moment, gathered around him were all the Jews who were teaching there-”out of the woodwork,” Zalman described it: Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and others. It hit Zalman with tremendous force how Jews and Buddhists might learn a common language.

As Zalman tells it, ”I said the kaddish and then we said aleinu aleinu [prayers of reverence]. In the middle of [prayers of reverence]. In the middle of aleinu aleinu it was like lightning hit me. There's a line that goes, 'For they bow down to emptiness and void and we bow down to the king of kings, the holy one blessed be he.' Now usually it means, they bow down to it was like lightning hit me. There's a line that goes, 'For they bow down to emptiness and void and we bow down to the king of kings, the holy one blessed be he.' Now usually it means, they bow down to gornisht mit gornisht gornisht mit gornisht [Yiddish: nothing with nothing], emptiness, void, stupid...But [Yiddish: nothing with nothing], emptiness, void, stupid...But there there, I read it: They bow down to Emptiness...and Void...and we bow down to the King of kings...and both of these are legitimate ways. You can imagine how that hit me. That's a story I tell people who are involved in Buddhism. If you do meditation and you see deep in meditation what this is all about, you see that emptiness and void is just one look and king of kings is the other look.”

I know from our conversations that Allen Ginsberg would not agree. King of kings King of kings could lead to a real ego trip. could lead to a real ego trip. King of kings King of kings is a look that has also put off many Jewish women, who simply cannot identify with the male imagery. And underlying these spiritual struggles is a deep Jewish family problem: women and h.o.m.os.e.xuals often feel excluded from Jewish spiritual life. is a look that has also put off many Jewish women, who simply cannot identify with the male imagery. And underlying these spiritual struggles is a deep Jewish family problem: women and h.o.m.os.e.xuals often feel excluded from Jewish spiritual life.

What Zalman's anecdote does tell me is that, at least theoretically, Ginsberg might have found answers within a Jewish context. Because Jewish prayer and Buddhist meditation can both be seen as visualizations. Just as a tantric Buddhist might contemplate an image of a deity, so a Jew in deep prayer might contemplate the image of king of kings. But in the depth of that contemplation, one is not identifying one's ego with the divinity: this is a key point.

Jonathan Omer-Man had already insisted on this in his conversation with me about s.e.xuality in Jewish mysticism. If one comes to the s.e.xual experience as an ego, then the identification with G.o.d and Shekhinah Shekhinah is dangerous. is dangerous.

Likewise in regard to king of kings: Here is where Jonathan OmerMan's explanation of thought transformation through Hasidic prayer fits in. He had explained to the Dalai Lama his own path as keter malkhut keter malkhut, the crown of sovereignty-an intense meditation on the kingly nature of G.o.d. But king does not mean boss-the janitor sweeping the floor could be on the path.

The Jewish mystical encounter with G.o.d is definitely not supposed to be an ego trip. That's why in fact the path requires very careful preparation, and very careful training, and a specific teacher. It isn't something you do on your own, or do out of a book. If an experience of closeness to G.o.d makes you egotistical and angry, then you aren't doing it right, at least as the Hasidim describe it.

More than a century ago, the Hasidim had struggled with Ginsberg's problem of ”totalitarian” ego. They'd written treatises about it. One of the most influential was written by Dov Baer of Lubavitch, the son of Reb Shneur Zalman, the founder of Lubavitch Hasidism.

In his tract on ecstasy ( Qunteros Ha-Hithpa'aluth Qunteros Ha-Hithpa'aluth), Dov Baer describes the problem of the ego-what he calls the yesh yesh-the ”thereness” of the human self and of the material world in general. The higher one rises in contemplation, the more the yesh yesh dissolves. One becomes transparent through clinging to G.o.d. The closer one gets-through prayer, meditation, and vision-the less ego one has. The highest level is only reached when the dissolves. One becomes transparent through clinging to G.o.d. The closer one gets-through prayer, meditation, and vision-the less ego one has. The highest level is only reached when the yesh yesh has been utterly dissolved, a process known as ”the losing of self in the divine has been utterly dissolved, a process known as ”the losing of self in the divine ayin ayin, the divine Nothingness.”

In Zalman's language, the king of kings is one look, and emptiness and nothing is another look. They are in fact the same look, and the paradox of the highest Jewish contemplation is that the closer one gets to an experience of unity with G.o.d, the less relevant the traditional images and languages become. The imagery of father, king, and judge that so deeply concern many JUBUs-and obviously create a barrier-dissolve in the contemplation.

But Ginsberg looked to Buddhism for his answers. Back in 1962, the Tibetan dzog chen dzog chen master Dudjom Rinpoche had advised Ginsberg not to cling to visions, whether horrible or beautiful. Instead, as Ginsberg explained it, ”the Buddhist notion is not to look for a vision. In ordinary mind, you don't collect experiences, you don't collect visions. If they come, you let go of them. There's no sense cultivating them.” master Dudjom Rinpoche had advised Ginsberg not to cling to visions, whether horrible or beautiful. Instead, as Ginsberg explained it, ”the Buddhist notion is not to look for a vision. In ordinary mind, you don't collect experiences, you don't collect visions. If they come, you let go of them. There's no sense cultivating them.”

Today Ginsberg no longer regards his Blake experience, which once so preoccupied him, as a vision. Rather, ”as time goes by it seems more like it came from within me as a projection of my own.” He finds a helpful a.n.a.logy in the Buddhist concept of deity. ”In most Buddhist practice if you have a deva deva or a or a yidam yidam or a meditation divinity, it begins with emptiness meditation, and you visualize the divinity in practices and then you dissolve it into yourself-dissolve the divinity completely and go back to or a meditation divinity, it begins with emptiness meditation, and you visualize the divinity in practices and then you dissolve it into yourself-dissolve the divinity completely and go back to shunyata shunyata, so there's a built-in definition that this is a creation of your own imagination, that it does not exist outside your own projection. Whereas there doesn't seem to be that built-in security system against sneaking in an external deity in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition.”

Ironically, as mentioned, there is is such a built-in security system, certainly in the Hasidic tradition, and also in the great mystical traditions of Christianity and Islam. such a built-in security system, certainly in the Hasidic tradition, and also in the great mystical traditions of Christianity and Islam.

I don't say that Ginsberg should have known this. Given the situation of Judaism, I don't blame him or anyone for looking elsewhere at the time. I am not mad at people for leaving the fold-they are perhaps the scouts for the big anthill of Judaism.

But in the long run, there is no need for anger on the scouts' part either. And I think it arrogant for JUBUs to a.s.sume that Judaism is somehow inherently inferior to other religions. I just don't buy that. If there'd been a brief pause in persecuting and murdering Jews in history, maybe I would look at it differently. But our picture of Judaism today, fifty years after the Holocaust, is just that-a picture. Judaism is so old and has so many contradictory currents and elements that two things can be said: it is likely to survive, and it is unlikely to survive in its present form. So the question is, what shape will it take as we move forward, post-Holocaust and with a modern state of Israel?

I have a sense that everything happened for the best, that it was necessary for some Jews, led by Ginsberg and others, to seek answers where they were available in a language, and in a setting they found compelling. The Hasidim represented everything Ginsberg's family in particular had run screaming from for two generations. It would have been absurd to say to him, ”Look, you've got it wrong. Leave your apartment on Fourth Street and go to a Lubavitcher Hasid and he will explain Tanya Tanya and Dov Baer's tract on ecstasy to you. Sit in a yes.h.i.+va and learn Hebrew, daven with us, and it will all come clear to you.” and Dov Baer's tract on ecstasy to you. Sit in a yes.h.i.+va and learn Hebrew, daven with us, and it will all come clear to you.”

Ginsberg and the other JUBUs were starving, and the Buddhists fed them. So there is no point in Jews being angry about it.

My hope is that perhaps some day he and others will see there's also no point in being contemptuous of or angry at Jews, Judaism, or G.o.d. If nothing else, Buddhist practice should tell us that.

But the issue today is different. The job for Judaism is to make sure that the very powerful esoteric language of Judaism does become more widely available-so that when the next strong wave of spirituality occurs among Jews, it takes place within within Judaism. This, in essence, is what the Dalai Lama told us when he advised us to open the doors of our esoteric teachings. Judaism. This, in essence, is what the Dalai Lama told us when he advised us to open the doors of our esoteric teachings.

As my conversation with the poet makes clear, this represents a formidable problem of translation. And a major task of Jewish renewal.

20.

A Synagogue in Delhi.

MONDAY, OCTOBER 29, 1990-DHARAMSALA- TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30, 1990, DELHI.

At three in the morning I woke to the sound of our broken tire rapping against the curb. Our cars clumped together-and a tired collection of Jews milled around disconsolately in a small Punjabi town, which came increasingly alive as we loitered. First some figures rose from cots on the shoulder-a string-bed motel where they'd been sleeping. Then a car repair shop opened-or had it ever closed?-followed by an outdoor restaurant. While our flat was fixed, some flat bread was patted on a stove, chai chai was served, sweet with cloves, anesthetizing lips and tongue. was served, sweet with cloves, anesthetizing lips and tongue.

Zalman and Jonathan had been nonstop yakking Jewish and Buddhist metaphysics, trailing a bright stream through the Punjab. I worried about beating the curfew. After our repair, our car lost touch with the caravan. In Harayana, we entered a low white fog, thick as wool. Mr. Singh pressed ahead, guided by Sikh internal radar. I fell asleep, woke with a jolt to the sway of the vehicle. The winds.h.i.+eld filled with the cab of a giant truck. I heard Shema Shema muttered in the back seat. My life was over. Mr. Singh swerved into oblivion and the moment pa.s.sed. I blinked and fell asleep. We stopped again just outside of Delhi. Tire trouble again. Mr. Singh went for help. I unfolded my body. I watched an old harijan, wrapped in a long white rag like a winding cloth, shoveling a house-high heap of manure into an ox cart with the side of his bare foot, a ghost worker in h.e.l.l. muttered in the back seat. My life was over. Mr. Singh swerved into oblivion and the moment pa.s.sed. I blinked and fell asleep. We stopped again just outside of Delhi. Tire trouble again. Mr. Singh went for help. I unfolded my body. I watched an old harijan, wrapped in a long white rag like a winding cloth, shoveling a house-high heap of manure into an ox cart with the side of his bare foot, a ghost worker in h.e.l.l.

It was the hour of the metaphysical hangover, the descent from the holy mountain to the world of dung.

Singh patched the flat and we rolled away, my head pounding, my belly full of phlegm, my eyes bleared and sandy. I muttered OM MANI PADME HUM OM MANI PADME HUM to the rhythm of the throbbing veins in my temples. The jewel in the lotus. The Jew in the lotus. I babbled the to the rhythm of the throbbing veins in my temples. The jewel in the lotus. The Jew in the lotus. I babbled the Shema Shema and felt for the little orange barley seeds in my pocket. I was a living confusion, a messy dialogue. But I had no use for talking. The car was silent as we rolled into Delhi. The fog lifted in tatters with the first gray sun. We'd beaten the curfew, though as we turned toward Connaught Circle and our hotel, I saw a truckload of men all dressed in white tunics and caps, packed tightly against the slats of an open truck, and felt for the little orange barley seeds in my pocket. I was a living confusion, a messy dialogue. But I had no use for talking. The car was silent as we rolled into Delhi. The fog lifted in tatters with the first gray sun. We'd beaten the curfew, though as we turned toward Connaught Circle and our hotel, I saw a truckload of men all dressed in white tunics and caps, packed tightly against the slats of an open truck, kar sevaks kar sevaks-Hindu fundamentalists-on their way to Ayodha. That day there would be several more deaths in the ancient battle between Allah and Ram.

We'd left the bright hopes of dialogue behind in Dharamsala. That was the dream, and the intent eyes of the fundamentalists were the reality. These eyes were Hindu, but I'd seen Jews, Muslims, and Christians with that same fixed stare. The light changed. Their truck lurched away.

We'd left Dharamsala in a rush. At Kashmir Cottage, Chodron and Alex Berzin said good-bye and exchanged addresses; Richard Gere had left the afternoon before. We had tried to be cool around him all week. But at the last moment, the Greenbergs persuaded the actor to pose for a farewell snapshot. We all came running, waving our cameras. Gere took one look and bolted. He seemed to have very long legs.

We had a more dignified farewell with Rinchen-la, thanking her for her hospitality with a small gift. In the fumes of Delhi, I recalled the rose gardens around Kashmir Cottage and our time there with Laktor, Karma Gelek, and the Western Buddhists as a sacred precinct of a brighter, greener world.

But there were sacred precincts in Delhi too, as I would find out the next morning.