Part 15 (2/2)

Rome observed the initial Tibetan-Jewish dialogue in New Jersey and came away impressed with how family practice has been key to Jewish survival. In his experience, that is something Jewish Buddhists are bringing to their Buddhist communities.

”The tendency has been for people to have their practice, which they do alone or in special group retreats. But it hasn't been so family oriented. Now many, many people have families and so we've been working with that for quite a few years. One of my friends, who comes out of a more observant Jewish background than I do, recently introduced the idea of a regular family-oriented gathering at the meditation center. It was designed like a Shabbat service.”

Because he seemed more attuned to Jewish concerns than most Jewish Buddhists, I asked David Rome a question I knew many Jews felt strongly. It had been posed to me forcefully by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, who has made encouraging Jews to stay involved with Judaism his life's work.

”You know,” Rabbi Carlebach said, ”imagine, G.o.d forbid, our father's house burns down-and I'm moving into somebody else's house? No. I help my father to rebuild the house. After the six million we had nothing. No yes.h.i.+vas, no spiritual leaders.h.i.+p, no rebbes. All those people who hit it big in other religions, they could be rebbes. They have big neshamas neshamas [souls]. Sure it's easy to go away, it's hard to rebuild, but you can't permit them to do that. It shows a lack of character. What's going on? Why don't they ask G.o.d, ”What do you want me to be?'” [souls]. Sure it's easy to go away, it's hard to rebuild, but you can't permit them to do that. It shows a lack of character. What's going on? Why don't they ask G.o.d, ”What do you want me to be?'”

I asked David Rome how he would answer Shlomo Carlebach. ”I'd say we're out learning some new skills so maybe later on we can come back and help rebuild the house. I appreciate where he's coming from, but more and more, as I get older, I find that my ethical responsibility, my responsibility altogether, is as a human being-although these days even that's not enough because it's to the ecosystem, too.

”But anyway, I have high ambiguity tolerance. I love to see people who are genuinely involved with Judaism. That's fantastic and there's even a bit of envy in that, but that's not what happened in my life. I have to be true to what happened in my life. If everybody is true to themselves and to the events of their own lives, then we will find a way to make it work out.”

Rome felt ”a teacher like Trungpa does appear as a rebbe. He's very powerful and can take you beyond your limitations. It's hard to find that from your average suburban rabbi, and it's very hard to do it on your own. The ghetto feeling of many Hasidic communities is something most modern people are not willing to put up with. The solutions may emerge over time. If you look at Buddhism and how it started up in Tibet and j.a.pan, usually you see a generation that had to leave their country and spend twenty years in a foreign culture. But it takes only a generation and then it was planted. It may have to take a generation that goes elsewhere and comes back to Judaism. The next generation comes back.”

That was an intriguing comparison, very much in the spirit of Zalman Schachter's circular dance. Over time Buddhism has adapted itself to many different cultures in the East, in China, j.a.pan, India, Korea, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. Historically, this has taken at least three hundred years to complete. By that measure, we are just beginning to see that process unfold in the West. It may well be that Buddhism will borrow a few dance steps from Judaism along the way.

Ram Da.s.s, a close observer of the Buddhist scene, expressed delight when told how David Rome's community was adapting Shabbat. He commented that ”the Eastern traditions are primarily monastic and as such they really give short shrift to family life. In terms of what we need at this moment in this culture-which is to respond to the alienation by a sense of community, by realizing we are interdependent with other people-Judaism, with its emphasis on the family and on spiritual living rather than on the other world, is a very vital and healthy vehicle.” This, of course, was the same message we had tried to pa.s.s on to the Dalai Lama.

But the exchange goes in both directions. David Rome had been instrumental in publis.h.i.+ng Jewish Meditation Jewish Meditation. Other experienced meditators have come all the way back to Judaism.

22.

A Last Secret.

At the 1991 P'nai Or Kallah, a biannual gathering of the Jewish renewal movement, I saw what happens when the energy of women, of Jewish meditation, and an active four worlds approach to davening are combined. Dynamic prayer services were led by women rabbis, spiritual leaders, and singers, including among them Hannah Tiferet Siegel, Rabbi Marcia Prager, and Shefa Gold. Siegel and Rabbi Prager introduced special gestures and dance movements to enhance prayer, and Shefa Gold rejuvenated a number of psalms with music that combined Hebrew words and fervent gospel rhythms. The total effect of such wors.h.i.+p, especially at Shabbat, was overwhelming. Jewish prayer, especially in more liberal synagogues, can be a staid affair. These Jews were dancing, singing, shouting, and moving their bodies. They combined breath meditation with prayer and physical techniques such as tai chi and yoga, as well as traditional Jewish ”yoga” of shukeling shukeling, praying while swaying the body. Was this very new or very, very old? One got the sense of renewing an ancient joyous energy, the dancing and singing in the days of the Temple, the harps and timbrels of the psalms.

According to Dr. Arthur Waskow, a leader of the Jewish renewal movement, ”The whole rhythm in American Jewish history has been, from generation to generation, to dump the tradition more and more. Ours is the first generation in American Jewish history that's drawn more on the tradition, rather than less. This is a return. But it's not a return to the old. The renewal response is to digest modernity, to absorb the truths that are in it. And they are: women are fully spiritual beings and their spirituality has to transform the traditions that have excluded them; other traditions do bear as much truth as our own, we have to honor and learn from them. Now on this small planet, we discover, G.o.d didn't speak at just one Sinai.”

I asked Zalman Schachter, who has combined vipa.s.sana vipa.s.sana with the Yom Kippur service, why Jews might find meditation of increased interest now. In the past, he thought, Jews, Christians, and Muslims were mostly interested in recital. An elite of Jews, ”less than a with the Yom Kippur service, why Jews might find meditation of increased interest now. In the past, he thought, Jews, Christians, and Muslims were mostly interested in recital. An elite of Jews, ”less than a minyan minyan,” in Safed, Spain, and medieval Germany practiced meditation. ”There was an explosion of spirituality after the Baal Shem Tov that was like fireworks. The Baal Shem went off and his disciples went off and within three generations, Poland, Galicia, and Lithuania were all dotted with Hasidic masters” practicing meditation.

The ”demand for spirituality today” is ”at the deepest level subjective, it's in the nominative, not in the accusative, the dative, the genitive. In shul, I'm there because it's genitive: my poppa belonged to the shul, I'm of of it. I'm an accusative Jew because a it. I'm an accusative Jew because a goy goy calls me that way. Because I've been circ.u.mcised and I have this history, my dative says I'm a Jew. But unless it gets into the nominative, the first-person experience, I'm not a Jew. From that place, people become meditators.” calls me that way. Because I've been circ.u.mcised and I have this history, my dative says I'm a Jew. But unless it gets into the nominative, the first-person experience, I'm not a Jew. From that place, people become meditators.”

Moshe Waldoks also feels Jews can learn from other meditative traditions. In fact, he does not think ”there's a Jewish meditation or Buddhist meditation: there is meditation. There's a debate within the philosophy of religion about whether a mystical experience in one religion is the same as in another. It's a very academic argument.” When he travels and teaches, he introduces meditation into the Jewish prayer experience with a presentation he calls CHAI Ch'ih. (Chai is the Jewish word for life.) He finds that all too often the synagogue service is modeled on the decorum of churches-the partic.i.p.ants are not looking for personal transformation or a peak experience. is the Jewish word for life.) He finds that all too often the synagogue service is modeled on the decorum of churches-the partic.i.p.ants are not looking for personal transformation or a peak experience.

”My contention is very simple: that meditation and chanting and breathing, things we a.s.sociate with the Eastern prayer mode, are in no way foreign to any of the Jewish services.” That is why he thinks the Jewish community could use the help of Jews who have experience of Eastern meditation.

Though Ram Da.s.s is not yet ready to play this role, he has made a personal rapprochement with his Jewish background since I saw him last in that shul in Delhi.

As a Hindu and theist, Ram Da.s.s had less trouble with G.o.d than many of the JUBUs to begin with. In a recent interview, he told me he found Allen Ginsberg's views of G.o.d as an external deity naive. He thought Judaism was ”more interesting than that. Because you can't have something in which the basic mantra is, 'There is only one G.o.d, there is only one'-and then say there's one and also us. The one is the one, and that's what I understand from every tradition. You go back and get to one thing.”

Still, he was not surprised by the negative att.i.tudes of some Jewish Buddhists toward Judaism, because ”usually the religion you grow up with, unless you were very fortunate and had a very deep connection, was often the last one in which you would find the living spirit once you were on the spiritual path. Because you have all the residuals. It's like staying very conscious around your family. The family is connected to you in a way that they know exactly where your b.u.t.tons are to press. A lot of Catholics who went into Eastern religion come back to Catholicism only at the very end, because then they can see the beauty. Before, they are so busy reacting to the negative sides: insensitive nuns, authoritarian structures.

”The negativity I came away with from Judaism made me realize I had business to do there. But I kept saying I'd better wait to connect to some guide who isn't going to try to hustle me, proselytize me, or make me feel guilty, who's going to respect me and love me and let me come back in, in some way. I was just waiting for that because part of one's incarnation is to understand the uniqueness of one's predicament, and to honor it and come into harmony or relations.h.i.+p with it.”

Ram Da.s.s's Jewish predicament was spectacularly exoteric: his father, the president of the New York-New Haven Railroad, chaired the Joint Distribution Committee during World War II, rescuing Jewish children from the Holocaust. After the war, he was instrumental in founding Brandeis University and Albert Einstein Medical College. George Alpert was a macher macher with a capital with a capital M M.

But religiously, the Judaism his son experienced had a ”Holocaust redemption quality.”

”I had never been connected with the spiritual aspects of Judaism at all. My whole connection was the sentimentality of the high holidays and the social political aspects of Dad's involvements. My father and mother grew up in Orthodox families, but we were liberal Conservatives-we only ate pork in Chinese restaurants.”

In an article in Conservative Judaism Conservative Judaism, Nathan Katz commented pointedly on our encounter with Ram Da.s.s in Delhi. After dinner, we had sung the birkat hamazon birkat hamazon, the traditional after meal prayer. Ram Da.s.s had asked, ”What is that pretty tune?” Nathan's comment: with such a paltry background, no wonder he left.

When I quoted this to him, Ram Da.s.s laughed and told me, ”There was a very funny a.n.a.logy. At one point we had a big summer place up in New Hamps.h.i.+re. When I came back from India in '68 or '69, people started to come to visit me until pretty soon there were two or three hundred people on a weekend. And my father let people camp up in the hills. He was wonderful. He didn't understand it at all. Once about 250 people in the barn were singing ”Hare Krishna.” He came up to me and he said, 'Who is this Harry Krishna guy?' And I said, 'Well, it's just another name of G.o.d.' And he said, 'It's a great tune, but why do they keep repeating the same thing over and over again?' So when I said to them, 'This is a great tune, what is it?' I realize I was my father to them, I was doing the same thing. It was like out of my own ignorance.”

But just a year later Ram Da.s.s was invited to lecture at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, a stronghold of Conservative Judaism. Realizing the invitation was controversial, he retreated to a South Sea island and studied Jewish texts diligently, for the first time. He began with the Talmud. ”It just struck me as very humorous that I would be reading these books about Orthodox practices while these women with bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s would be walking by. That was a wonderful juxtaposition. I thought, what a wonderful place-if I can find joy in Judaism here, I've got it made.”

Evidently he was able to keep his eye on the page even under those conditions. ”I said to myself, if I were an Orthodox Jew who loved G.o.d, how would I understand my religion? Then the halakhic laws fell into place, not as an authoritarian patriarchal or paternalistic law giving, but rather these incredible guides for how to remember G.o.d from moment to moment.” He began to look at the beauty of Judaism, instead of judging it.

”Then I got into the Hasids, and people like Nachman and the Baal Shem Tov and other tzaddiks tzaddiks. And, of course, then I was meeting people that I recognized from Eastern traditions. I was meeting the saints, the mystics.

”Then I understood, when you were connected to G.o.d from that point of view, the laws were a joy to follow, not a heavy burden at all. I realized that when I first took psychedelics in the sixties, that had I been more on good terms with Judaism, emotionally, I probably would have turned toward kabbalah for a framework for understanding. As it was, I ended up through Aldous Huxley with the Tibetan Book of the Dead Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was a framework also. One that led me and a lot of others to the East.”

In preparing for the lecture, he came to know Rabbi Omer-Man better. They talked about Judaism and he felt ”very loving and connected” to Jonathan. The lecture itself was a popular success. Jonathan advised him that he might face hostility, but Ram Da.s.s told him, ”I'm going in loving everybody. We are fellow Jews and we're all trying to figure out what we are doing together.” He spoke for three hours. ”I just loved it. I was trying to share the joy I saw in Judaism.”

To Jonathan Omer-Man, the lecture-attended by everyone from New Age Hindus to Jewish yuppies to bearded Hasids-was a remarkable event. Ram Da.s.s ”spoke beautifully as an outsider” of the Jewish experience. It was not so much a coming home to Judaism, as ”acknowledging that home is a good place.”

I liked talking to Ram Da.s.s-he was a very pleasant man and very enthusiastic about Judaism-at least in theory. I was curious to know how far he would go with it-and where he would pull back. He told me that the summer after his speech, he'd spent time at Elat Chayim, a Jewish renewal summer camp affiliated with P'nai Or. He actively davened and celebrated Shabbat, practicing the Judaism he'd been contemplating in the abstract.

He told me, ”In every religious tradition, what you invest is what return you get. And I'll tell you when we did the Shabbas and we did the mikveh mikveh, the whole idea that one day was going to be out of time, and one day was going to be the statement of what it was like after the Messiah came, and one day was the real wedding celebration-then I saw the Shabbas as something extremely profound and beautiful. I began to open to the use of time to go beyond time. I saw that the people who invested more were making Judaism into a living tradition they can grow from rather than simply honoring their own genetic history. Lighting the candles is a tiny taste.

”It's the same for me. I go to Burma and I spend two months in meditation. And the bhikku bhikku says to me, 'You know, don't leave, you're just beginning to get the sweetness. Spend two more years.' I say, 'I've got other business to do,' and he looks at me with pity. I understand his pity. I realize I'm a lousy Buddhist and I'm a lousy Hindu and I'm a lousy Jew and I'm a lousy Taoist and that's the way I am. That's my path. I don't distrust my own path. Yet I also understand that each one, as you go in deeper, you get more rewards from it. I don't mean to sound like this is all truth, but this is my experience. says to me, 'You know, don't leave, you're just beginning to get the sweetness. Spend two more years.' I say, 'I've got other business to do,' and he looks at me with pity. I understand his pity. I realize I'm a lousy Buddhist and I'm a lousy Hindu and I'm a lousy Jew and I'm a lousy Taoist and that's the way I am. That's my path. I don't distrust my own path. Yet I also understand that each one, as you go in deeper, you get more rewards from it. I don't mean to sound like this is all truth, but this is my experience.

”I don't think any longer that there's any one person in Judaism setting the rules. Because it's clear that you are a Jew for so many different reasons, that there are so many different ways that people can say with pride: I am a Jew. One way is to give to charity, or be a good community member, or a good member of a family. Others are deep into the study of Torah. I don't know that any of them are better Jews than anybody else-or should be arbitrating the laws of who should follow what.”

I concluded that Ram Da.s.s has gained a much clearer appreciation of Judaism as a spiritual path while basically continuing on his own merry and somewhat erratic way. But other Jews have danced all the way around the circle Zalman described to us in Dharamsala, from Judaism to Buddhism to Judaism.

Professor Nathan Katz is one. He tells how, on the lecture circuit, he frequently encounters Jewish parents concerned about their children's involvement with Buddhism and other Eastern religions. He advises them to be patient. His own life experience tells him that exploring meditation may be part of a process that brings people back to Judaism.

”I grew up in a traditional home, distanced myself in the sixties, but never severed ties. But I was not religious in any sense until my encounters with Buddhism.” In the end, as he says, he came to Judaism through Buddhism.

During the period of his most intense involvement, from 1975 to 1977, he frequently met with Chogyam Trungpa for formal interviews. He felt a special bond to Trungpa and at the same time had met Zalman Schachter, who was also counseling him spiritually. It was a ping-pong effect. ”Trungpa told me I should keep Shabbas as part of my practice. Zalman was telling me to do more meditation.”

When Nathan saw Alex Berzin during our visit, he was very impressed by his spiritual development and a little envious. ”I see meditation doing wonderful things for these people. Someone like Alex seems very close to enlightenment.” But Nathan finds his fulfillment as a Jew-a commitment intensified by time spent living among Orthodox Jews in Cochin India. ”You have to live the life to get committed to Judaism. When you go to synagogue constantly, you can really get someplace spiritually.”

Another committed Jew with meditation experience is Rabbi David Blank, whom I met at the 1991 P'nai Or Kallah. We spoke on the campus of Bryn Mawr on a late summer afternoon, with sparrows providing counterpoint to the story of his spiritual circ.u.mnavigation, from Lubavitcher Hasid to Zen monk to the Aquarian Minyan. What interested me about his story is that, unlike many other JUBUs, he had been exposed to Jewish mysticism before encountering Buddhism.

David, in his early forties, has intense eyes and a very soft-spoken manner. He spoke with directness and humor. His background is mixed, his mother very Orthodox and his father not at all. She had sent him to Israel to absorb a more Orthodox influence. He arrived not long after the Six Day War. ”People were crying, many had died and almost died. Yom Kippur was such a high there. They really lived it. Not like in Montreal where there was dry davening.”

From the start Rabbi Blank was interested in a strongly devotional religious life. He found it at first in the Lubavitcher spiritual community, six years in Israel and six more in New York. Because he'd been ”on the university track, not the yes.h.i.+va track”-he proved very useful in working with baalei teshuva baalei teshuva-Jews new, or returning, to the Orthodox fold.

”I taught in the Lubavitcher yes.h.i.+va in New York to the beginners. In the early 1970s, they were coming from all kinds of different places. Macrobiotics. TM. They saw me as helping out with all these people be cause I could speak English and knew the idiom. If there was someone around from Hare Krishna they said, 'We'll send him around to David Blank, maybe he'll be able to find a language with him and bring him in.' I was successful. But then somebody thought, Maybe we can send David out to someone who hasn't even expressed an interest. So they made the mistake of asking me to rope in a person who was very happy in his path and wasn't interested in Judaism at all.”

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