Jew in the Lotus Part 15

When our discussion ended, the London chavurah chavurah formed a circle. As I prayed arm in arm with these strangers who had received me so warmly, I was embarra.s.sed to find big tears rolling down my cheeks. I had no such group myself to return to. I was feeling sorry for myself, and in a funny way, feeling sorry for G.o.d. formed a circle. As I prayed arm in arm with these strangers who had received me so warmly, I was embarra.s.sed to find big tears rolling down my cheeks. I had no such group myself to return to. I was feeling sorry for myself, and in a funny way, feeling sorry for G.o.d.

I knew that the feeling of emptiness, of lack of meaning, of absence, which I'd often encountered in my life, was connected to this lonely G.o.d Zalman had conjured up. And I realized that at some very deep level, which I had never even allowed myself to express, I had felt lonely for G.o.d myself for many years.

Perhaps at some essential level this is a difference between Jews and Buddhists. Both may experience a profound sense of emptiness in the universe: the meaningless swirl of samsara, the spilled and scattered light of our fragmented lives. For the Buddhist this emptiness is open s.p.a.ce. For the Jew it is an absence. And from there the paths diverge.

Quite appropriately, the last temple we visited that day was a synagogue. The architecture looked very familiar, too, like my old temple in Baltimore built in the fifties. There was a nice courtyard garden and the obligatory plaque with its list of donors on the outer wall. As we pa.s.sed into the prayer hall, six Jewish stars were framed overhead in the gla.s.s transom.

We were met by a short, energetic man. Ezekiel Isaac Malecar is extraordinarily proud of his temple and keeps it going as shammas shammas and and chazzan chazzan. Nathan Katz, who had arranged our visit, called him "Judaism's flickering candle in India's capital."

I was impressed by the variety of our hats. Tsangpo, our Tibetan travel guide, joined us, smiling broadly, glad our trip was nearly over. He wore a yellow sateen yarmulke. I wore my Indiana Jones. Marc Lieberman, sporting an orange Hindu cap from the Tibetan market, sat next to his wife, Nancy Garfield, who'd spent most of the time we were in Dharamsala in England recuperating from an asthma attack. Zalman, learning we were going to do a kiddush, ran out to get the drivers, a very sweet gesture. The handy Mr. Singh joined us and so did Ran, in a powder-blue turban.

Meanwhile, Isaac's seven-year-old daughter was being grilled by two experienced Jewish mothers.

"Do you know what shalom shalom means?" Joy asked her. The little girl with dark brown eyes smiled shyly. Then Blu, "Do you know what means?" Joy asked her. The little girl with dark brown eyes smiled shyly. Then Blu, "Do you know what Shabbat Shalom Shabbat Shalom means?" She nodded vigorously. means?" She nodded vigorously.

Yitz, adjusting his gla.s.ses, stood beside Isaac at the prayer stand and led a brief service. We sat on metal folding chairs. I saw Moshe Waldoks, and next to him, Ram Da.s.s, the yellow yarmulke looking pretty natural on his head. He was very carefully studying the prayer book, his finger creasing his temple.

21.

Buddha's Jews.

Ram Da.s.s remembers that moment in Delhi as a kind of epiphany. As he leafed through the Jewish prayer book in the Judah Hyam synagogue, he felt himself to be "in a very tender state."

He told me later, "I was reading the prayers and feeling that they were coming out of a time and place and wording that made it very difficult to connect to the essence of Judaism.

"But I was also remembering sentimental feelings of my bar mitzvah and high holidays. I was feeling a distance from the whole process and at the same time somewhere touched very deeply in my being. That was an interesting moment in time-part of a sequence that's been going on for many years. I mean, to be a Jew and then feel alien in your own religious situation is a strange feeling. Because of the nature of Hebrew and of Judaism, the closed circle quality-you're either in or out in a certain way-the feeling I had at that moment, I was outside of it. And yet I was there, and there as a Jew. So I had that interesting feeling I've had before: I don't belong and yet I'm there-what many Jews feel who have gone into Eastern religions."

Ram Da.s.s's mixed feelings testify to the strength of Jewish roots, no matter how attenuated. Allen Ginsberg, who defines himself strictly as a cultural Jew, can reel off the blessing over bread at the drop of a hat. Thubten Chodron and Alex Berzin maintain an ongoing correspondence-Dear Sadie, Dear Melvin-full of Jewish jokes and Yiddish words. These sc.r.a.ps and remnants of Jewishness made me wonder if JUBUs from strong Jewish backgrounds might be evolving a blend of Judaism and Buddhism.

Clearly, the whole venture to Dharamsala expressed Dr. Marc Lieberman's personal struggle to have the two traditions meet with love and respect. He had spent at least ten years as an observant Jew, in Israel and the United States, was fluent in Hebrew, and is knowledgeable about Jewish texts. When he came to Buddhism, he made an audacious decision.

"I'd shed ident.i.ties before, and there was a real superficiality to that. If anything I was learning in meditation was true, it was true at the level of integration, not disintegration." He felt no compulsion to fragment into another ident.i.ty, or to be angry at Judaism. "I asked myself, are you running away from being Jewish? Though there was no role model to integrate the two, I decided, it won't make sense, but I'll be Jewish and Buddhist.

"After all, when you're on your zafu zafu [meditation cushion], you're just meditating. So if lighting candles feels right, honor that too. Even if intellectually it's in conflict. It still feels awkward. My son asks me, 'Dad, are you Jewish or are you Buddhist?' And I answer, 'I've got Jewish roots and Buddhist wings.' I'm honoring my tribe. Jews in general have tremendous resonance with other tribes, with Indians, and blacks. So why not with our own? I'm from the Jewish tribe, but Buddhism speaks to my heart." [meditation cushion], you're just meditating. So if lighting candles feels right, honor that too. Even if intellectually it's in conflict. It still feels awkward. My son asks me, 'Dad, are you Jewish or are you Buddhist?' And I answer, 'I've got Jewish roots and Buddhist wings.' I'm honoring my tribe. Jews in general have tremendous resonance with other tribes, with Indians, and blacks. So why not with our own? I'm from the Jewish tribe, but Buddhism speaks to my heart."

On Friday evenings, Lieberman observes Shabbat; his wife, Nancy, lights candles, he says kiddush. He makes the traditional blessing of his son, and then with Mahayana expansiveness, she extends the blessing to all children everywhere. That same evening may also be spent in Buddhist meditation, or studying abidhamma, Buddhist philosophical texts. Through a private foundation, Nama Rupa, the Liebermans raise money for Tibetan monasteries in India and help Tibetan orphans. They also promote Jewish-Buddhist dialogue.

I asked Marc how he combines elements of a monastic tradition with the Jewish emphasis on family life. Lieberman sighed. "I went to an interesting meeting three or four years ago at the Zen Center with Jews and Buddhists. A strongly identified Jew familiar with Buddhism said, 'Look, Buddhism is a universalist religion. Its central metaphor is choosing a path that is homeless and walking out in thin air. Judaism is the exact opposite. The home is the central shrine and the heart of all being. When those of us are attracted, is it to Buddhism or do we simply want to leave home?'

"In my experience, as one profoundly realizes the nature of the way things are, Buddha is someone who is awake, the rest of us are dulled by sleep. If someone is awake and sees the way things are, it's like a lining you can put into various gloves. I have a friend who lost a lover to AIDS. Nancy taught him to meditate. He finds as he goes back to the Catholic church, he can now interpret the ancient tradition-and see things as they are. Similarly, when I look at Yitz Greenberg's profound sense of Jewish integrity and social justice-so it's not just talking, but asking how can we manifest in the world what we believe in, I'm profoundly moved. I see why and how the Jewish tradition has preserved so much wisdom, because it has so much good stuff in it."

Many would find it confusing to combine practices of two religions, but for Lieberman, this has been mostly clarifying. He finds Judaism a complicated heritage to sort out. "I couldn't know which were the reliable voices to listen to. The glory of Judaism is that there is no single voice. There's no pope setting the key. So it's a vast musical library. People gravitate in Judaism to that which mirrors and reflects their own understanding of the world. Meir Kahane was just as Jewish as Yitz Greenberg, though Kahane was much more dominated by the demons of aggression and violence than Yitz. But they're both Jewish.

"The voice of clarity and wisdom, the voice that speaks to my heart, I'm only rediscovering now in Judaism because I have a much clearer experience of listening to my heart through meditation.

"At one point I realized Judaism was the most profound spiritual religion, because it said the stuff of spiritual life is getting a job, feeding kids, and going to sleep with bad breath: that the world is the stage of spirituality. I found it appealing that the Talmud is deeply fixated on the world as it is. At one level that's very Zen, very profound and true. At another level, Judaism seems among the most denying of all religions, because it doesn't equip people for stepping out into the ether. Judaism was never giving a path out of the world to see the world as it is."

I have observed Lieberman moving in both worlds, Buddhist and Jewish-planning a bar mitzvah for his son and for a Buddhist monastery in San Francisco-discomfiting himself and others, especially his Jewish friends and family, who need to know the name on his label.

Joseph Goldstein offered a good perspective. "The Buddha didn't teach Buddhism. He just taught dharma, how he understood the truth. Really, that's about love and compa.s.sion and wisdom. So as a way of relating to family-it's not necessary to take a stand on being a Buddhist. A woman came from a fundamentalist Christian family who hated that she was doing Buddhist practice. She wrote a letter to Ram Da.s.s outlining the difficulties. She ended it by saying, 'My parents hate me when I'm a Buddhist and love me when I'm a Buddha.' We don't have to become anything. If we're more accepting and loving, less judgmental-that's the way to open contacts and connections."

Despite the difficulties and ambiguities, Marc Lieberman and some other JUBUs remain connected to their Jewishness. I found this as well in talking to David Rome, formerly the personal secretary of Chogyam Trungpa. At the time I interviewed him, in May 1992, he was living in Vajradhatu, a Tibetan Buddhist community in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Rome graduated Harvard with a Boylston Prize in cla.s.sics and served in the Peace Corps in Africa. As the heir to Schocken Books-the publishers of Kafka, Buber, and Scholem and at one time probably the world's most influential Jewish publishing house-he grew up in an intellectual household. "We were always surrounded by books, there was always a high caliber of discussion at the dinner table." He said his father, a Lithuanian Jew who was first in his cla.s.s at Harvard, approached things "with great intellect and great curiosity."

Rome's family name is notarikon notarikon, or Hebrew acrostic, for Rosh Matifta, or "Head of the Yeshiva." "Supposedly we're descended from the Gaon of Vilna on my father's side." Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the Gaon-or "eminence"-of Vilna was an oustanding eighteenth-century Lithuanian rabbi and one of the staunchest Orthodox opponents of the Hasidic movement. So David Rome could claim very serious yichus yichus-Jewish lineage.

He was bar mitzvahed in White Plains, New York, and attended a Hebrew high school run by the Jewish Theological Seminary. But despite this rich Jewish background, he turned to Buddhism after college.

"I wasn't really looking. It just happened. Hitchhiking in Europe with an old friend from high school who had an interest in Eastern religions. He dragged me along to Samye-ling, the meditation center in Scotland that Trungpa Rinpoche had started. That was in 1971. There I experienced meditation for the first time."

Rome found in meditation "a sense that something was right-just very much intuition." Powerful too was "the quality of discipline in Buddhism," which gave "a way of working with yourself, a way of what Rinpoche called making friends with yourself. There was a path, which Buddhism talks about a great deal. You could actually have this commitment and work with it, work on it and progress, explore, go deeper, clarify.

"Though meditative practice survives in the Jewish tradition, the Buddhists are the world experts. Beyond that, Buddhism, being nontheistic and nondogmatic, manages to avoid a whole huge realm of problems of who's better than who, and who's got the truth and who doesn't have the truth, and all of those kind of issues. Jews on the whole do better than Christians in that regard, but there's still a fair amount of that in Judaism. And so in that sense the Buddhist sensibility is more ec.u.menical, more universal. That's precisely the appeal to Westerners. They're just not willing to go along any more with anybody who says, I am the best, I've got the answers."

Is he still a Jew? "I feel less and less the need or the accuracy of defining myself in any which way. I suppose I'm a Jewish Buddhist American Canadian at this point. Judaism is certainly a strong part of my ident.i.ty, as is Buddhism. My practice is as a Buddhist, not as a Jew. But it's almost as if they represent different aspects of oneself. Judaism is my family, my background, and I feel very strongly for Jewish history," especially the Holocaust. "Buddhism is more of the spiritual side, the practice, of how do you experience life from moment to moment, how do you work with your mind and with other people."

David Rome felt Trungpa encouraged him to look at Judaism with respect. "Rinpoche said to me very early on that one of his hopes was that his own students would return to their traditions. At that time-it changed later on-he saw his work very much as dealing with a basic human wisdom from the East that was not very accessible in the West. He did see bringing Westerners back to their own wisdom as part of his mission."

Rome began working as Trungpa's personal secretary in 1974. In 1983 his mother died and he returned to New York to take over the reins at Schocken Books. So it happened that an experienced Jewish Buddhist meditator headed the most influential Jewish publishing house when the late Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan's ma.n.u.script, Jewish Meditation Jewish Meditation, came across his desk.

"Bonnie Fetterman, the Judaica editor there, had the ma.n.u.script. She was a little befuddled by it. She knew Kaplan and respected him. He was a rabbi in a very Orthodox community. In fact, the series of talks that became the book were done somewhat on the sly. He met with a small group of students who were not part of his congregation.

"So she knew he was a good person and yet didn't know quite what to make of all this mystical stuff. She asked me to read it. Without necessarily presuming to completely understand it, I found that it all sounded familiar. He had obviously done some study of Eastern meditation. A lot of what he was describing had the quality of meditation, concentration, absorption practice, insight practice, and visualization. He also talked about the feminine principle, which is one of the things Bonnie didn't get and wanted to edit out. I said, 'No, you can't. That's really important.' I encouraged the publication strongly and helped with the editing. He had died, of course, abruptly and quite young, which is too bad." It proved to be one of the most successful books Schocken published in 1984.

Schocken is known for books about Jewish mysticism, most notably Buber's Tales of the Hasidim Tales of the Hasidim and Scholem's monumental and Scholem's monumental Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. But to Rome, Kaplan's book "was very different because an Orthodox rabbi and pract.i.tioner was saying, 'You can do this.' And that's certainly not what you get in Scholem. And in Buber you will only get a sense of inspiration and of a philosophical view or an ethical view, but not specific meditative exercises."

Rome found this interesting and exciting. He didn't try the meditations but "felt they corresponded with practices I had experienced in Buddhism." He was concerned, "especially since Rabbi Kaplan wasn't alive, what context this was happening in, what teacher principle or protection principle, what sangha sangha or community is there." or community is there."

By contrast, he felt that Buddhism's strong appeal to Westerners was having "teachers who are part of a continuous lineage, genuine masters who really understand how to be a spiritual guide for somebody pursuing a contemplative path." Also important was the sense of a "contemplative community," which is what he personally sought when he sold Schocken in 1987 and joined Vajradhatu in Halifax, though in the meantime, Trungpa had died. For several years Rome has served on the community's board of directors.

Yet these days David Rome finds himself with a de facto Jewish family-his wife, also a member of the sangha sangha, is Jewish by birth, and he has a daughter of thirteen. Along with other Jewish Buddhists, they get together for Pa.s.sover seders. Rome also celebrates Chanukah and other holidays. "I have wanted to give my daughter some access to the Jewish tradition so that if she feels inspired at some point to get into that more, at least she feels there's a doorway open for her. Other than that, I don't practice, I don't observe."

Yet he finds in Buddhism a continuity with his experience of growing up Jewish. Like Alex Berzin, he finds "a lot of respect for intellect" and scholarship in both traditions. "They've got just as much commentary and commentaries on commentaries going as the Jews do, maybe more." But the key attraction to Buddhism was that it provides a way of putting the intellect itself into perspective.

"At the heart, there's this notion of not becoming fixated in the conceptual realm." Buddhism teaches "how to be in touch with the ground before thought-or nonthought. Perhaps especially as a Jew, as somebody who grew up in a strong intellectual environment, I used my intellect a lot." In Buddhism he found something "true and profound and necessary in terms of how to balance the intellect for it not to become distorting."

Jews, by culture, training, and perhaps by genealogy, are highly oriented toward logic, intellect, reason. The delight in lively debate and argument, whether between two study partners in a yeshiva, or in a family argument over the kitchen table, is a marked feature of Jewish life. (I have noticed this more since living in the South where debate and vociferous public argument are viewed with fear and suspicion.) The point is that, like David Rome, I have also sometimes felt a weariness with argument. Reading the Talmud one can marvel at the brilliance of intellect, but sometimes, at a certain point, one can also feel that all of this impa.s.sioned reasoning is too much of a good thing. I had those moments in Dharamsala during the debate over the prayer for the Dalai Lama.

If it is true, as the poet Eliot remarked, that only those who had personality could understand the desire to escape from it, likewise only those who've lived in intellect can know what it means to desire to escape from it. But escape where? Shunyata Shunyata, as Trungpa taught, is not simply empty s.p.a.ce, but open s.p.a.ce. Another definition of shunyata shunyata that the Tibetans use is "dependent arising." Nothing arises of itself, all things are dependent one upon the other. The emphasis is not on absence or loss, but on the interrelatedness of all things. Through meditation practice, one not only comes to understand dependent arising as an idea or concept, but one experiences it. According to Buddhist pract.i.tioners, such meditation produces true wisdom. that the Tibetans use is "dependent arising." Nothing arises of itself, all things are dependent one upon the other. The emphasis is not on absence or loss, but on the interrelatedness of all things. Through meditation practice, one not only comes to understand dependent arising as an idea or concept, but one experiences it. According to Buddhist pract.i.tioners, such meditation produces true wisdom.

Judaism, too, has its practices for balancing the intellect, as Zalman Schachter and Jonathan Omer-Man had made clear-namely, prayer and meditation. But I could understand why even a well-educated Jew like David Rome might have found the meditation techniques of Tibetan Buddhism more immediately accessible.

I thought it was a good sign of his own sense of balance that like Marc Lieberman, David Rome is more at ease than most JUBUs about belonging to the Jewish tribe. "I do feel special as a Jew," he told me, though he was quick to add, "At the same time I don't think any people are really more special than any other people." He added, "One of the really big challenges about what's going on in Israel, in becoming a nation among nations rather than G.o.d's people, is a danger of arrogance. It is not too much of a problem as long as you're being persecuted, but when you're not, then it's something you have to be very mindful about."

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 yeshivas, no spiritual leadership, 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 publishing 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 worship, 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 relationship 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 Hampshire. 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 yeshiva 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 yeshiva 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."