Jew in the Lotus Part 9

Nathan felt a lingering disquiet after this thorough scouring, which came out later that evening as he talked the day over with Zalman. The rabbi also had ambivalent feelings. He expressed some frustration-he called it a bellyache-born of admiration for Jewish Buddhists like Alex Berzin. "Why, if he knows where the action is, would he not come back to our vineyard?" To such Buddhists Zalman would want to say, "You're taking bodhisattva vows; who needs bodhisattvas more than Jews at this point? You guys have got something, so why the h.e.l.l don't you come in and help us? Why have you abandoned us?"

It was interesting that even Zalman felt this ache so strongly. I understood a deeper psychological reason why Jews tend to dismiss Jewish Buddhists. Because getting close to them, and seeing how fine they really are, makes their loss even more painful. This encounter between Jews and JUBUs cut to the bone, very much as Yitz Greenberg had described all dialogue in an age of pluralism. "You meet these people with tremendous force and openness and they're not preselected, they're not prefiltered, or loaded in your favor."

I decided that when I returned to the United States I would try to meet more Jewish Buddhists and find out what they were thinking. The ones I'd met had broken down my old stereotypes of brainwashed zombies-these people were as lively and with-it as I could have wished. But while I'd been impressed by Alex and Ruth, by Chodron and Pemo, there was a slight note of superiority in their discourse that was the source of my own bellyache.

I wasn't so ready to declare Buddhism the hands-down winner in the all-round spirituality contest. I'd give Buddhism an A for meditation and Judaism an A for family values. But Buddhism gets a C-for boring poetry (too much hyperbole) and Judaism gets an A+ for great standup comics. And I thought kreplach and mo-mo were a dead heat, but lox and bagels a tiebreaker in the food category.

At a more serious level, I wondered if some of the kvetches JUBUs had about Judaism were based on a false comparison. There is a danger in comparing an idealized version of a new religion to the very gritty and lived version of one's birth religion. Was it a fair comparison-or were we looking at an idealized Buddhism, a Buddhism for export as Zalman called it? Though I didn't have his erudition, I agreed with Isaac Bentwich that Judaism is an ancient tradition as worthy of respect as any other. In fact, the Dalai Lama himself had taught me that.

But then Joy Levitt's point came to me with force: so many Jews had been turned off, not only to Judaism, but to any sort of spiritual experience. I was such a Jew. My own background was very similar to Chodron's and I could understand her impatience and dissatisfaction, especially if she brought any intellectual curiosity into her religious school cla.s.s. It was clear, too, that if someone like Alex, who has mastered Tibetan and Sanskrit, pa.s.sed through a Jewish childhood without being taught Hebrew, something was terribly wrong with Jewish education.

I was confused, caught between admiring the JUBUs and resenting them, feeling a little that they were putting Judaism under an indictment, though in a very friendly way that just made the inherent critique of Judaism that their lives represented more penetrating.

So I was grateful to Zalman, after all his bellyaching, and Nathan's and mine, when he reversed field and offered us a consoling vision to settle our stomachs before we retired that Sat.u.r.day night.

"When you look at those dharma people," Zalman suggested to Nathan, "and look at the people who have made choices like you have made, they make a circle too. So there are people coming to Judaism from other, different religions, and there are those who remain with other traditions, and there are some people who started in Judaism and went to others, and then you have a line-on this side, you're Jewish, and on this side, you're not.

"Now imagine yourself drifting off in a rocket looking down at the group at the boundary you call Jewish and before long, what lights up on the map is the amount of awareness, like little pinpoints of light. You see the lights of awareness; it's night, so you can't see the boundary anymore. From that perspective all of us are in between."

All of us are in between. Given their presence that Sabbath morning, it's safe to say that applied to the JUBUs. They still feel Jewish in some way. For some the ties are bound with the hope of reconciliation with family members. Thubten Pemo, who seems to have a suffered a great deal in this regard, told me of a letter she received from an aunt. "Once, when I was in Nepal, she wrote me that she went to synagogue for Yom Kippur. She was reading the holy book and she realized that everyone just wants happiness. She wrote me, 'If you have found your way to obtain happiness, then that's all right with us.' Well, that's a high realization that His Holiness teaches wherever he goes. It's almost like she received a blessing that day in the temple."

Thubten Chodron also has hope for more reconciliation with her family. She told me, "I've been ordained thirteen years. My family sees I'm serious, stable, I'm happier, what I'm doing is useful to other people. Slowly, they are relaxing and opening up. They came to one talk I gave on Buddhism. They even brought some family friends. My real hopes and prayers are they will realize my choice was not a rejection of Judaism or them, but I was taking certain values from Judaism and expanding them in a way that made sense to me."

The Jewish value she mentioned so far was an awareness of suffering. I wondered what other Jewish values she'd been exposed to. It seemed to me that her main tie with Judaism was the old standby, family guilt.

On Sunday, just before we left Dharamsala, I tried to probe a little deeper. "Why is it," I asked her, "in spite of all you've gone through, this deep effort to free the self from attachments, why the curiosity, why still the draw, why the interest in meeting with us?"

She told me that she'd discussed this with Alex Berzin. For him, the visit of the Jews had been reaffirming: he is a Jew but he's also a Buddhist. "But for me, watching my mind and my reactions, I felt I had really come to terms with coming from a Jewish background and feeling comfortable with that, not feeling rebellious or hostile, but also knowing very clearly that I am not a Jew. I come from a Jewish background and I understand those people, I live in a Tibetan culture and I understand them, I live in a Chinese culture and I understand them, but I'm not any of them.

"I knew before I had left Judaism, I had some feelings why I left. Sometimes you're never sure if there's some hostility or resistance until you actually meet the situation. When you see you're calm in it, then there's been some progress. If you meet some hostility, if you can feel something inside of you shake, then you know there are some things to work on."

The difficulties with her family and with her Jewish background in general had themselves become objects of meditation, tests of her own spiritual development, just as she and what she represented had become a serious subject of contemplation for the Jewish visitors.

"I was excited the rabbis were coming, because I saw it as an opportunity to get in touch with things I'd lived before with other parts of myself and to check up from a different point of view, well, what is this religion? Do I still feel the same way about it? Do I still feel the same as the people? Because if you feel different, then maybe you could see that maybe you were being unnecessarily critical before. It just gives you a perspective. It's like meeting old friends from childhood. It gives you a perspective on yourself, how you've changed, how you've grown."

Before we parted, Chodron mentioned that she was making a teaching tour in the United States in the spring and I invited her to visit with me. I would get to know her better and learn more about the complexities of her spiritual life. Like Nathan Katz, or Marc Lieberman, she was not only a person, but a process, a living Jewish Buddhist dialogue all to herself.

Zalman's image of a circle came back to me, only this time with real faces: Chodron and Pemo and Alex Berzin and Ruth Sonam and Nathan Katz and Marc Lieberman all forming a circle. Where did one cross over and become a Jew, and where a Buddhist? Who had the more realistic idea of how to deal with suffering, or with anger? I loved the gentleness and equanimity of the Buddhists I'd met, their calm and their apparent freedom from anger. But I had been deeply moved, too, by the Jewish prayer, the dancing we'd done-Zalman and Yitz, our senior rabbis, leading the way arm in arm. I had seen, as Zalman had exulted on Friday night, "the sages of both traditions dancing."

I felt, though I couldn't really explain it, that there had to be a place, a very high place, where the circle of dancers was whole and the differences weren't differences anymore.

12.

JUBUs in America.

Finding that high place wouldn't be easy.

When I returned from Dharamsala, I interviewed a number of JUBUs, over the phone, through E-mail, and in person. I wanted to know what they'd found in Buddhism and why they'd left Judaism. I found myself conducting exit interviews for a generation of Jewish Buddhists.

When talking of Judaism, the JUBUs sometimes sounded illinformed and harsh. But listening past the static, I heard a valuable critique of Jewish life today. Maybe Jews should consider adopting a formal exit procedure. We might learn more from the people who are leaving than from some who stay behind through sheer inertia.

The Dharamsala JUBUs had mainly stressed similarities, not differences. Alex Berzin had mentioned shared scholarly traditions, Ruth Sonam and Thubten Chodron that their awareness of Jewish history had led them to appreciate Buddhist ideas about suffering.

That was very diplomatic, but it didn't speak to the more visceral level where my Jewishness tends to operate. I knew there had to be more anger and pain involved with their leaving than that. Chodron as much as said so when she talked about looking to see if something in her encounter with Jews still made her shake. The JUBUs made me shake too.

They made me ask a question I'd never asked myself. What was I getting out of Judaism? What was I getting out of being Jewish?

And they threw out a challenge, implicit in Chodron's probing of Nathan Katz: Is Judaism a viable spiritual path today? That was Michael Sautman's question, too, after Zalman's presentation on kabbalah. While intrigued to learn about the rich mystical literature, he rightly wanted to know whether this stuff is available today.

Every JUBU I spoke to had found Jewish mysticism inaccessible. Most were as surprised as Rabbi Levitt that such teachings even existed. They certainly didn't know of any teachers. When, in the course of our conversations in May 1992, I mentioned the kabbalistic doctrines of ain sof ain sof to Allen Ginsberg, the poet responded with very practical questions. "What specific group with a lineage teaches that and has practices that lead to the understanding of that, the absorption of that? Who would be the contemporary teacher representing that tradition? What's available for students?" They were questions I could not readily answer. to Allen Ginsberg, the poet responded with very practical questions. "What specific group with a lineage teaches that and has practices that lead to the understanding of that, the absorption of that? Who would be the contemporary teacher representing that tradition? What's available for students?" They were questions I could not readily answer.

Zalman Schachter had been born into Hasidism. And other Jews, such as Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man, have found their own ways to authentic teachers of Jewish mysticism. But, as he later explained, he had taken a very private and idiosyncratic route, one that makes credible the JUBU complaint that such teachings have not generally been of easy access-especially compared to the very public dissemination of Buddhism in the past twenty years.

This inaccessibility was important, because the JUBUs' quest in turning away from Judaism was to seek direct contact with a teacher of wisdom. To meet a holy person. I could understand that-I had the same curiosity in meeting the Dalai Lama.

That personal contact changed their lives. Alex Berzin had come to Dharamsala as a scholar-but stayed because of the living masters he met there. In Tibetan Buddhism in particular, the guru becomes an overwhelming influence. I had seen close up the very special relationship of teacher to student, between Ruth Sonam and Geshe Sonam. I had felt it in the way Thubten Pemo spoke of her teacher, Lama Yeshe. "Lama was radiating love at everybody."

But just as important is the accessibility of the teachings. The early stages of the Buddhist path are experiential. You don't have to be converted to Buddhism to meditate. You don't have to sign up to a long list of beliefs or a.s.sertions about historical events or figures. The most basic meditations are as available as your next breath. And if they prove useful to an individual, beyond them are very systematic paths of spiritual development. The Tibetan pedagogy, lam rim lam rim, is, in fact, a graded path toward enlightenment.

Direct experience of meditation was key to Joseph Goldstein, one of the four JUBU founders of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Ma.s.sachusetts. "A year or two into my practice I came back to the States and met with the rabbi who had bar mitzvahed me. He was very upset that I was leaving the Jewish fold, which is how he saw it. For me the real difference was that insofar as I understood it, the path of Judaism involved following the vision, the law, of someone else's experience. I used the Old Testament prophets as an example. I told him I was interested in having that experience. I wasn't interested in taking it on faith and trying to live up to it."

In the sixties and seventies some extremely skillful Tibetan teachers came to the West, among them Lama Thubten Yeshe, who taught Chodron and Pemo, and Kalu Rinpoche, a brilliant meditation master. But the best-known Tibetan teacher at that time was Chogyam Trungpa.

As befits a master poet, Allen Ginsberg explained Trungpa's great success with Jewish students as due to his language. "For the first time he expounded Buddhist dharma with a Yiddish accent. A lot of his students had been Jewish and he understood New Yorkese, Hymietown dialect." For instance, "the Buddhist notion of suffering-as in 'existence is suffering'-he could translate as tzuris tzuris.

"I had not until that time [1970] run across any wise men that completely penetrated my skull with their language and their insight and their humor." By contrast, Ginsberg found the Jewish esoteric to be relatively difficult to access. When I mentioned the outreach of the Lubavitcher rebbe, who lives across the river from him in Brooklyn, Ginsberg exploded, "He seems like a complete crank and a political reactionary on top of that. Who's going to go to him for wisdom?" I thought that was funny, because I could imagine a Hasid speaking just as harshly about Ginsberg's teacher for being a drunk and a s.e.x maniac.

Maybe he thought better of it himself, because he added, less irritably, "What I'm getting at-there were no teachers who were clear. Or I didn't run into a teacher who was clear. There may have been some hidden teachers but I didn't know them. It was daunting to try and do it in English anyway when it should be in Hebrew, whereas it was less daunting to do the Tibetan in English because the teacher had by then found the English equivalents and did not have to rely on the Tibetan."

I asked Zalman Schachter why he thought so many had left Judaism for other traditions. He mentioned something obvious that had not been expressed by the JUBUs themselves-the appeal of the exotic. "First-it doesn't feel real if it comes from their own thing. If you come to shul on Yom Kippur-this is the gross level, yah?-and you know you're going to be hit for the United Jewish Appeal and the building fund, you can't take your own tradition seriously."

As to accessibility, Zalman pointed out that the mystical and esoteric were suppressed by the more liberal branches of Judaism, beginning with the German reform movement of the nineteenth century. "The early translators were very strong rationalists. Anything that smacked of mysticism they put down, as Graetz puts down kabbalah. Very ashamed that we Jews have such superst.i.tion. So the hunger is very great." This was, of course, exactly the climate Gershom Scholem had encountered in Berlin when he began his study of kabbalah.

With their own esoteric teachings inaccessible, most JUBUs grew up with a Judaism heavy on ethnic pride, obsessive about preserving itself, about maintaining Jewish ident.i.ty at all costs. And Jewish pride, Jewish chauvinism, Jewish particularism-the idea that we are special, a chosen people-seems to contradict the very universalistic prophetic messages Judaism also teaches. Perhaps they wouldn't put it this way, but if examined closely, it appears that some JUBUs left Judaism because because of their Jewish ideals. of their Jewish ideals.

Joseph Goldstein told me, "One reason I don't feel so connected, and this may be a totally exoteric dimension of Judaism, but I was never comfortable with its nonuniversal aspect. It seemed separatist to me. The whole notion of the chosen people. This is true of all Western religions. They are not so much talking about the universal nature of the mind, but rather a belief system. If you believe, you are part of a certain group. If you don't, you're outside of that."

Chodron told me, "I felt a very strong Jewish ident.i.ty because I was one of four Jewish kids in the school. I was brought up, you're different. 'I'm not stupid like those people who believe in Jesus'-this kind of att.i.tude. Though my parents weren't very religious, there was this ethnic feeling. When I was ten, I had a Christian girlfriend. We used to talk about G.o.d. I said I felt closer to G.o.d because I was Jewish." She laughed at the memory. "In high school I was already moving away from Judaism." She was disappointed in the whole idea of "this happened to the Jews five thousand years ago; therefore, this is what is important to you. I thought, hold on, that happened to people from a completely different society. What do I have to do with them?"

Chodron felt Jews emphasized their own suffering too much. "I felt very uncomfortable when I got into high school with Jewish paranoia. This whole feeling of unrelatedness to the rest of humanity because you're Jewish.

"I grew up in the time of the Watts riots, with black people saying they wanted equal rights. So were women and Chicanos. That made a lot more sense to me than this Jewish protectorate. I moved into the sphere of social action, taking what I learned about suffering from my Jewish background but going well beyond the narrow Jewish limit to which it was applied."

Allen Ginsberg remains very disturbed by Jewish particularism. He told me in our 1992 interview that he agreed with the former United Nations resolution stating that Zionism is racism. "And the fact that everybody is so screamingly angry Zionism can't be called that is even worse." The Israelis and Palestinians had both missed great opportunities for peace. He was equally hard on the Tibetans. He thought "the Dalai Lama's political group is partly responsible for the conflict with China, because the rather corrupt Office of Tibet asked for such a large chunk of territory that it offended the Chinese." He found the Tibetans "making the same mistake as the territorial overextension of the Zionists." Though there were hints of anti-Zionism among some of the Jewish Buddhists I spoke to, Ginsberg's expressions were the harshest.

When I asked him to define his Jewishness, he described himself as a "delicatessen intellectual." Yet despite that purely secular self-definition, there are many references to Jewish religion in his works. His powerful poem of outrage and mourning, "Kaddish," mimics the rhythms of the ancient Aramaic prayer. But as Ginsberg explained to me, both his parents and their family were completely secularized Jews. He said, "My family had a lot of the experience of the Orthodox and disliked it a great deal. My grandfather had shaved his beard and payos payos and had a job. My great-grandfather was Orthodox and I was exposed to him, briefly." and had a job. My great-grandfather was Orthodox and I was exposed to him, briefly."

Like Allen Ginsberg, most Jewish Buddhists I spoke to came from secular backgrounds. In this they resemble the vast majority of two generations of American Jews. I'm convinced that the Judaism we were exposed to was primarily exoteric, preoccupied with social and political issues, and often embarra.s.sed by expressions of spirituality.

There are many historical reasons for this. One has to do with the type of Jews who came to America during the ma.s.sive wave of immigration at the turn of the century. Many had already dropped religion in the old country, some in favor of the Bund, Zionism, or Communism. Like Ginsberg's grandfather, most others quickly dropped the outer trappings of religious Judaism just to make it in American life. A New York rabbi once remarked that he would like to do some scuba diving around the Statue of Liberty. He was certain he would find hundreds of yarmulkes, prayer books, and tallisim tallisim that newly arrived immigrants tossed overboard. that newly arrived immigrants tossed overboard.

American Reform Judaism-the kind both Chodron and I were exposed to-continued the process by streamlining religion. Though the Reform movement was born in Germany in the 1830s as a response to the emanc.i.p.ation of Jews from the ghetto, its success in America with the children and grandchildren of immigrant Jews had a lot to do with its elimination of old world religiosity. The more Reform synagogues resembled churches, the better.

The point is, the Reform Jewish strategy pretty much succeeded in a.s.similating Jews into American life. When JUBUs spoke against Jewish particularism, one could feel that Reform Judaism had succeeded all too well. An ethical ideal of universal justice, freed from the particulars of ritual, left many Jews free to leave the fold. We could be secular, or Buddhist, and still feel connected to these universal values.

At the deepest level, though, the JUBUs could never make a connection to G.o.d. "After all," as Allen Ginsberg told me, describing the Naropa cla.s.s of 1974, which included Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and others, "most of us were nontheists, while Judaism finally does insist on a sacred personality to the universe." In that regard, Joseph Goldstein told me of "a real quest in my senior year in high school and first year in college: a pressing issue around the existence of G.o.d. I was grappling with it. It seems to me it had a lot of consequences: my life would be one way if there were and another way if there were not. I went to Columbia. For some weeks it was a very strong issue, but I don't recall what happened. I must have just gone on writing my papers. After college I went into the Peace Corps in Thailand and that's where I came into contact with Buddhism."

Many Jews, if pressed, could not say for sure that they believe in G.o.d. Although surveys show that a large majority of American Christians believe in G.o.d, a much lower percentage of Jews do. American Jews in general are more uncomfortable than their Christian neighbors with concepts of G.o.d, or heaven or h.e.l.l.

Here the JUBUs are different. Spiritual issues grabbed them-they had a lot of consequences. G.o.d became a big issue to these folks at some point in their lives, a source of concern or conflict. And many JUBUs resolved this by concluding that G.o.d was a harmful concept, with disturbing effects on the personality of the believer.

This aroused my interest because I certainly could not claim to have had any direct experience of G.o.d. In fact, belief in G.o.d had not been much stressed either in my family or in my synagogue. G.o.d was a name we mumbled in our prayers, along with a lot of other Hebrew we didn't fully understand.

My Jewish attachment so dominated my thinking, I was even proud that Jews had invented G.o.d, or at least that most people seemed to worship the Jewish G.o.d, which I took to be the same thing. It never occurred to me that I should stop being a Jew just because I didn't have an experience of G.o.d.

Thubten Chodron's questioning began earlier in her life than Goldstein's, and she did arrive at some definitive conclusions. Yet she still has unanswered questions-which may account for her intense encounter with Joy and Nathan in Dharamsala.

She opened our conversations in the United States by telling me about her various efforts in recent years to meet with rabbis so that she could ask them about G.o.d. Their response to her was rather cold. As she had indicated to Joy Levitt during their encounter in Dharamsala, these questions go back to her Sunday School days, when she used to compare notes on the way home with a friend.

About "the Old Testament G.o.d," she said, "I didn't like his personality. He was vengeful, he had qualities I wouldn't want to develop, that my parents taught me were wrong. Harming others because they harm the people that you like. Smiting others because they criticize you or worship somebody else. When you're a kid on the playground, because somebody plays with somebody else, that doesn't give you the reason to jump in and a.s.sault. This kind of jealous, vengeful G.o.d-I can't worship that. I can't see that as holy, I don't want to become like that."

I tried to suggest that "people evolve different conceptions of G.o.d" and wondered if "the G.o.d and Judaism you rejected is one most Jews would reject also, if it isn't a very unsophisticated child's view of Judaism. As we mature, we realize that concepts of G.o.d as father, king, or ruler are baby steps toward some greater understanding."

Chodron answered, "Then they should teach that to people. If there are wider notions of G.o.d, that's what they should teach to the children-not that G.o.d is up there watching you and you be good or you'll get punished."

Likewise, Allen Ginsberg felt that "there doesn't seem to be a builtin security system against sneaking in an external deity" in the Jewish tradition.

The phrase "external deity" struck a chord with something Zalman had said to the Dalai Lama, about the kabbalistic notion of G.o.d. He had suggested "that the notion of creator who comes from outside who makes something happen is not the way kabbalah spoke about it. Kabbalah speaks about emanation. It comes out of G.o.d. There is nothing but G.o.d, so it all flows from G.o.d."

So I asked Allen Ginsberg if he was familiar with the mystical notions of G.o.d in the Jewish tradition, those that permitted the Dalai Lama to tell Zalman that he saw a point of similarity with the Buddhist concept of shunyata shunyata, or emptiness.

Then I quoted to him from the thirteenth-century Spanish kabbalist, Joseph Gikatilla, that ain sof ain sof is "called Ayin [Nothing] because of its concealment from all creatures." I quoted other Jewish mystical concepts of Nothingness from the Hasidic master, Dov Baer, and from the contemporary mystic, the late Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan. But though impressed by these quotations, Ginsberg became irritated with the suggestion that such ideas represent real Judaism. Ironically, he shared Yitz Greenberg's view that kabbalah is no more than a minority report. is "called Ayin [Nothing] because of its concealment from all creatures." I quoted other Jewish mystical concepts of Nothingness from the Hasidic master, Dov Baer, and from the contemporary mystic, the late Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan. But though impressed by these quotations, Ginsberg became irritated with the suggestion that such ideas represent real Judaism. Ironically, he shared Yitz Greenberg's view that kabbalah is no more than a minority report.

"After all," he said, "what is the promised land, the special race, without a Bible that is the word of G.o.d of some sort, without all the literalism of the Old Testament?" He felt that there may be some eccentric kabbalistic definitions saying it's really nothing, but the mainstream seemed to be saying it is something, isn't it? By contrast, in Asian societies, he added, "they have the intelligence to realize there's no G.o.d."

This last remark seemed insulting, and I wondered at the wrath with which he denounced Judaism, G.o.d, the Lubavitcher rebbe, Zionism, and even the Office of Tibet. Why the vehemence, still? I was amused when he went on to explain to me in great detail the Buddhist methods of controlling anger.

He himself insisted, "I haven't left being a Jew. I'm there. But I don't feel I left anything because I didn't have anything to begin with, religiously."

I decided that in an important way he was correct. He hadn't left at all. Maybe I caught him at a bad time, but in our conversations, he sounded very much to me like what he condemned-a reactive, cranky, and very Jewish, prophet of Buddhism.

I don't mean to pose Allen Gisnberg as a model of all JUBUs or as a representative Buddhist. I tend to believe that at root, his real religion is poetry. I suspect that the rigors of the Tibetan Buddhist discipline-the prostrations and the advanced meditations-are not as interesting to him as the theory-and the language it engenders. (I happened to pa.s.s by him in the audience during a teaching by the Dalai Lama in New York. While others were dutifully chanting Tibetan syllables, Ginsberg was intoning "eenie meenie miney mo.") Thubten Chodron represents almost the opposite pole in terms of commitment. From my own observation, she does spend hours a day on prostrations and prayers and, of course, she has gone all the way-shaving her head and putting on monastic robes.

But in our conversation, Chodron inadvertently threw a light on this persistence of the Jewish personality even after a Buddhist makeover when she mentioned how "G.o.d's preprogramming, intervening in the world," leads to a context of blame and punishment in our understanding of events. When she said that, I knew she had put her finger on an important aspect of Jewish, and Western, culture. The self-righteousness virus is a dangerous infection that easily follows from a belief in divine inspiration-or any transcendent spiritual experience.

Perhaps we are also close here to an answer to the question of Jewish particle physics-the gluons of Jewish ident.i.ty that keep not only secular Jews such as me, but even JUBUs, still attached to their Jewishness.

I began to suspect that Jewish ident.i.ty, as it has evolved in the West today, could be a real barrier to encountering the depths of Judaism. In other words, being Jewish could keep you from being a Jew.

In our secular times, the sense of chosenness has degenerated from theology to psychology to reflex-like the paranoia I felt in the Frankfurt airport. Just as some delis now serve kosher-style sandwiches that are no longer kosher, so one might have a prophetic-style ego-without the prophecy.

I see myself carrying around a sense of being special that has no content. I can also see it in some of the JUBUs-they have become Buddhists in part to get free of it. And as long as Jews make them shake, they haven't quite succeeded. Judaism is the wrathful divinity they must meditate upon until they are utterly calm.

In short, Chodron's disappointment with G.o.d and the rabbis is a very Jewish disappointment. And Allen Ginsberg's anger at G.o.d and Judaism is a very Jewish-style anger.

Zalman Schachter gave me a beautiful midrash on this subject. He told me, "Shlomo Carlebach said something that deserves attention. He quotes a Hasidic master, Rabbi Mordecai Joseph, the Izhbitzer Rebbe, who asks: 'Why is it that a kohen kohen isn't supposed to go near a dead body?'" According to the law enunciated in Leviticus 21:1-3, 10-12, the isn't supposed to go near a dead body?'" According to the law enunciated in Leviticus 21:1-3, 10-12, the kohen kohen or Jewish priest, is forbidden to make contact with a corpse. Thus, a Jew today who knows he is a or Jewish priest, is forbidden to make contact with a corpse. Thus, a Jew today who knows he is a kohen kohen cannot go to the cemetery except for the funeral of a close family member. cannot go to the cemetery except for the funeral of a close family member.

The Izhbitzer Rebbe, in his midrash, takes off from the text in Leviticus and uses it to find a spiritual message.

"So the short of it is," Zalman explained, "when you see a corpse, you can't help but be angry with G.o.d. 'Why did He have to make it that way? That that's the door you have to go through? It's terrible.' Now the kohen kohen is supposed to be the gentle teacher of people, so if he is angry with G.o.d, he'll have a real bad time talking about G.o.d because what will show will be the anger. is supposed to be the gentle teacher of people, so if he is angry with G.o.d, he'll have a real bad time talking about G.o.d because what will show will be the anger.

"End of the Hasidic master, okay? Now Shlomo: Ever since the Holocaust we are all like priests who have become contaminated by death. It's hard for people who are looking for a loving, living G.o.d to find him among the angry voices. They go to people who at this point don't have any anger about G.o.d."

Yes, I thought, they didn't go to hear about G.o.d. And some of them, like Allen Ginsberg, are still angry and others, like Chodron, are seriously disappointed. It was clear that all the JUBUs dismissed out of hand the idea that G.o.d could be compelling or real. And I certainly couldn't condemn them-because there were only a few occasions in my own life where I had any intimation that G.o.d might be real.

That was the challenge Zalman had given me the morning he led davening in Dharamsala, when he touched me on the shoulder: Your G.o.d is a true G.o.d. That is, your G.o.d is real.

Long ago, Moses Maimonides commented on this verse from Jeremiah. To the great medieval Jewish philosopher it meant, "He alone is real, and nothing else has reality like His reality."

Between the faith of my ancestors and the challenge of the JUBUs I am caught in this dilemma: G.o.d is reality-or nothing.

Or are reality and nothing somehow the same?

Maybe where shunyata shunyata meets meets ain sof ain sof, I would find the high place where Jews and JUBUs and Buddhists could dance together again.

13.

Tibetan Intellectuals, Tibetan Orphans.

SAt.u.r.dAY, OCTOBER 27, KASHMIR COTTAGE.

Sat.u.r.day afternoon the Jewish delegation glimpsed the political tensions in the exile community. In the garden of Kashmir Cottage, we met with Lhasang Tsering, at that time president of the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC), an organization that has played an opposition role in exile politics. In 1977 the group staged militant demonstrations at the Chinese emba.s.sy in New Delhi and made direct contacts with Indian political parties, which embarra.s.sed the Kas.h.a.g Kas.h.a.g, or cabinet of the Dalai Lama. Since then, many TYC leaders have ended up working in the exile government's bureaucracy, including Tsering. At times, then, the Dalai Lama has managed to coopt the potential rebellion, believing "that a militant att.i.tude is helpful for maintaining morale among our youth, but a military movement itself is not feasible. It would be suicidal."

When I met him, Lhasang Tsering appeared suave, sophisticated, very sharp in his sports jacket. A man in his mid-forties, he voiced his criticism of the government in mild terms. However, I could infer that greater political pa.s.sion burned underneath. Later in 1990, after our meeting, he resigned from the TYC to pursue a more militant path of opposition. As an advocate of Tibetan independence, he has strongly criticized the Dalai Lama's peaceful approach to negotiation. That afternoon he told us, "When people are restless and unhappy in this land-as they should be-the challenge to our leadership is how to lead them into something constructive." Our friend, the monk and translator Laktor, replied that religious leaders faced a similar challenge. He admitted that westernized Tibetans in exile might get a feeling that "all this Buddhism is impractical" and added that "Buddhist education is confined to the monasteries, and we need to make it available to the people and let them judge if it is worthwhile or not. There is no need to change the truth but how to communicate it, so that other people can appreciate it." I wondered whether the problem didn't run deeper than packaging.

We did not discuss the situation in Tibet, but the problem of secularization is not confined to the exile. The Dalai Lama left Tibet in 1959, and an entire generation has grown up for whom he is a remote figure. And young Tibetans are not wholly isolated from popular culture, which has entered China through Taiwan and Hong Kong.