Jew in the Lotus Part 1
The Jew in the Lotus.
Rodger Kamenetz.
Acknowledgments.
My deep thanks to Dr. Marc Lieberman, for bringing the dialogue together, and for asking me along. His intelligence, energy, innate kindness, and deep fund of knowledge are valuable in themselves, but I especially treasure them in my longtime friend.
Thanks too to all the partic.i.p.ants who were generous with their time and themselves, both in Dharamsala and since. Dr. Nathan Katz, Rabbi Joy Levitt, Dr. Marc Lieberman, Dr. Blu Greenberg, Dr. Moshe Waldoks, Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man, and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi gave generous postdialogue interviews and shared with me photographs, doc.u.ments, tape recordings, and videotapes. Special thanks to my fellow reporter, Shoshana Edelberg. I am also grateful for interviews and conversations with Rabbi Irving Greenberg, Michael Sautman, Marc Lieberman, Joseph Goldstein, Rabbi David Wolfe-Blank, Rabbi Leah Novick, Joseph Mark Cohen, Greg Burton, Robert Esformes, Andy Gold, Nancy Garfield, Rabbi Paul Caplan, and Dr. Arthur Waskow. Elie Wiesel was kind enough to share a few anecdotes with me that were of great help.
Several Western Buddhists were very generous with their time, Ven. Thubten Pemo, Dr. Alex Birzen, Ruth Sonam. I want to particularly thank Ven. Thubten Chodron for a lengthy interview at my home.
Also gracious in providing time for an interview was David Rome. I want to thank Allen Ginsberg for taking time from his busy schedule for our interview sessions. I also want to thank Ram Da.s.s for a very generous and stimulating interview.
While working on this book I've had the opportunity to consult informally with a number of Buddhist scholars and pract.i.tioners on the computer net-thank you denizens of Buddha-L and BUDDHIST for your generosity, especially Dr. Richard Hayes and Dr. Robin Kornman, for your clarifications. Any errors in either Jewish or Buddhist doctrines are all my responsibility.
Of my Tibetan friends, I want to thank Laktor, our able translator; Karma Gelek, our official host in Dharamsala; and Rinchen Choegyal and Tenzin Choegyal, our hosts at Kashmir Cottage for their many kindnesses. Getting to know Tibetan people has been a wonderful bonus of this work. I want to remember as well the late Geshe Khenrab of Montreal for his insights and generosity. I am immensely grateful for the opportunity and privilege of having met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Most of all I owe a debt of grat.i.tude to Mr. Charles Halpern, who urged this project upon me with gentle persistence.
During the time I worked on this book, I received generous financial a.s.sistance from the Nathan c.u.mmings Foundation, from the National Endowment for the Arts, from the Louisiana State Arts Council, and from the College of Arts and Sciences of Louisiana State University. I thank all of these inst.i.tutions. I especially acknowledge the a.s.sistance of Patricia c.u.mmings and the Nama Rupa Foundation for the use of a transcript of all the Jewish dialogues with the Dalai Lama.
My warm thanks to Luann Rouff, who shepherded me through the transformation of ma.n.u.script to book and answered my many questions, and to Laurie McGee and Dahlia Armon, whose copyediting and proofreading were extremely helpful. Thanks too to Rachel LehmannHaupt for her time and energy. And to my agent, Katinka Matson; my editor, Amy Hertz; and all the professional staff at Harper San Francisco who have helped in so many ways-thank-you so much.
Introduction.
In late October 1990, I traveled to Dharamsala, a remote hill town in northern India. I came to write about a religious dialogue between a group of Jewish delegates and the XIV Dalai Lama of Tibet.
I was looking forward to this trip. I'd never been to India and the idea of shlepping mezuzahs and matzahs through remote corners of the Punjab appealed to me. I also thought I would learn a lot. I'd written about Jewish life before, but I had little knowledge of Buddhism. And though in recent years I'd become increasingly aware of the Dalai Lama's activities, as a personage in my consciousness, he seemed as fabulous as the Unicorn.
Before I left the United States, I studied the modern history of Tibet. Her great national tragedy began with the Chinese Army occupation in 1950, which overturned centuries of mutual nonbelligerence. Years of empty negotiations followed between Tibetan and Chinese officials. Finally in March 1959 a dramatic uprising against Chinese rule broke out in Lhasa, the capital. Feeling the Dalai Lama's life was in danger, ordinary Tibetans surrounded his palace. Hoping to avert bloodshed, he fled to India. He has been joined in exile by more than 115,000 refugees. In that terrible month alone, Chinese soldiers killed 87,000 Tibetans in Lhasa. Since then the Chinese have continued a systematic effort to destroy Tibetan resistance. One out of ten Tibetans has been held in prisons or forced labor camps for ten years or more. The Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) has repeatedly fired on unarmed Tibetan demonstrators. All told, an estimated 1.2 million Tibetans have died as a result of the occupation.
Destroying Tibet's religion has been a key Chinese policy. Public teaching of Buddhism is forbidden. Monks and nuns have been singled out for public humiliation and torture. Temples have been used for granaries and monasteries for machine shops. The huge Ganden monastery in Lhasa, once the world's third largest, has been reduced to a heap of rubble. The Chinese forces have systematically pillaged and then razed more than 6,000 Buddhist monasteries.
The Tibetans have lost their land, their temples, their leading religious teachers. And now they risk losing their ident.i.ty as a people altogether. The Beijing government, by encouraging a ma.s.sive influx into Tibet of Han Chinese settlers, is perpetrating a slow-motion genocide that escapes the notice of most of the planet. Today, in Lhasa, the ethnic Chinese outnumber the native Tibetans.
To anyone conscious of Jewish history, parallels to the Tibetan situation leap to mind. As Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg, a member of our delegation to Dharamsala, wrote, "This is what the destruction of the Temple must have been like in Jewish history." He referred to events two thousand years ago, when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and expelled the Jewish people from their spiritual homeland, beginning nineteen centuries of exile and dispersion. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner made a different parallel when he told the Dalai Lama in 1989, "The Chinese came to your people as the Germans came to ours."
Faced with the destruction of his people and their tradition of Buddhism, the Dalai Lama has been tireless in his efforts to bring freedom to Tibet. Restricted in travel by his Indian hosts and by difficulties obtaining a visa, he was not able to come to the United States until 1979. But since then, through personal appearances, and dialogue with religious and political leaders, he has gained increasing respect and notice for the Tibetan cause. In 1989, the same year he was awarded the n.o.bel Peace Prize for his nonviolent efforts, the Dalai Lama turned for the first time to the Jewish people for help. "Tell me your secret," he said, "the secret of Jewish spiritual survival in exile."
3 As my grandfather might have said, Who would have thought to ask?
Jews have survived twenty centuries of exile and dispersion, persecution and vilification, economic hardship, expulsion, forced conversion, Crusades, Inquisition, blood libel, pogrom-you name it, Jews survived it. But up until now few outsiders have ever looked upon this as much of an accomplishment.
In the Dalai Lama's eyes, and to many of the Tibetans, Jews are survival experts. The idea that Jewish history, with all its traumas, is relevant to another exiled people was inspiring.
But another attraction to Dharamsala was equally important. This dialogue would be an unprecedented meeting of two ancient religious traditions, an opportunity for leading religious Jews to immerse themselves in a living Buddhist community-that had never happened, as far as we knew, in thousands of years of Jewish and Buddhist history.
The Dalai Lama is not only the head of the leading sect of Tibetan Buddhism, but its most innovative thinker. In exile, he has carefully directed the preservation of the spiritual treasures of the Tibetan people. Dharamsala itself, though a small town, has an extraordinary number of learned monks, abbots, and Buddhist sages and is a worldwide center for Buddhist study. The Dalai Lama is considered a spiritual master by most of the world's Buddhists.
Another important feature of the dialogue was the Dalai Lama's request for teaching about kabbalah and Jewish meditation. And he in turn would respond to questions about Buddhist esoteric teachings and practices. This exchange of secrets proved to be even more powerful and fascinating than I could have imagined when I set out. The exploration of Buddhist tantra and Jewish kabbalah opened me to whole new ways of thinking and feeling.
The main organizers of the encounter in Dharamsala were two American Buddhists from Jewish backgrounds. And they in turn represented another important aspect of this dialogue. Over the past twenty years, many spiritually curious Jews have explored Buddhist teachings, and some have left Judaism altogether. A surprising number have become spiritual leaders, teachers, and organizers in the Western Buddhist community. Among them are Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, Bernard Gla.s.sman Sensei (a Zen roshi), Stephen Levine, and Jeffrey Miller (Surya Das), the first Jew to become a Tibetan lama.
I was also aware that the Jewish community views with a mixture of fear, alarm, and regret the loss of such Jews to other religions. This dialogue would address that concern as well.
These were the prospects I had in mind as I made my way to Frankfurt for the first leg of our journey together.
But I could not have imagined then how the actual experience would be much more radical and transforming, not only for me as an observer, but also for the Jewish delegates.
What follows, then, is the story of a historic dialogue between Jews and Buddhists. It is also the story of the movement of some Jews toward Buddhism over the past twenty years, and what this has to tell us about the problems in Jewish religious life today. But most of all, it is a story of the possibilities for Jewish renewal as I first encountered them in Dharamsala.
1.
Sparks.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1990, FRANKFURT-DELHI I joined the stream of disembarking pa.s.sengers in the Frankfurt airport, b.u.mping and jostling in the narrow corridor to the main concourse. I was nervous, nothing new in itself. Nervous is my religion.
On previous visits to Europe I had always avoided touching down on German soil. Now I knew why. Seeing German on posters put me on edge. So did the voices of German citizens around me. This was nothing I could help, an involuntary reaction, a stubborn prejudice.
The ma.s.s of travelers surged into the main concourse and split up in all directions. I wandered around, hoping to b.u.mp into other members of my party, who were arriving from New York, Boston, London, and Israel. We were all to meet at the New Delhi departure gate. Near a ticket counter, a man with a briefcase was berating a clerk. My ears p.r.i.c.ked up at the sound of his voice. A few syllables of German spoken in anger and already the grainy newsreel was unwinding: Hitler at a podium, the crowds at Munich, goose-stepping soldiers, the crowd responding with a ma.s.sive Heil Hitler salute. And then, inevitably, the stacks and stacks of bodies...
But these businessmen and tourists hurrying through the concourse were not storm troopers, and it would have been a stretch to imagine myself as a Jewish victim in striped pajamas. I am a grandchild of immigrants, Jews with the luck to get to America soon after the pogroms opened the long twentieth-century European Jew-killing season.
So I had no rational reason to feel uncomfortable in the Frankfurt airport. Surely these good German citizens would wish me no harm. Why hold a grudge with ghosts?
Yet, despite my ongoing turbulence about my Jewish ident.i.ty, my discomfort was visceral. German posters, German language, German people made me nervous, and I wanted very much to find the other members of my group. I wanted to be with other Jews.
That's when I saw the Torah.
In a crowd of German students, a tall man held it to his chest like a father clutching a chubby toddler. He was balding, with a fringe of wild hair and a thin goatee. With his wire-rimmed gla.s.ses and blue serge jacket, he looked like a cafe revolutionary. He was, in fact, Paul MendesFlohr, a distinguished professor of Modern Hebrew Thought at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
What surprised me was my surge of joy upon seeing Paul's Torah. It wasn't particularly pretty. It wasn't even familiar-looking. This was a Torah in a tin case, used by the Sephardi Jews of southern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East and meant to be read standing upright on a table. The case was decorated with an uninspired orange floral pattern. Yet it drew me and not just me. From all corners of that vast waiting room, our entire party gathered around it.
A Jewish mystic would have understood the Torah's magnetism. For the kabbalah teaches that the Jewish soul is composed of many brilliant sparks. I like the idea of a sparkling, multifaceted soul, with bright bits of reincarnated rabbinic sages jostling around with earthier types, nightclub owners, and peasants. In a way, the Jewish soul is like an airport concourse, crowded with competing sparks of life. And in that German concourse, even for a rather secular jumble of sparks like me, a Torah still has strong powers of attraction.
As Paul explained later, the Torah had been purchased in Tel Aviv that morning as a gift for the Dalai Lama. It was a printed replica, actually, not a real scroll, but that didn't matter. From the start of our journey it served many purposes. Symbolically, of course, we Jews were bringing our Torah-our wisdom-to Dharamsala. But at a far more visceral level, during a sometimes difficult journey through India, the Torah acted as a magnet, keeping the sparks of our Jewish souls aligned and, some believed, keeping our Jewish bodies safe.
That morning in Frankfurt, as we gathered around the Torah, I felt myself to be an unlikely candidate for this journey. I had hardly ever been what one could call a spiritual seeker. I was deeply interested in Jewishness-as culture and history. But I wasn't looking to Judaism-the religion-for answers to the deepest problems in my life.
I presumed that the partic.i.p.ants in this dialogue would have strong religious commitments. I would be standing outside of that.
As for Tibetan Buddhism, I considered myself too stubbornly loyal a Jew to go shopping. I'd never been much for gurus. Were it not for the efforts of an old friend, Dr. Marc Lieberman, it would never have occurred to me to seek spiritual wisdom from a Dalai Lama.
Marc, a San Francisco ophthalmologist, was the first person to ever describe himself to me as a JUBU-a Jewish Buddhist. I've since learned that he is one among many, in a long line that goes back at least one hundred years.
The history of the spread of Buddhism to the West is complex and includes many different strands and influences, ranging from the impact of early translations of Buddhist texts on Emerson and the Transcendentalists to the nineteenth-and twentieth-century immigration of j.a.panese, Chinese, and other Asian Buddhists. Charles Prebish, a scholar and JUBU himself, has written of two distinct American Buddhisms. One consists primarily of traditional, conservative Asian-American Buddhist groups, which, like other ethnic groups, have brought their religion from the old country. The other, distinctively Western, Buddhism is both more innovative and less stable and draws primarily on non-Asian Americans.
In the past twenty years, JUBUs have played a significant and disproportionate role in the development of this second form of American Buddhism. Various surveys show Jewish partic.i.p.ation in such groups ranging from 6 percent to 30 percent. This is up to twelve times the Jewish proportion of the American population, which is 2 1/2 percent. In these same twenty years, American Jews have founded Buddhist meditation centers and acted as administrators, publishers, translators, and interpreters. They have been particularly prominent teachers and publicizers.
The very first Westerner to take refuge in the Buddha on American soil was a Jew, Charles Strauss. He dramatically proclaimed himself a Buddhist at a public lecture that followed the World Conference on Religions in 1893. Strauss set a pattern for American JUBUs by becoming an author and leading expositor of Buddhism in the West.
Similarly, a more recent phase of American Buddhism owes much of its impetus to the beat generation of writers in the 1950s, who were led by a self-proclaimed "Buddhist Jew."
Allen Ginsberg's openness, and his role as a very public personality, made his personal quest for wisdom influential, even paradigmatic, for a generation. Buddhist references are sprinkled throughout his poetry, but he did not become a serious pract.i.tioner until the 1970s. He remains a committed Buddhist, as the t.i.tle of his most recent biography, Dharma Lion Dharma Lion, indicates.
In a much more quiet, but perhaps deeper way, other Jews have been very important Buddhist teachers. In the early 1970s, four Jewish pract.i.tioners of Vipa.s.sana meditation-Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Jacqueline Schwartz, and Sharon Salzberg-returned from their studies in India and Thailand to found the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Ma.s.sachusetts, which is today one of the most successful Buddhist teaching inst.i.tutions in America. Goldstein and Kornfield have also collaborated on very popular books on basic meditation technique.
When a big surge began in the mid-1970s, Joseph Goldstein told me, "a strong predominance of Jewish people took an active, leading role. I came back from India in 1974 and that year Naropa Inst.i.tute first started a big summer program-like a spiritual Woodstock. That's when I first started teaching. That was a seminal year."
The Naropa Inst.i.tute in Boulder, Colorado, was founded by the late Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan teacher from the kagyu kagyu tradition. That tradition is not strictly monastic, and Trungpa became controversial for teaching a "crazy wisdom" that allegedly justified his own public drunkenness, s.e.xual promiscuity, and violence. But perhaps in part because of his wildness, Trungpa could reach large numbers of disaffected young people who were, as Allen Ginsberg told me, "coming off the flower tradition. That tradition is not strictly monastic, and Trungpa became controversial for teaching a "crazy wisdom" that allegedly justified his own public drunkenness, s.e.xual promiscuity, and violence. But perhaps in part because of his wildness, Trungpa could reach large numbers of disaffected young people who were, as Allen Ginsberg told me, "coming off the flower power acc.u.mulation of trips of the sixties." Many were Jews, and Trungpa used to joke that his students formed the Oy Vay school of Buddhism.
A number of Trungpa's intimates were Jews who moved high up in the hierarchy of Vajradhatu, the Buddhist community in Boulder. David Rome served as his personal secretary. Robin Kornman, now a professor of Buddhist studies and a translator, was also in the inner circle. Sam Bercholz founded Shambhala Books, the first major publisher of Tibetan Buddhist works in this country. Others, like Nathan Katz, who came to Naropa to study Tibetan language, became scholars of Buddhism and translators of Tibetan texts. Today in American universities there is an impressive roster of Buddhist scholars with Jewish backgrounds, perhaps up to 30 percent of the total faculty in Buddhist Studies. Among them are Anne Klein of Rice University, Stanley Weinstein at Yale, Alex Wayman and Matthew Kapstein at Columbia, Charles Prebish and Steve Heine of Penn State, and many more.
The big star at Naropa that Woodstock summer of 1974 was a teacher of Hinduism, Ram Da.s.s, a.k.a. Richard Alpert, yet another Jew. He told me in an interview that the percentage of Jews involved in the early boom phase of Buddhism was "inordinate" and "outlandish." He said, "I can give you nine explanations that are glib, but I don't think I can get hold of it."
I could think of a number of reasons myself, none entirely satisfying. Where I came from, leaving Judaism for another religion seemed like a big betrayal.
That's why I related very personally to Marc Lieberman's change of direction. We have been close friends since I was fifteen. We met in the Sunday School of a Reform synagogue in Baltimore. After college, he went to Israel and studied briefly in a yeshiva. Living in Jerusalem he had picked up a much greater depth of Jewish learning and a much more Orthodox practice than we'd been raised with. He married a lovely Israeli woman and returned with her to our hometown. During that period in the late seventies, Marc was a very observant Jew and he taught me a great deal. We had long discussions about Talmud, midrash, and Hasidism. We often prayed together at an ancient rundown shul near Corned Beef Row in East Baltimore.
In the early eighties he moved to San Francisco, and shortly after that his marriage broke up. Meanwhile, I'd moved to Baton Rouge to teach at LSU. We stayed in touch. Soon I noticed that Marc was talking more and more enthusiastically about Buddhism.
At first I figured that, postdivorce, he was hungry for new answers. If he wanted to be a Jew in a lotus for a while and meditate, that was fine with me. Just a phase, I figured. But then a few years later, he married a fellow Buddhist pract.i.tioner, Nancy Garfield, in a Vietnamese Buddhist temple in San Francisco. Not just a phase anymore. Still, when I visited them in San Francisco, I noted that he made kiddush on Friday night and sent his son from his first marriage to Hebrew school. Even as a Buddhist he seemed a better Jew than I was, certainly more knowledgeable and observant than most I knew.
Then some interesting things began to happen. Marc spent three months on a Buddhist retreat in total silence. Marc met with the Dalai Lama. Marc and Nancy started a Buddhist foundation and began holding meditation sessions in their home. They made trips to Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in India.
Finally, in the fall of 1989 Marc told me he was organizing a dialogue session between rabbis and the Dalai Lama in New Jersey.
This remarkable project began with a visit from David Phillips, who is active in the American Jewish World Service, a relief agency helping Tibetan refugees in southern India. The Dalai Lama was very grateful to AJWS and told Phillips he wanted to learn more about Jews and Judaism. The Buddhist leader had also noticed that an impressive number of his followers in the West were from Jewish backgrounds.
In the spring of 1988, Phillips was Dr. Lieberman's guest for Shabbat dinner. Phillips must have observed the unusual combination in Lieberman's San Francisco home: at the table, Shabbat candles; in the living room, incense; at the doorway, a mezuzah; in the meditation room, a five-foot-high Buddha. If he glanced at the bookshelves, he would have seen dharma and kabbalah competing for s.p.a.ce, and one was as likely to find Pali as Hebrew.
So Phillips asked Marc Lieberman for a list of books on Judaism for the Buddhist leader to read. Marc responded with a far more ambitious plan. Jews needed to learn about Buddhism, too. Why not have a dialogue with the Dalai Lama? Better yet, why not immerse rabbis and Jewish scholars in the life of a Buddhist community? They could bring the Torah to Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan exile, and they could return-he hoped-impressed by Buddhist wisdom. In the glow of Shabbat candles, it sounded like a marvelous idea.
Phillips agreed to get word back to the Dalai Lama. Marc set out to work on the Jewish side. Over the past decade, the Dalai Lama had had extensive dialogue with Christians, but none formally with Jews. Such a meeting seemed long overdue to Dr. Lieberman, but that wasn't a perception shared by the organized Jewish community.
Some work was being done with interfaith dialogue, mainly with Catholics, and with intergroup dialogue, mainly with Blacks. But at the time, Jewish philanthropies were preoccupied with Soviet emigration to Israel. And to most Jews the Dalai Lama was too exotic. They couldn't see the value in meeting with him. After sixty-five turndowns, Lieberman knew he had to find a way to break the ice.
Along the way, he had teamed up with Michael Sautman, another Bay Area Jew with strong Buddhist ties. A pilot active in relief work with the Tibetans, Sautman is also a personal student of the Dalai Lama.
With the Buddhist leader coming to New York in the fall of 1989, Lieberman hit on the idea of organizing a preliminary meeting in the United States. Sautman brought word from the Tibetans that the Dalai Lama would grant a few hours' time. Lieberman, with the help of Dr. Moshe Waldoks, a Jewish scholar and editor, arranged the rest. They invited rabbis and scholars representing all four branches of organized Judaism in the United States: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist. Lieberman hoped the historic nature of the event could attract publicity and, eventually, funding for the more ambitious dialogue he had in mind.
They met at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Washington, New Jersey. After lunch and a tour of the grounds, the Jewish visitors entered the Buddhist temple and sat down with the Dalai Lama and his senior monks and translators. A Torah scroll was unwrapped and the Dalai Lama was photographed by the New York Times New York Times peering respectfully at its long lines of script. peering respectfully at its long lines of script.
In the animated discussion, the Dalai Lama expressed his admiration for the Jewish people and showed a particular interest in Jewish mysticism. But his request for details about kabbalah went largely unanswered. And the whole subject of the survival of exile peoples needed much more elaboration. These would have to wait for a fulllength dialogue.
What did emerge into view was the warmth and energy between these two groups. Tibetans and Jews shared a similar sense of humor. When the Dalai Lama was presented with a tallis, in return he handed his guests the traditional gift of a silk katak katak. "I give you a scarf and you give me a scarf," he joked, and as the session ended, he walked away with another gift, a shofar, tucked into his robes. Though Marc later referred to it as a "crash course in Judaism 101," the initial encounter got great press, especially when, just a week after, the Dalai Lama received the n.o.bel Peace Prize for 1989. Now the Nathan c.u.mmings Foundation offered to support the major dialogue in Dharamsala that Lieber man had been dreaming of for two years.
Not everyone in the Jewish community applauded the news. An influential New York Jewish newspaper ran a sarcastic headline about the session, "Dillying with the Dalai." In the article, the two Orthodox partic.i.p.ants, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg and his wife, Dr. Blu Greenberg, were attacked for consorting with idol worshipers.
But even in liberal denominations the received idea is that all Eastern religions are "cults." Many a.s.similated Jews were horrified in the late sixties and seventies when charismatic leaders such as Ram Da.s.s, a Jewish Hindu, or Allen Ginsberg, a Jewish Buddhist, led many other Jews out of the fold. Moonie, Hare Krishna, or Buddhist-what's the difference? They all ran together into every Jewish mother's nightmare-walking into a shopping mall and finding her boychik boychik-or daughter-with a shaved head and a saffron robe, shaking a tambourine and chanting.
To some in the Jewish community, Dr. Marc Lieberman personified the danger. His mother was active in Baltimore's Jewish affairs, his late uncle Morris had been a prominent Reform rabbi, and his brother Elias had followed in his uncle's footsteps. What had happened to this quintessential "nice Jewish boy," and a doctor yet?
When the question of his background came up in the Jewish press after the first session with the Dalai Lama, Marc described himself with a mixed metaphor. "I have Jewish roots and Buddhist wings."
I knew what Marc meant by wings: Buddhism had gotten him somewhere spiritually in a way Judaism never had. In the years since he'd begun meditating, he seemed to have become calmer, less neurotic, more at ease.
I also knew what he meant by roots. We both came from very intense, extended Jewish families-with all the obligations and neuroses that implies. I knew we shared some of the same Jewish finicks, the same paranoias. We'd been raised in the era after the Holocaust with an intense consciousness of Jewish suffering. We both knew the long history of anti-Semitism. Yet in our lives we had met few signs of discrimination. We'd gone to the finest schools; all doors had been opened to us. With that freedom, we had chosen our own career paths, and they had moved us far from our families and childhood friends. I'd relocated to the deep galut galut of Louisiana and he'd settled in San Francisco. If the first generation of Jews in America were a people broken loose, we had broken even looser. In part, old guilt-fear of disappointing my family-had kept me tied to Judaism. But I could understand why, for Marc, that wasn't enough. of Louisiana and he'd settled in San Francisco. If the first generation of Jews in America were a people broken loose, we had broken even looser. In part, old guilt-fear of disappointing my family-had kept me tied to Judaism. But I could understand why, for Marc, that wasn't enough.
My big question was-could he maintain loyalty in both directions? Roots and wings? For the time being, at least, he had gotten all of us off the ground. He'd worked tirelessly for two years writing grant proposals and in the months preceding the trip had handled all the niggling details involved in transporting scholars, journalists, and a few extra family members to Dharamsala, in the state of Himachal Pradesh three hundred miles north of Delhi.
Given my basic orientation, I was surprised when he sent me a preliminary announcement. He'd scribbled on the cover letter, "Join me for yak b.u.t.ter tea in Dharamsala?" I called him immediately. He was serious and invited me to come along as an observer and to write about the results. I promised to be annoyingly accurate.
Now, four months later, while I tested my first Hindu dinner of the trip somewhere over the Kush, Marc stood in the aisle halfway between the flight attendant and Rabbi Greenberg. The stewardess was holding a tray of food, but the rabbi wasn't having any.
The flight kitchen, based in Delhi, had translated the kosher meal the Greenbergs had requested as Brahmin vegetarian. The meal was rice, peas, potatoes, dal, and an excruciatingly sour Indian pickle chutney. Conceivably kosher-if only one knew how it was cooked, what oils and vessels were used. But of course there was no way for the Greenbergs to be certain. Kosher? Not Kosher? Brahmin? Chutney? Who knew? Dr. Lieberman tried to rea.s.sure Rabbi Greenberg that Brahmin vegetarian was glatter than glatt kosher. But in the end, the rabbi and his wife left their meals uneaten. I saw Lieberman stretched between two worlds, Orthodox Jewish and Hindu, his kosher roots straining and his Eastern wings flapping.
I waved him over. My friend looked tired. He was suffering from culture lag. He'd spent the weekend with Nancy in a vihara, or Buddhist monastery, north of London. The contrast between the two worlds was strong. Monks are inclined to silence. Jews like to yak. Like it or not, and mostly not, Marc Lieberman had become a tour guide for a traveling bundle of Jewish anxieties, handling everything from money changing to hotel room shuffling.
But he hadn't lost his visionary gleam. When he first pitched the dialogue to me, it was always in very lofty terms, a dream of Buddhist monks and Jewish rabbis, lamas and sages, meeting with mutual respect and sharing their wisdom. Clearly it meant much to him personally as well. The unthinking Jewish reaction-the received idea-about Jews like Marc is powerfully negative. Apostates. Converts. The words were ugly.
But he had never cut his roots to Judaism. And for just that reason, they still fed back a strong current of pain. Unlike some JUBUs, Marc kept a foot in both worlds. That impressed me. He mentioned that when he discussed the dialogue in the vihara, his Buddhist teacher in England remarked that of all his students, those from a Jewish background had the most difficulty letting go of their previous attachments.
I wondered too about this persistence of Jewish interest among people who had spent years in a lotus posture scouring their consciousness with Buddhist meditation. (I wondered about the persistence of my own interest sometimes.) JUBUs like Marc could not be done with their Jewishness even though their contacts with the Jewish world, and particularly family, were sometimes difficult emotionally.
Maybe a Jewish Buddhist dialogue could help heal the division between Jews and JUBUs. Maybe it could heal a division within JUBUs themselves.
Now, somewhere over Pakistan, I teased him the way we always teased each other, saying that in Dharamsala, his lofty dreams would be realized. At the appointed moment, he would cross his eyes and have a vision. Rabbi Greenberg and the Dalai Lama would merge together on the same meditation cushion-as the Dalai Greenberg.
EARLY MORNING, MONDAY, OCTOBER 22, DELHI.