Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

Jubu Review: A response to the Venerable Shravasti Dhammika

A few months back, Shravasti Dhammika, a Buddhist monk of 32 years practice and the spiritual advisor to the Buddha Dhamma Mandala Society in Singapore, added a post to his blog on the subject of hyphenated Buddhists in general, and Jewish-Buddhists in particular.  The good monk wrote that whole idea of hyphenated Buddhists gives him an “identity crisis,” which is a pretty funny thing for him to say, given that an identity is about as insubstantial as it gets in Buddhism. I suspect he was winking when he wrote this, since his sense of humor is on display throughout this posting. After all, mistaking the skandhas for a self would be a shande. 

Nevertheless, the question of hyphenated Buddhists, and Jewish Buddhism or Buddhist Judaism in particular disturbed him. And it’s a question that that often comes up in my world, since I identify myself as a  Jewish Buddhist. I am hardly alone on this path, since it’s been estimated that 30% of American born Buddhists also identify in some way as Jewish. That’s enough people to become a market! And so,, no surprise, there are quite a number of books, films and t-shirts (blending spiritual path, identity and fashion with Western consumerism) on the phenomenon. The venerable Dhammika refers to some books by an IMC teacher I admire, Sylvia Boorstein, in particular. I don’t think she would define herself as a Jubu — her excellent essay in Beside Still Waters, an anthology of writings by Jews and Christians who have been profoundly changed by their Buddhist practice is her response to the question of hyphenated identity and I recommend it. This is my response to the venerable Dhammika’s post where he writes:

“Is it possible to be a practicing Jew and a practicing Buddhist at the same time? No it is not! The two are mutually incompatible. A Buddhist would have to see most of the practices of Orthodox and even Reformed Judaism as harmless but empty rituals that contributed nothing to the development of virtue or the freeing of the mind. If anything, they reinforce a specific identity; the very thing Buddhism seeks to transcend. The Torah’s unambiguous demand for total allegiance to the God of Israel and the Buddha’s God-free spirituality and world view, separate the two religions from the word go.”

I take issue with a number of things he writes here. Just as I take issue with Rabbi Akiva Tatz, who wrote a book called Letters to a Buddhist Jew, that I will write about in another post. However, what both gentlemen have in common is a lack or experience or deep knowledge of each other’s path, so that neither man has enough of an understanding of the other’s path to make a full judgment or fair assessment.

Today though, I’m sticking to the venerable Dhammika’s comments. So let’s start with his contention that the Torah demands “total allegiance to the God of Israel.”

I’m not sure what his concept of that God is, but I have to respond with the words of Rabbi Irwin Kula: “I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in either.”

The word God itself is problematic. People tend to think of a character, a personage, a being with a personality, and for that matter, a gender. Thinking about god this way is basically a violation of one of the commandments — against idolatry, which isn’t restricted to making physical images. In Judaism one cannot speak the name of the Divine because to name something is to limit it, to have control over it, and the Divine is beyond language or limit.

One of the central Jewish prayers, said several times during services, is the Kaddish. The point of the Kaddish is to break through the tendency of the mind to reify God. Rather than being an empty ritual, it is a prayer designed to break through any definition of what is essentially beyond the limited power of language to express and thus help open the one praying to an experience of the unconditioned state. If one recites it rote, without consciousness, it is no different from simply reciting the sutras without mindfulness. Or for that matter reciting a sutra as a mantra in the hopes of getting a new car (Can you say Sokka Gakkai?).

The Kaddish is a deep teaching about the nature of the Divine, which in the Jewish mystical tradition is sometimes referred to as the Ayn Sof: infinite no-thing-ness. It is beyond form and formlessness. This is not the same thing as Nirvana (or is it?), though I can’t rightly say, never having experienced it. For that matter, it is an experience, from all I can gather, than can only be expressed by what it is not (which is expressed beautifully in the medieval work of Christian mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing). This is the place where language breaks down. So while I can’t say with any authority that these concepts are equivalent, I have a sense that they arise from the same place (or no-place as the case may be).

I remember when I had walked away from Judaism entirely, and had given myself over to meditation practice and the study of the sutras and the various commentaries. My friend Marion asked me what I had found in Buddhism that I hadn’t found in Judaism. I read her some passages and spoke to her about what meditation had given me. She opened up a siddur — the book of Jewish prayer — and pointed to some passages that went to the heart of what I was talking about. In fact, several of these prayers were mindfulness practices — they weren’t something so much to be read as instructions to a practice of awareness. I was dumbfounded, since I had never recognized this before. Like the venerable Dhammika, I saw the liturgy as empty ritual. But of course, no rabbi in my youth had ever taught these prayers as an awareness and mindfulness practice. I wasn’t even sure there were rabbis who understood these prayers in that way.

Of course, that was my ignorance of my own tradition. And the fact that no rabbis in my youth taught in this was was a result of the history of post-enlightenment Judaism in the U.S. and the broken lineage of deep teachers in the last century — . I knew nothing of masters like Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, who taught a meditation technique that reads like a text on Vipassana, and who was murdered in the Holocaust.

When I delved deeper into the tradition of my ancestors I discovered many texts I would never have understood but for my experience with Buddhist meditation. And I met rabbis who not only understood the practices these prayers called for, they actively taught them.

As for a hairy thunderer in the sky demanding total allegiance — well, that’s just a story. A teaching story. I don’t imagine that the venerable Dhammika literally believes all of the Jataka tales. And I doubt he believes in a literal being called Mara. These tales are told to point to a deeper truth.

I can’t deny that Judaism, like Shinto, carries the mythic history and consciousness of a particular people from a particular time. The Torah, like the Kojiki, are the stories that encode the deepest teaching of the tradition. Taking it literally is about as delusionary as believing that the Japanese emperor is a direct descendent of the sun goddess, Amaterasu. Ahem, well. Obviously many Japanese did believe this well into the last century — the Venerable Dhammika neglected to ask the same question about hyphenated Buddhists to the entire Japanese nation, whose population pretty much considers itself both Buddhist and Shinto. But as always, I digress…

The problems arise when people take the stories literally — it’s what leads to kamikaze pilots, the suicide bombers of WWII, not to mention murderous zealots like Baruch Goldstein. Or lunatics like Fred Phelps. I stray again…

Getting back to the empty prayers and rituals…perhaps the most important prayer in Judaism is the Shema – which, rather than being a demand for total allegiance is a radical statement that calls one’s full attention to the unity of reality.

While my interpretation of the prayer may sound unorthodox to many who grew up with the English translation that appears across from the Hebrew in the siddur, it is actually within the realm of orthodoxy (which is not usually where I find myself):

Listen/Be mindful, you who wrestle with the Inexpressible, the Inexpressible is Greater/Beyond Anything you can imagine, and it is Indivisible from Reality - there is nothing that is separate or not a part of It (including you and your struggle).

The Hebrew is a lot shorter, but it’s a language of great economy that manages to express a non-dual experience of the Divine that is both transcendent and immanent simultaneously.

Now certainly there are places where Judaism and Buddhism clearly part ways. There is no monastic tradition (that has survived, i.e. the Essenes) in Judaism. While Buddhism sees the way out of suffering through equanimity, Judaism calls for passionate engagement with all of life — experiencing joy and suffering as the fullness that is human existence. While Buddhist monks don’t marry, don’t work and don’t own anything, historically rabbis have been expected to marry, work and provide for their families. This is where the paths diverge for those who wish to practice, not simply as laymen (ah, the innate sexism and limits of language), but as complete devotees.

By our very nature as humans, we cannot see or express the whole truth. Each of our traditions displays merely one facet of the jewel of Reality. Each does it’s best to give its adherents a practice that will enable them to see this and apprehend an experience beyond the limits of expression.  And each has practices that can be bizarre and counterproductive to the goal — how could it be otherwise, given their long history and the addition of any number of adopted teachings and offshoot branches.

The rabbi of  Congregation Har HaShem in Boulder, in his blog notes an beautifully strange similarlity between the writings of the Soto Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki and the 18th century Chassidic rabbi, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev. This great master wrote that:

“we are holy in that we can become aware of our essential nothingness – 'Know that you come from nothing' – and that Jewish practice (mitzvoth) raise our consciousness of the nothingness underlying our existence, and the transitory nature of our materiality.”

At this point you would be excused if you quoted Shakespeare and said of me, “I think the lady doth protest too much.”

Yes there are differences, and there are practices in each tradition that would be anathema to the other. I do my best to live fully in the real contradictions while celebrating the ultimate oneness. Duality is real. I live in it every day. There’s just a greater reality. And the teachings of both traditions create a feedback loop that helps take me deeper to a place that transcends both.

Rabbi Arthur Green, in Tormented Master, his biography of the Chassidic master, Rabbi Nachman, related this conversation between the rabbi and a close disciple. R. Nachman explained that he really no longer needed to follow many of the commandments. Because in following the path of mitzvoth, of living in blessing, he had “reached the other shore” and no longer needed the vehicle of the form. But he continued to follow these practices because he had followers — and if he kept up the practice his followers would be inspired to continue, despite the difficulties of the path, and could someday reach the far shore themselves. Sounds like a boddhisatva vow to me.

I’m grateful to the venerable Dhammika — his words gave me an opening to write about all this in more depth than usual and possibly open a dialog.  And I am grateful to my teachers in both traditions: their words and their living examples have been a blessing in my life.

One more parenthetical — a postscript: here is a question/koan to consider on the dual path from this Jewish Buddhist — to go with the collection of Jewish Buddhist haiku that gets sent around by email endlessly (and believe me I’ve seen it many times, so please stop sending it to me!):
Mu. Nu?

Barack Obama and Storytelling

In yesterday’s speech Senator Obama distinguished himself with an understanding of the universal power of story — and how essential it is in forging the identity of a people. He recognized how we all enter story and become a part of it. He used the examples of Biblical stories to point this out explicitly. But by using the organizing metaphor of the “more perfect union” he tapped into sacred/secular American story of the creation of the country and its founding document.

He spoke of the Constitution in the way Jews look at Torah — a document we are in relation to and that we’re constantly reinterpreting in order to live our lives to our best understanding of what the divine call us to be. Yet all the while always understanding that no one is perfect, that we all fall short, and that the only way to live with this understanding is with compassion for each other and ourselves.

Most commentators focused on what he said about race. I was taken by what he said about story — because that’s the real story:

“I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories of survival and freedom and hope became our stories, my story. The blood that spilled was our blood, the tears our tears, until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black. In chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a meaning to reclaim, memories that we didn't need to feel shame about, memories that all people might study and cherish, and with which we could start to rebuild.”

This is the power of story — the great tradition of folk tales from all cultures shares this power. And the great storytellers know that when they tell, every listener is also a participant embodying every character and event in the story. Senator Obama is a great storyteller, and he is telling the story Americans most yearn to hear — and to live.

Narrative psychologists say that the story you believe is who you are. Politicians know how to use stories to create fear — certainly the Bush administration and the G.O.P. have made the use of scary stories the keystone of their approach. This is the power of story to divide. To create an enemy we can project all our shadow fears onto.

But story is best used to inspire and build community. Not at the expense of others, but in building connection between all. This isn’t done by papering over difference or division but by recognizing commonality and by peaking to real pain on all sides, transcending it. This is the power of storytelling that Senator Obama knows how to use masterfully. And it is what has made him a formidable candidate. Because people are hungry for this story. It is in fact the story nourishes us.

Senator Obama is telling the story I have always wanted to hear from a candidate. I still wish I liked his health care plans better than Hillary’s.

D'var Sutra: Pekudei — the place where you are standing is holy

Here we are at the last reading in Sh’mot, the book of Exodus. And the storyteller in me wants to think about this book, just the second of the five books of Torah, as one complete story to be read in and of itself. Except that it ends right in the middle of the journey. Or does it? Now I realize that the story calls for wandering for 40 years. That the generation that lived in slavery had to pass away before entering the land. But…

Remember, at the end of Devarim, the last of the five books, the people still have not crossed over into the land. This seems significant to me when looking back at the story in Sh’mot.

The book begins with our ancestors living in Egypt as slaves to a temporal power, the Pharaoh. They are unwilling builders of the Egyptian temples and cities, making bricks from mud and straw. Building structures that cannot move. And when Exodus ends, they have freely entered into a relationship with the Divine, building a portable tabernacle made of the finest precious metals, jewels, woods and hides they have been able to muster.

I suspect there is a teaching here about where holiness is truly found, and it isn’t connected to place.

When the people completed the building of the tabernacle, Moses blessed them. The Midrash tells us that his blessing was: “May it be God’s will that the Divine Presence rests upon the work of your hands.”

Similarly at the end of Devarim Moses says to the people: “The thing is very close to you, in your mouth and your heart, to observe it”

In the Torah, both at the end of Sh’mot and at the end of Devarim, the people do not enter the land. They are told that the Divine Presence is within, and can be expressed in one’s actions and in one’s work in the world. This simple and radical teaching is often overlooked in our desire to connect myth with history (please do not make any assumptions about my political leanings about Israel from this statement — I am speaking entirely about our relationship with the Divine as it is revealed through the story).

On Shabbat, we look back on the week before. We rest. But it does not mean we do not reflect on our work in the world. The question to ask when we stop running (which means we catch up to the Holy One, who wasn’t going anywhere) is whether the work we have done expressed our relationship with the Divine, so that the Presence will rest upon it, and among us.

When we can answer that question clearly on an ongoing basis the tabernacle will follow us wherever we go. And the Promised Land will always be beneath our feet wherever we are.  This is the experience of the unification of keter and malchut (and all the sefirot in between). This is the experience of the non-dual nature of peshat and sod. The recognition that Samsara and Nirvana are one: wherever you go, there god are!

Sunday Morning Cartoon: Achilles and Patroclus

To call this 11 minute claymation telling of the Greek myth of Achilles and Patroclus a cartoon does not feel right, regardless of the fact that this is certainly animation. It brings together so much that I love — Greek mythology and folk tale, animation and queer representation in media. This is not for children to watch. I mean, naked men in claymation? There is a rape scene in this cartoon that is intense and horrific. It is the story of the violence of war writ small. Yet this little film is really about the love between these two men. As the narrator asks: What makes a leader of men — the armor or the heart? Made in 1996, it is narrated by Derek Jacobi and was nominated for a BAFTA award. Be patient though, because it's long it takes a little while to load, but believe me it is worth it.

How a gay boy lost his heart to India: From Sajid Khan to the Ramayana and Bhangra in Bryant

When I was fifteen years old there was a TV show that starred Jay North, the kid who played Dennis the Menace in the early 60s. The premise of the show was that North was searching for his lost father in India, traveling on the back of an elephant with his Indian friend, who was played by a young Indian actor named Sajid Khan. Jay North could be in one of Richard Lamparski’s "Whatever Became Of" books, but Khan went on to become one of India’s top actors and heart throbs. And when I was 15, he was my heart-throb, one more piece of evidence helping me to realize that I was a gay boy.

It was not the first time I was captivated by a young Indian. To this day
one of my favorite movies is the 1940 version of The Thief of Baghdad,
starring Sabu, who was indeed the son of an elephant driver. This film puts the Disney cartoon to shame and its special effects still hold up after all these years. But what makes this film truly great is its Huck and Jim friendship between the deposed king of Baghdad and Abu (played by Sabu) the thief. It is a deeply spiritual movie, that is also a grand adventure, a love story and fantasy. It compares more to The Lord of the Rings than to the Disneyfied remake. And like Huck at the end of his story, Sabu as Abu lights out for the territories. It was the first time in my life I’d heard of the city of Basra. And every time I hear news of this city today I am
filled with sadness. (Let’s ignore for the moment that Iraq and India are completely different cultures and the people only look alike to those who have no experience of the world and it’s many peoples.)

Sabu went on to make a number of films in the US, including the high camp
Cobra Woman, and the classic Black Narcissus which demonstrated that he was really a fine actor. But his career stalled because Hollywood couldn’t see him as anything other than the exotic elephant boy. He suffered the fate of so many actors who don’t fit the homogenized white bread image sold by the studios of the day.

Unlike so many actors with an ethnic background, a name
change wasn’t going to change Sabu’s heritage. He died young and frustrated, restricted by the racial blinders of the time. He might have done better to light out for the territories.

At this point you may be wondering if I’ve been to any SALGA dances. Or HABIBI for that matter. What I can tell you is that the other night on my way home from work I passed through Bryant Park to discover the Incredible India ad campaign was sponsoring performances of traditional Indian music and dance on a fanciful stage, and as I passed by I could see in the distance what was very clearly a performance of an episode from the Ramayana, one of the world's greatest stories. I was hooked, and was in the park in a flash. The next group of performers were Bhangra dancers. That’s right. You may know Bhangra as music, but this is how the term has changed in this generation and in the West. Its origin is as a dance style from Punjab, and there was a group of young men who demonstrated this athletic rhythmic movement with such obvious pleasure it was completely infectious. It’s amazing the whole crowd wasn’t on their feet along with them. One of the dancers moved with such sensual grace that my old memories of Sajid Khan and Sabu were reawakened.

Accuse me of sentimental orientalism if you like. Or fetishism. But a youthful attraction to these men is what opened my eyes to a wider world. Sabu was my sexual fantasy psychopomp who led my soul -- and my body all the way to Asia, where I worked for 7 years and traveled widely. (And where I discovered that I too could be objectified and made the object of a fetish for my then still red hair.)  This curious passion is what led me to discover, study and respect the beauty and value of other cultures, languages and spiritual paths. Which is no surprise really, since in both Maya and The Thief of Baghdad these handsome young men took on the role of guide to other characters through (under)worlds they did not know. It may be a cultural and artistic stereotype, but it led me to a place where those stereotypes dissolve, and then reform newly informed.

So have you had some teen crush that led you out of the closet, and out of your own culture? 

Sunday Morning Cartoon: Kiss That Frog

Perhaps the creator of this wonderful little bit of animated storytelling, Rob Hlus, didn't know about the NewFest or didn't finish in time to enter this year. But I always love it when a traditional story gets a queerly happy ending. Take that, Brothers Grimm! I really love the sound design in this piece, the hint of the background music and the noise of the crowd gives this an adult ambience, along with the hilarious use of a cigarette. Three cheers for the Vancouver Film School and Rob Hlus!

Shabbos D’var Sutra: Strange Fire

What are we to make of Parsha Shemini? Our ancestors struggled mightily with this reading because there are things in it that also made them very uncomfortable. There are things in it that make me very uncomfortable. But open-hearted struggle with what makes us uncomfortable is in fact a part of the tradition. A part I really connect with – because the Torah is part of our inheritance, whether we like parts of it or not. And I like a good story…

The story begins after 7 days of preparations for the dedication the Tabernacle are ending. So there are lots of lists of ritual laws of sacrifice and holiness for the priests and the people, connected to the Mishkan. The reading also includes the introduction of the dietary laws. With all these laws we get the story what happened at the consecration of the Mishkan and the ordination of the priests — including Aaron and his sons.

Unfortunately, this ordination does not go well. Okay, that’s an understatement...

Maggid: We Are Commanded To Tell The Passover Story

The internationally acclaimed storyteller Laura Simms once said that she "tells stories in order to destroy story." I've always understood that to mean that storytelling wakes us up to the fact that we are always telling ourselves a story, living out of stories that we have in our heads — often stories that don't actually have any connection to reality in the moment. Personal stories, family stories, tribal or national stories: we are characters in all of them.

This is a kind of madness, but it a madness all humans live by. If we are attentive when we hear a story well told in a culturally relevant ritual setting, the story helps destroy the illusion of reality we place on the story we live. It wakes us up to other possibilities and other actions we might take. It opens us up to the hearts of others, and their motivations. In this way, ritual storytelling is a kind of Buddhist meditation. Certainly it is the way Laura practices and teaches storytelling, and I am always profoundly grateful to learn from her.

So it's about to be Passover. The time when Jews are commanded to tell the story of the exodus from Egypt. The story of our enslavement — and our freedom. There are many things I love about this storytelling ritual, not the least that it is a living ritual that has continued for more than 2000 years in this form. But there are also things that trouble me. One passage in the Haggadah I always flinch at when we read it is the phrase:

"For not only one enemy has risen against us, in every generation men rise against us to destroy us."

While history is certainly filled with examples that could support this statement, I find myself wondering about the victim mentality it leads to. I wonder whether reading this leads us to recreate this story by telling it generation to generation. Is this a story we want to live?

And it leads me to a question about slavery — are we enslaved by the story? Can this ritual help free us from the very story we are telling, so that we both honor it, and learn how to act in the world in fresh ways, free of the narrow vision it gives us? Don't get me wrong — I am not about throwing the story out. I'm only suggesting the most traditional thing one can do at a seder — talk about the story as it is told, but this time, talk about it as story and the ways in which it creates our way of seeing reality. At least that's one thing this Jewish Buddhist is planning to talk about at his first night seder this Monday.

And of course, in memory of Yvonne DeCarlo, who died not so long ago, and played Nefertiri in DeMille's 50's remake of his original The Ten Commandments, at the appropriate moment, we will all sing out in unison:

Oh Moses, Moses, you stubborn,
splendid, adorable fool!