Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

Queer Jubu Heroes

I was watching the Alan Burke show — sort of a primeval O'Reilly circa 1968 — late one night and there was a guest on the show the likes of whom I'd never seen before. He had long hair and a beard, not so unusual in those days certainly. But he was far from stylish.  And he was speaking about his husband, Peter Orlovsky. It was the first time I saw or heard Allen Ginsberg. It was electrifying. Here was a proud queer man on television. A poet. An activist. A mystic. The host, who usually made mincemeat of his guests, couldn't land a punch. Ginsberg danced around him lightly with his words, a fairy Old Testament prophet speaking the truth of love to media power. I was 16 years old, and my life changed. I knew there was no reason to be afraid of being openly gay — that there was no reason to be ashamed, or to accept shaming from others. I was lucky enough to meet him a few times. The last time I saw him, he autographed a volume of collected poems, signing it: "From one queer Jewish Buddhist to another." And that's the story of the name of this blog.

Two Bowls

The Caples Awards were held this week — I wasn't able to go this year, and I was sorry because I always like to see what other creative folks are doing in the world of direct marketing.

The award itself is a bowl on a pedestal. And I realized earlier this week that I keep one of my Caples awards on a shelf in my office next to another bowl — a gift that was given to me a few years ago by friends who visited Thailand and Burma (don't get me started on the name change of that poor country or anything else about the junta) on my recommendation. It's the kind of bowl carried by a Buddhist monk in the morning when he goes out on his rounds seeking alms. He can only eat what has been placed in the bowl – and he can't eat more than what the bowl can hold.

One bowl, awarded for the ability to create hunger for material goods and services. The other, a reminder that it takes very little to have a full bowl.

One bowl, the professional recognition (and the rewards that come with it) that many of us yearn for. The other bowl a reminder of anicca — impermanence, a concept known to many people in a field where you can be the hero one day and on the street the next.

To paraphrase E.M. Cioran, to be fully human is to live the full contradiction of one's time. Or as one of my favorite queer American mystic poets, in this case Walt Whitman, would hve it: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself!"

Take off your mask

Purim is the queerest holiday on the Jewish calendar. The time when we put on masks that show the selves we keep hidden the rest of the year. The time when we bring the shadow out for full display and celebrate it. So it is of course no surprise it is the time when you’ll see men in drag — since there’s no shadow men are more afraid of than their own connection to the divine feminine. Sometimes this is true even of gay men, who today, have bought into the hyper-masculinity sold in the magazines that reflect the fantasies we are told are acceptable to have. If we’re going to love men, then they have to be masculine men — fey boys who serve the goddess aren’t allowed. Except on Purim.

This year, the Purim full moon is also the night of a full lunar eclipse. When the moon masks itself with the shadow of the earth. And what happens when it takes off its mask? What happens when we take off ours?

Years ago (so many I was still a teenager) I tuned in to WBAI late one night and came in a couple of paragraphs into a story that I hadn’t heard introduced. The reader told a story of a rather plain bartender who met a blond woman in a bat costume on the subway and found himself on an adventure with her downtown in what seemed to be a citywide costume party. The played and flirted with each other all night, running through the streets amid the revelry. And at one point, they won a prize for their costumes. At midnight, they kissed, and the blond bat said to the bartender, “Take off your mask.”

Of course, he wasn’t wearing one.

Eventually I learned the story was by Spencer Holst, and I like to read it aloud to friends at times when costume parties are the custom. You can find it in his anthology, The Language of Cats.

So here we are on the night Jews commemorate Esther’s removal of the mask — revealing herself as a Jew to the King. And many of us who are queer Jews celebrate and reveal the hidden “other.” For some that means opening to the feminine within. For others who aren’t quite a Kinsey 6 it means opening to our heterosexual desires (assuming we don’t fall prey to heterosexual panic, a defense I don’t believe I will ever hear in a court room).

Then there are the queer Jewish Buddhists among us. This gay jubu finds meaning in the holiday’s union of opposites. Not merely that of masculine and feminine, but also in the exhortation to become so divinely drunk that we can’t tell Haman from Mordechai. To get beyond good and evil.

This is not to deny the evil of Haman. But often Jews wonder about this tradition of the holiday. My take on it is entirely Buddhist. Haman is suffering — and like many who are not awake, he acts out his suffering in the world and creates more, for others and for himself. And thus, while we should do everything in our power to prevent his carrying out plans to spread suffering, he is just as deserving of compassion as Mordechai. Not a popular message nowadays. Not even an easy practice for those who take it on. But the heart of the Buddha’s teaching.

All this I hope serves as an introductory ramble to this new blog — Just Another Queer Jewish Buddhist. While I expect to offend Jews, Buddhists, and many in the GLBT community, my hope is to create community of people of GLBT people who cross boundaries and transcend categories in the search for the heaven that exists right here on earth in front of us at every moment of the ongoing creation.

What's a Jewish Buddhist?

“Jubu” is the colloquial term to describe a Jewish Buddhist, someone with a Jewish ethnic and/or religious background who has a taken on Buddhist practice of some sort, whether meditation or spirituality. The term was first brought into wide circulation with the publication of The Jew in the Lotus by Rodger Kamenetz, a book which chronicled a meeting between the Dalai Lama and several rabbis. The Dalai Lama wanted to know how the Jews survived as a people without a country for 2000 years. The rabbis wanted to know what so many Jews were seeking in Buddhism.

Obviously there is no orthodox Jubu-ism.  You can be a Conservative Vajrayanist, a Reform Theravadan, a Zen Reconstructionist. Practice varies with the individual. Some people practice both traditions, some have left Judaism behind, others use Buddhist meditation techniques to inform their Jewish practice.

Of course, many Jews believe these traditions are completely incompatible. So what am I? A radical Conservative neo-Hasidic Theravadan practitioner of Vipassana. And of course, as you can tell from the title of this blog, I’m also queer. Not so oddly enough, inasmuch as queer folk are usually boundary crossers in one way or another, a number of well know Jubus are also queer. But being a Jubu is no indication of someone’s sexuality.

If you want to learn more about it all, take a look at:
The Jew in the Lotus by Rodger Kamenetz,
One God Clapping by Alan Lew and Sherril Jaffe,
That's Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist! by Sylvia Boorstein
God in Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness and Embodied Spiritual Practice, by Jay Michaelson