Over the years, the Jewish High Holidays have waxed and waned in significance for me. They were probably most profound when I was a child, when they were unavoidable due to familial obligation. They loomed before me forebodingly for weeks. But the foreboding was not arising from fear of divine judgment. It was simply anticipation of excruciating boredom.

By now, as a longtime Zen practitioner, I have spent so many hours sitting silently and staring at a blank wall that a High Holiday service seems quite lively by comparison, especially if I haven’t eaten for 22 hours and am fantasizing about blintzes. Sure, services can still feel excruciating at times. My wife is usually unavailable to help me keep our two toddlers alive and stimulated for hours on end. (She gets a pass; she’s the rabbi.) The upside is, now I enjoy the sermons more–when I’m able to pay attention, that is.

You would be right to ask how someone so bored by the ritual forms of his Jewish upbringing ended up married to a rabbi and doubling down on his Jewish identity. The short answer is that I eventually found teachings and practices that helped me accept and enjoy the circumstances of my life.

The longer answer begins when, dissatisfied with my native forms of Judaism, I started to seek spiritual assistance elsewhere. I began studying Buddhism when I was 15 or 16, had settled into Soto Zen by the time I was around 20, and have been spiritually at home, wherever I am, ever since.

Along the way, I’ve picked up a distinction that’s helped me explain just where that home is. I describe myself as a “Buddhist Jew,” as opposed to a “Jewish Buddhist.”

Most of the Jewish people I know who have taken more than a passing intellectual interest in Buddhism belong in the latter category, Jewish Buddhists. While they proudly relate to being Jewish as a matter of descent, background, history, and so forth, their Buddhist lineage and practice is now central to how they understand themselves. When I was younger, I thought I was a Jewish Buddhist, too.

By my second year of college, though, I had found Jewish peers doing Jewish stuff in which I wanted to partake—an absolutely unprecedented situation for me. Even as I was studying Buddhism in class and joining my classmates for zazen every day, I was going to Hillel on Friday nights and learning what my native ritual forms actually felt like from the inside. My first spiritually powerful High Holiday services were on campus in what were really fairly typical circumstances. The shocking difference was that everyone around me was my age and had actually chosen to be there. I started to really connect with the ritual, but even more so with the community. So much so that—in that panicked “what am I going to do after college?” way—I even briefly considered rabbinical school, wondering if it would be possible to reshape Judaism into something that would have worked for me as a kid.

After college, however, it was much harder for me to find a Jewish community that gave me the same sense of connection. My Zen practice was flowering, and it was in the zendo that I found my fellow travelers—and inner stability.

I found Zen to be something of an antidote to my most difficult conditioning. Where Judaism was hyperconceptual and hyperintellectual, Zen could not be simpler: Just sitting is the whole of the practice. Where Judaism seemed to demand the same things of everyone in the community, Zen nourished each person’s independent, indescribable experience. Growing up, the experience of being made to perform Hebrew liturgy in front of the entire congregation made me anxious in ways that still feel present in me today. Whereas the Zen sanghas I sat with seemed to delight—with actual laughter!—in accidental variations from the ritual forms that I don’t even want to call “mistakes.”

These crucial differences healed me. But so had the connections I had made in college, for the first time, with other Jewish people my age. As time went on, I became determined to find space in my life for both.

When my now-wife declared that she wanted to enroll in rabbinical school, I agreed to go along, knowing full well what that meant. I fully intended to keep up my Zen practice, but this change of scene meant our life would revolve around Judaism. It was time to find a synthesis.

As I dove deeper into the Jewish world than I had ever been before, I realized a twofold change in myself.

For one, I had found the unshakable and ever-present, centerless center of zazen. As a child, I thought holiness was reserved for certain places and times, whether one was ready at those times or not. Now, I realized one may never be ready, but that’s OK, because everything, just as it is, is holy at all times. It became so interesting to experience Jewish ritual like this: no different from any other activity, yet practiced with such caring attention by people I love. Participating in this way resonated deeply with me, given the particulars of my life. I recognized that I wouldn’t be who I am without Jewish forms of practice and the people who carried them through the centuries.

What’s more, I realized the way Zen holds space for the ineffable experience of each person was also possible in a Jewish space. Whatever one is going through is held, in the Jewish tradition, by the container of ritual and the seasonal cycles of observance. I found new compassion in this realization. Some people in the room were having transformative spiritual experiences, and I loved that for them. Other people in the room were bored out of their minds, just like I was as a kid—or maybe still am! I loved that just as much.

As deep into our Jewishness as my wife and I now are, married for six years, I am actually in my most committed period of formal Buddhist practice. With my parents, wife, and children looking on, I took Jukai (lay precepts) at the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in the fall of 2020, receiving the dharma name Kyosaku.

But I did so as a Buddhist Jew. Buddhist is the adjective, describing my practice and approach, but my Jewish identity and culture is the noun—the particular manifestation of the practice as this incarnation, me—as I center my family, relationships, and community observances.

When I sit in High Holiday services now—that is, when I’m not chasing kids around in the back—I sit with the Zen orientation of appreciating everyone’s radically personal experience of these forms we all share. Sure, our community is not a typical American synagogue—for example, half the time we’re on a mountain or in the woods, not in a building. But as a Buddhist Jew, my Jewish community is vaster than I ever thought possible, and I take refuge in helping make it a refuge for others.

The post How I Became a Buddhist Jew (And Why That’s Different from Being a Jewish Buddhist) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Did you know that Tricycle was part of a Jewish conspiracy to take over Buddhism? No? Neither did I, until someone forwarded me a link from a blogger who made the claim. I was offended. I work at Tricycle, and I’m Jewish. So why didn’t anyone tell me about the secret plot?

Of course, there isn’t one. Such conspiracy theories have not gained much traction in Buddhist circles, but I worry that they speak to a more widespread confusion around the history of Jews in American Buddhism. It is no secret that among converts in the US there are a lot of Jews. Yet although this fact has been a topic of conversation for many years, there has not been a comprehensive analysis that deals with all of the issue’s complexities. Ignorance alone does not explain anti-Semitism, but conspiracy theories seem to take root in that murkiness.

Fortunately, a new book can shed some light on the topic: American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change (Princeton, November 2019) by Emily Sigalow, a sociologist of contemporary Jewish life and postdoctoral fellow at the Duke Center of Jewish Studies.

American JewBu  is not a sentimental book about the author’s personal experience. For the most part, Sigalow leaves herself out of it, except to discuss research methods and to act as an impartial interviewer and observer. Yet in the simple laying out of fact, Sigalow outlines a heritage and history that situate the Jewish Buddhist experience within a distinct subculture. She does not claim to have a definitive answer for the apparent affinity for Buddhism among Jews. Instead, she explores a different and perhaps more fruitful line of inquiry: What is the history of the Jewish-Buddhist encounter in America, and what does it look like today?

That encounter has been complicated. Even the term “JewBu” is contentious. As Sigalow notes, Jewish Buddhists under 30 tend to identify as JewBus, while many baby boomers “dislike the label and view it as a form of disparagement or condescension.” But American JewBu attempts to clarify this complication without resorting to oversimplifications.

Sigalow comes to a few important conclusions. Her most emphatic claims are that the Jewish adoption of Buddhist practices amounts to more than a “salad bar religion” whereby dabblers “pick and choose among religious options in highly individualistic and idiosyncratic ways.” Rather, she argues that “distinct historical and social conditions shape religious mixing in the United States, from modernization to anticapitalism to counterculturalism.” She borrows this view of religious mixing from sociological discussions about syncretism. The conversation about syncretism has traditionally looked at how minority groups assimilate to the majority, but Sigalow asserts that two minority traditions can have the same type of influence on each other.

The study is divided into two parts. The first section traces the wide range of Jewish encounters with Buddhism dating back to the public conversion of Charles T. Strauss in 1893, which marked the first American Buddhist “initiation ceremony” (a rite that was created for the occasion in order to make a statement to Western audiences). In the second section, Sigalow draws from her historical analysis, as well as dozens of interviews she conducted with Jewish Buddhists, to explore the various ways that Judaism and Buddhism have blended in a country where they are both religious minorities.

She examines how Jews have been prominent American Buddhist leaders from the early days of Buddhism’s journey to the US. She looks at figures such as Strauss; Buddhist sympathizer and Ethical Culture founder Felix Adler (1851–1933); Pure Land priest and World War II anti-internment activist Reverend Julius Goldwater (1908–2001); Rinzai Zen master and Sufi murshid Samuel Lewis (1896–1971); and magazine publisher and D. T. Suzuki student William Segal (1904–2000). In each chapter of this encounter, Jews took part in the modernization of Buddhism into a religion largely compatible with scientific values and American liberal ideals of pluralism and equality. Jews were far from the only modernizers—many of the Asian teachers who first taught American converts had already begun to place greater emphasis on meditation and Buddhism’s compatibility with science—but there were Jews in each generation of interpreters.

Sigalow’s best explanation for the early trend of Jews turning to Buddhism (although she does not suggest it is a complete explanation) is that Jews were disproportionately represented in the “social location” where Buddhism took root in American communities of European descent—namely, among educated people in major cosmopolitan areas. (It’s worth noting that throughout the history of Buddhism the dharma has tended to enter new cultures first through the merchant and aristocratic classes.) But her more significant insight is the recognition that later generations of Jews were drawn to a Buddhism that was already translated and adapted to be palatable to a Jewish audience. At this point Jewish Buddhists begin to emerge as neither entirely Jewish nor entirely Buddhist.

That distinct identity becomes even more apparent as Sigalow begins to discuss the rise of Jewish meditation after books like Rodger Kamenetz’s The Jew in the Lotus in 1994 and Sylvia Boorstein’s That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist in 1997 opened up the conversation about JewBus. In looking at Jewish meditation, Sigalow shifts from talking about the influence of Jewish values on Buddhism to an analysis of how American Judaism has incorporated Buddhist influences.

These Jewish meditation practices take a few different forms. Some Jewish meditation involves incorporating certain Buddhist practices to add an embodied dimension to Jewish spirituality, which often means omitting practices that are seen as incompatible. (No idol worshipping!) The issue of compatibility is not as much of a concern for Buddhists and other traditions in Asia, where it is far more common for people to belong to multiple religious groups than it is for them to hold exclusivist beliefs. Sigalow notes that some American JewBus, such as Boorstein, likewise do not see any problem with identifying as a member of multiple religions.

But plenty of Jewish meditators are concerned with whether or not their practice is kosher, Sigalow found. Many of these practitioners left their religion for Buddhism but returned to Judaism later in life. Other groups see themselves as reviving forgotten practices within Jewish mystical traditions; occasionally they describe their goal as defending Judaism from being taken over by Buddhist influences. Some meditators speak explicitly about taking practices from Buddhism, while others erase the Buddhist roots and claim that the practice is entirely Jewish. (Rabbi Alan Lew, who cofounded the Jewish meditation center Makor Or with Jewish Zen Buddhist priest Norman Fischer, refers to some of the latter attempts as “dubious re-creations of Kabalistic meditation practices that may or may not have ever existed.”) Meanwhile, movements like Reconstructionist Judaism and Jewish Renewal have tried to enrich Jewish religious life by including a wide range of resonant influences, Buddhism being just one of many.

Questions of cultural imperialism abound in this interaction. Jews are not uniquely guilty of appropriation—a concept that has entered the mainstream only in the past few years and would have been unknown to the Jewish Buddhists of the 20th century—but are guilty of it nonetheless. However, Sigalow’s account suggests that Buddhism has influenced Judaism in America at least as much as Judaism has influenced Buddhism (or as much as Protestant Christian and American liberal values have influenced both). Of course, the same can be said of Zen Buddhists in Japan, Vajrayana Buddhists in Tibet, or literally any form that Buddhism took after the teachings left the Buddha’s lips. The issue of appropriation is further complicated by Buddhism’s missionary imperative.

Sigalow neither apologizes for appropriation nor condemns it; her tendency is to remain an objective observer.

As Sigalow writes in her final pages: “Flux and mixing, not stasis or uniformity, have been the norms in Jewish and Buddhist history. That these two traditions have been altered and reconfigured as a result of their encounter is inevitable and unavoidable.”

The dharma has always accommodated the needs of a given culture. And after generations of living in diaspora, Jews have also learned the delicate craft of holding onto one’s cultural identity while adapting to the surrounding society. While this can be said of nearly any religion, Judaism and Buddhism in 20th-century America were more open than many of their contemporaries to this particular marriage of teachings.

Sigalow, however, neither apologizes for appropriation nor condemns it. “It is not my charge as a scholar to make a normative judgment about the new reconfigurations [of Judaism and Buddhism], thus assigning them a certain worth, good or bad,” she writes, in keeping with her tendency to remain an objective observer.

Her reserving of judgment is at times frustrating or comes off as a dodge. But ultimately, in not answering those questions, she reserves space for more facts and analysis to better help the reader come to their own conclusion.

I recognized the value of this approach while I was reading American JewBu on the subway and found myself doing something peculiar: slipping a notebook in front of the cover to hide the title from fellow passengers. I felt silly when I realized what I was doing. Being just a little over five feet tall with curly black hair and a nose that would look offensive in a sketch, I was not going to have much success concealing my Ashkenazi ethnicity. (Twice in my life, complete strangers have asked me if I am a lawyer.) Moreover, I should have nothing to hide. But perhaps I was not embarrassed about the Jew in the title. At a recent doctor’s visit, a medical clerk asked about my religious affiliation, and I answered “none.”  The person I was with cocked her head and gave me a quizzical look. “Actually,” I conceded to the clerk, “I’m Buddhist.”  The reason I hesitated when asked about my religion was that I knew the answer would not fit neatly into the space on a
hospital form.

Throughout the book, Sigalow acknowledges this complexity and that there is neither one Judaism nor one Buddhism. Even narrowing the scope down to the encounter between Judaism and Buddhism in America leaves us with a variety of traditions on both sides of the equation. Sigalow divides JewBus into three categories: practicing Buddhists who are culturally Jewish, practicing Jews who turn to Buddhism for spirit­ual enrichment, and those who see no distinction between their Jewish and Buddhist practice. From this perspective, the term “JewBu” is not a box that limits one’s identity but a way of labeling a shared history of messy interactions.

American JewBu does not make an impassioned plea for understanding and acceptance of Jewish Buddhists in America. It does not claim that there is anything special about the encounter of these two religions. It does not attempt to give definitive explanations for many of the concurrences between the groups, nor does it determine whether they benefited from or were harmed by this encounter. It does not even take a stance on the theological compatibility of Buddhism and Judaism.

Instead, Sigalow sticks to a descriptive method and leaves the rest for us—for Jews to think about their place in recent Buddhist history, for non-Jews to better understand their Jewish teachers or dharma friends, or for any curious person to consider how cultures and religions interact. The book leaves the reader with something that Jews and Buddhists alike may find familiar: more questions than answers, but a feeling that getting further from a solution has somehow made you wiser.

The post Jewish Buddhists, an American Tradition appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Once a month, Tricycle features an article from the Inquiring Mind archive. Inquiring Mind, a Buddhist journal that was in print from 1984–2015, has a growing number of articles from its back issues available at www.inquiringmind.com. In this holiday season when many Westerners who practice Buddhism also celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah—some returning for services at the churches and temples of their childhoods—we present a Buddhist’s reflections on God. This month’s selection, “God is a Three Letter Word: Interview with Norman Fischer” by Susan Moon, originally appeared in the The God Issue (Inquiring Mind, Fall 2013).

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Norman Fischer is a poet and writer and the guiding teacher of the Everyday Zen community, with sanghas in the US, Canada, and Mexico. He was a resident of Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery and Green Gulch Farm, and for several years he served as abbot of San Francisco Zen Center. One of the signatures of his teaching is his interest in different religious traditions and his valuing of the very idea of religion. He lives with his wife in Muir Beach, California. Fischer’s most recent books are What Is Zen?: Plain Talk for a Beginner’s Mind (University of Alabama Press, February 2016), Untitled Series: Life As It Is (Talisman House Publishers, May 2018), and the upcoming The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path (Shambhala, April 2019). Susan Moon interviewed him via email.

When you were a child growing up in an observant Jewish home, did you believe in God?
My impression of “belief in God” in Judaism—at least the way I grew up Jewish—is that it isn’t a question. It was never discussed, because it wouldn’t have made sense to discuss it. It was just assumed—deeply assumed. The ideas of “belief” and “faith” seem to be inherently Christian concepts. But growing up we had no such idea. You were Jewish whether you liked it or not: if you tried to escape being Jewish, eventually you’d be found out, so there was no use denying it. It was for better or worse a fact of life. Like being a man or a woman. And then if you were Jewish you did Jewish—that is, you went to synagogue, observed kashrut [dietary laws], and so on. So God wasn’t an issue; God was just a basic assumption that had to do with being Jewish. You were you, ergo God was God. To tell the truth, this still seems true to me.I do believe in the benevolent protection of God . . . in the sense that something always happens, and that what happens is what it is and not something else, and that therefore there is a special virtue in it.

As a child the way it seemed true to me had to do with the strangeness of the experience of being alive: literally perceiving, feeling, thinking, and so on. The world just seemed strange. This must have to do with God—that was the reasoning. So, for instance, walking to synagogue holding my dad’s hand and seeing the sparkling substance in the sidewalk as we glided by: how else would that be possible if not for God?

In Judaism as I knew it, there was no theology; there were just stories. You read stories in the Torah every week—stories about people trying to engage God—not because they believed but because God was involved in their lives as a fact: experientially. Clearly these were stories. Not exactly historically true: more true than that. I remember being very small and listening to a recording of Bible stories. God spoke in a booming baritone male voice—very intimidating, very frightening. I used to hide under the table. On the other hand, it was thrilling, and I listened to this record again and again.

How did your sense of God change when you were a young man?
As I grew up, my sense of God didn’t particularly change. I studied religion and philosophy and became more sophisticated in my way of thinking and speaking about God. I no longer believed (but I don’t think I ever did) that God was watching over and protecting us in some anthropomorphic way. But this increased sophistication did not change my earliest ideas about God. I was just learning more and more developed ways of thinking about what I knew all along.

Related: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Now I do believe in the benevolent protection of God. Not in the sense that good things will always come to good people whom God loves, but in the sense that something always happens, and that what happens is what it is and not something else, and that therefore there is a special virtue in it. Whether or not we discover the virtue is our problem. That seems to me to be ample evidence of God’s tremendous compassion and grace. We can absolutely depend on it!

When you began to practice Zen, did you think about God? Did you miss God?
When I started to practice Zen, I was just going on to the next thing that naturally called to me, assuming that the religion stuff was still relevant and would still be there when I needed it. I guess I had an enormous confidence in my sense of Jewish identity, backed up by God. I didn’t think I needed to tend to it; I could move on to whatever was next and it would all be okay. When I started to practice Zen, it was like that: my explorations had led me to Zen naturally and this is what I was going to give myself to, with the same kind of full-on hysteria with which I’d given myself to the great American triumvirate of baseball, football, basketball—and to girls.

Now it was Zen. But I didn’t miss God or wonder whether I was abandoning God or God was abandoning me. I assumed that God would always be around. Because if God is simply embedded in the strange fact of existence, then how could God not always be part of the equation? The fact that God is officially not an issue in Buddhism—or is, in some forms of Buddhism, apparently denied—didn’t trouble me at all. Different language game. No problem. Anyway, Zen seems not to be invested in denying the idea of God. [Shunryu] Suzuki Roshi mentions God several times in his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind with apparent approval.

Did you return to your Jewish practice after you were a Zen practitioner and teacher, or was it always there?
I didn’t practice Judaism much when I began doing Zen. I was living in a Zen temple and it was a very full life, no time for it. But when our kids were old enough we did [Passover] seders and other stuff, and then when my mother died in 1985, I wanted to say Kaddish [prayer for the dead] for her. So I went to the nearest synagogue and told the rabbi who I was (a Zen priest by then) and why I wanted to be there. He said OK; he was a very nice man. I got involved with regular attendance there, with my mother in mind.

Related: The Meditation Mitzvah

Then in 1990, my dear and now-departed friend Rabbi Alan Lew returned to the Bay Area, and from then on I began doing a lot of Jewish practice with him. We started a Jewish meditation center, Makor Or, that I still direct and teach at [as of 2013]. I learned a lot from him, and he got me to study a lot, which I still enjoy. Judaism is fascinating. So I actually have quite a lot to do with Judaism.

How does your Jewish meditation practice frame the idea of God?
Our Jewish meditation theory is that God is presence—presence both within and beyond your life (within and beyond turn out to be completely mutually implicated, when you look closely). And that while Judaism knows this and Jewish practice is meant to foster it, in fact, most contemporary Jews do not have access to the richness of God-encounter that Judaism contains, because a major motivation for Jewish observance is to strengthen the community—which is not only reasonable and salutary, it is also self-protective conditioning from a long history of oppression. So this is where the meditation comes in: it is easy access to God-encounter, through encountering your own body, breath, mind, and presence. I speak of God all the time at Makor Or—and sometimes at Everyday Zen, too.

What, if anything, did you tell your children about God?
I communicated to my children what my parents communicated to me—God is obvious, necessary, and ubiquitous. It is not a matter of belief or faith. And you don’t need the word God if it seems to cause you problems. After all, does it make sense that God would be limited to positive feelings about a three-letter word in the English language, and that if you had a problem somehow with that word (because maybe where you live it is socially unacceptable) that God would cease to exist for you? No, this makes no sense! There is no doubt there is more to life than meets the eye, more to being alive than the material world. In fact, there is more to the material world than the material world! What is this “more” if not God? It’s also fine to call it something else. As to the question of God as personal: as [philosopher Emmanuel] Levinas (1906–1995) says somewhere, of course God is personal, because we are persons.

Do you pray? If so, to whom?
I pray all the time. To God. I am asking God to help out with this and that, mostly friends who are ill, people who have died, the crazy messed-up sad and foolish world. Please help with all of this, God, as I know you will. I am never disappointed with God’s active response. Because I know what to expect. And I am thanking God a lot for almost everything.

Have you had moments of feeling directly connected to God?
I usually feel directly connected to God. I’m alive, and I can tell I am alive.

What is God like?
God is like life, like being, which of necessity involves death and not being—and this is where the God part comes into it.

What is your responsibility as a Zen teacher, in talking to Zen students (like me) who yearn for God, or to other students who come to Zen relieved that at last they don’t have to “believe in God”?
As you know, I resist the idea of myself as a Zen teacher. There are roles to occupy, and I have mine; everyone has his or hers. I am interested in responding honestly to anyone I meet, as far as I can understand that person. I hope it helps, but I never really know. If it does help, the reason is not my wisdom and brilliance, it is the luck (you could also call it karma) that produces a fruitful encounter between two people meeting in the middle of a dazzlingly complicated world. Since I am sensitive to language because of my long-standing poetry habit, I don’t get caught up in debating with someone about their choice of words. I think useful truth is in the meaning, not the words. The art is to find the words to indicate something to this person now. Speaking of which, I’ll close with a poem from my 2004 collection Slowly But Dearly.

How God Gets Into It

God arrives in the transitions—
the times between before and after
the shatterings, bendings, breakings
moments of devilment and blasted pose—
The feeling then arises,
a draft in the system
tiny shaft of light in the visual field
which, when noticed and affirmed,
opens out to an aura on the screen of eclectic ineffability—
One’s arms open in quietude and perplexity
There’s nothing to say, do, or think

RELATED INQUIRING MIND ARTICLES

• The Great Matter by Susan Moon
• A Non-Theists Journey by Rob Lee
• What God is Not? by Askold Melnyczuk
• Being-ness: Your God by Yael Shy
• Everyday Deliverance by Martha Kay Nelson

The post Seeing God in What Is appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

On Saturday night, following a mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, I was taking the subway to a Halloween party when I tried an experiment. I allowed myself for a second to feel the deep sadness I had been pushing away since I woke up to the news that seven people were killed by an anti-Semitic far-right conspiracy theorist (the death toll has since risen to 11, including a 97-year-old woman.)

Throughout the afternoon, I put the news out of my mind in order to complete some work I had to get done. But waiting for the subway on a raised platform in a gentle rain, I had nothing else to do, so drawing on a mindfulness practice, I shifted my attention to the pain that I had pushed aside. I allowed myself to think about the Holocaust, the history of anti-Semitism around the world, and of my sisters and my mom who could have easily been targeted if the shooter had showed up at their temple instead. I thought about how the victims were part of my tribe, a tribe that has spent all of its history searching for a refuge from persecution. I thought about how—despite my more rational understanding of violent crime statistics—I felt a little afraid to leave the house that day.

Then my thoughts drifted to the shooter and the people who encouraged him, either explicitly, by playing into his fears, or by implying they support his actions through their silence.

Quickly, my sadness turned to rage, an experience that everyone is likely familiar with. But for the first time in my life, I watched these emotions as they shifted inside me, using tools for reflection that have only started to develop after a few years of practice. What I saw upon deeper reflection was that the sadness wanted to become anger—because anger was easier. I had to consciously shift my attention back to the suffering or else righteous indignation would take over.

When President Donald Trump responded to the shooting by saying the temple should have had armed guards, when he chose not to cancel his political rally, when he joked about how his hair was messed up because he had to answer reporters’ questions in the rain, when he waited too long to even mention the phrase anti-Semitism, when he took no blame for the years of apologizing for alt-right hate mongers, and when he returned to blaming the violence on the media (often a dog whistle for Jews), I didn’t get angry. I mean, I did, but that was not my first response. Instead, I was scared—because I realized that the most powerful man in the country did not have my back. But of course, that fear became anger, and it happened so fast that I hadn’t even realized that I was afraid—until I slowed down.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with getting angry sometimes, and no one should be criticized for it. When I first started reading Zen literature, I thought the Buddhist masters were beyond rage. But I soon came to see that the most equanimous people—and perhaps even enlightened beings—still feel anger. The trick of contemplative practice is to close the gap between feeling that anger and letting it go. When the anger arises again, the master feels it, then lets it pass again. But even knowing that I had to let go, I wanted to cling to my anger. Returning to that reflection on the train, it’s easy to see why: anger is a security blanket, protecting me from my fear and from allowing myself to feel the suffering of the people in Pittsburgh.

I don’t think it would be a grand revelation if I were to say that the shooter, if not all people driven by hate, cling to anger to escape fear and suffering. Hatred, I think, is like cancer; it is created by the system it destroys. Just as cell growth is natural, anger is natural. Homicidal hatred is metastasized anger, and it can threaten the whole society in which it was born. So it’s up to everyone to let go of anger to avoid becoming the thing they hate—which can strike me as terribly unfair.  When a hate monger goes on a deadly rampage, everyone else is left to do the work of processing. While he gets to be angry, we call upon ourselves to be compassionate.

I don’t want to show the shooter or any of the people who encouraged him any love or forgiveness. Not today, at least.

Yet on that train, I found that the anger wasn’t helping. Every time I turned to the pain, there was something sublime there. I felt human—limited and fragile. That feeling is part of compassion, seeing how my suffering and the suffering of others are linked. So even if I couldn’t muster up a kind word for the killer, I could still turn toward compassion rather than anger for a time.

Then I would, of course, drift back to anger, and I would feel powerful, like I alone could march into the Oval Office, look Trump in the eyes, and say, “Hey, knock it off!” It’s a comforting thought, but not a very useful one. Acknowledging our frail existence, on the other hand, is a very powerful thought; it’s at the heart of all spiritual investigation.

Perhaps, an opportunity to reflect on impermanence and interdependence is a poor consolation for mass murder. But what else can we do? Even if we take up political or social action—which we should—we will still end up spending the majority of our time going about our  days. When we come home from voting or attending a protest to eat dinner and unwind for the evening, at those times, all we can do is try to be human, as human as we can be.

Eyes watering as I tried not to cry and make everyone else on the train uncomfortable, I got off at my stop and went to a party. When I showed up, I was a little bit rawer than I wanted to be, but I was met with great kindness and sympathy. One friend told me that he had spent three hours talking about the shooting with a group of people who had met up for another purpose, which they never got around to. He laughed about how it felt unproductive at the time, but in the long run was probably far more important than anything else they could have done.

I wish I could end this with some bold statement about driving out hate through compassion and self-reflection, but I don’t actually think it works that way. Hatred is never going away; it only spreads or shrinks for a time. But this past weekend compassion and self-reflection helped me in a way that I hadn’t expected—by simply allowing me to feel what was going on inside instead of running away from it. That’s all I’ve got. Hope it helps.

The post Suffering at the Synagogue appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

At Beth El, a Conservative synagogue in Baltimore, Rabbi Dana Saroken spoke to her class of a dozen adults about Joseph’s realization near the end of Genesis: to move forward, he had to respond to his brothers in a new way. “What does it mean to let go of old scripts?” she asked. “How does that liberation look in our own lives?” As the congregants settled onto their mats, yoga teacher Kimberlee Strome took over, leading them in a series of poses around the theme of holding on and letting go.

And at Baltimore’s Temple Oheb Shalom, Reform Rabbi Steven Fink regularly does deep breathing exercises with bridal couples before they sign their marriage contract. “It helps them calm down, come into the present, and remember why they’re there,” he told Tricycle.

Mindfulness, meditation, and even, to some extent, yoga are becoming commonplace in American Judaism. While some believe that such practices have been part of the Jewish experience from the start, others believe that their recent popularity is due largely to the influence of Buddhism and other Eastern religions. But people in both camps believe it has had a positive effect on Judaism.

Rabbi Jordan Bendat-Appell of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality said, “There have always been Jewish mindfulness practices, especially in Hassidism. Many of these contemplative practices weren’t written down, but even when we do have the words that talk about connecting with the divine, they don’t explain how to do that.”

Related: The Jew in the Lotus

Jewish meditation teacher Steven Siegel agreed, saying, “There are practices that I learned from the swami I studied with in the ’70s, but had I read a certain tract written by an 18th-century eastern European rabbi, I might’ve learned the same thing.”

There are three reasons that certain mindfulness practices have been absent from much of American Judaism, said Reform Rabbi Elissa Sachs-Kohen of the Baltimore Hebrew Congregation.  First, the Reform movement rebelled against the trappings and practices of traditional eastern European Judaism when it took hold in the United States in the 19th century. Second, the German formality and intellectualism of early Reform Judaism rejected more soulful practices. And third, because so many Orthodox rabbis who taught meditative practices died in the Holocaust, those more soulful aspects of Judaism were lost and are only now being rediscovered.

Beginning in the 1950s but more seriously in the ’70s, some American Jews were drawn to Buddhism or at least some of its practices.  During that period, several of the foremost Buddhist meditation teachers in the United States were Jewish, as was a sizable percentage of the people practicing Buddhism and Buddhist meditation, according to Dr. Emily Sigalow, author of the forthcoming book American JUBU: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change in the United States. These included Richard Alpert (a.k.a. Ram Dass); Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Jacqueline Schwartz, and Sharon Salzberg, who founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts; Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, a founder of Naropa University; and Sam Bercholz, founder of Shambhala Publications. In his book The Jew in the Lotus, Rodger Kamenetz speculates that as late as the 1990s, perhaps a third of the Buddhist studies faculty in American Universities were Jewish. Sigalow notes that those numbers, especially among white American Buddhists, continue to be disproportionately Jewish compared with the number of Jews in the general population.

According to Reconstructionist Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg, “A person can maintain her love of the dharma through meditation and still be a practicing, believing Jew. Many Jews involved in Buddhist practices are not looking for a new religion, but rather are amazed to discover that meditation and the insights that arise from it are authentic to Judaism.”

Related: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Fink believes that “many Jews, especially in the Reform community, are uncomfortable with the idea of prayer. Mindfulness is a more secular and easier to embrace euphemism for prayer, for kavanah [intentionality in prayer and deeds].”

Judaism has a long history of assimilating elements from surrounding cultures. Bendat-Appell said, “It adapted aspects of Greek rhetoric and philosophy into the Talmud and Islamic mystical tradition into Kabbalah. One of the most famous medieval Jewish philosophers, Moses Maimonides, borrowed extensively from Aristotelian philosophy.” The late Conservative Rabbi Alan Lew, author of the memoir One God Clapping: The Spiritual Path of a Zen Rabbi, put it this way: “Judaism seems to have a kind of cell-like mechanism. We seem to know intuitively what it can absorb and what’s toxic.”

Not all mindful practices are considered equal, however. While meditation is becoming commonplace in Judaism, yoga is a harder sell.

Some people trace Jewish resistance to yoga to its origins in Eastern religions. According to Bendat-Appell, “Unlike meditation, which can be easily reshaped to eliminate the trappings of Eastern religions, yoga studios often contain statues and altars that are repellent to observant Jews. Even words like namaste—the god in you—feels trefe [not kosher] to people who focus on those things.”

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether Judaism’s renewed emphasis on mindfulness came from Buddhism or was there all along. Reconstructionist Rabbi Geoff Basik believes that “there’s value in an eclectic spirituality as long as you’re rooted in your own. To put it another way, it’s OK to be multilingual. The tradition something comes from isn’t an important question. Does it help us access our own spirituality?”  

That’s the rationale behind Baltimore Hebrew Congregation’s annual Yom Kippur afternoon meditation service. “The work of Yom Kippur is to face with honesty and humility our imperfections,” says Sachs-Kohen. “It’s challenging and daunting. The meditation service enables that work, gives us the space, bookended by the liturgy.” Participants said that they left the session more open to accept what the prayers of the day have to offer.

Mindfulness practices reflect the metanarrative of Judaism, the move from slavery to freedom to redemption, according to Institute for Jewish Spirituality teacher Marvin Israelow. “That is what we’re after as individuals as well,” he said. Mindfulness practices “help us choose freedom, choose life. Breathing in and out in nature is an echad [one] moment—all is one.”

In today’s culture, Jews, Buddhists, and most other Americans are looking for ways to cope with the frenetic pace and information overload of everyday life. Congregation Beth El Rabbi Dana Saroken sees it this way: “People feel like they can’t keep up. Trying to do everything faster is not the answer; it just exhausts. Meditation, yoga, and other mindful practices are ways for people to create space in their lives in order to be present. God gave us Shabbat to provide, at least for one day, the opportunity to be a human being and not a human doing.”  

The post The Meditation Mitzvah appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When B found out she had sleep disorder, it made sense to me. I remember the nightmares she’d told me she had when she was young, the desperate look on her face when we hugged goodnight outside her dorm room, her half-joke that everyone was abandoning her to the night. I asked her about her early dreams and whether she thought they related to her sleep disorder. Oh L, she softened, you know me so well. I’d forgotten about those myself. I smiled, the person who remembers people even better than they remember themselves.

***

My anxious twitch is to text my friends. Hovering over each of my iPhone Favorites, I review what I know they’re up to this week, the last thing we talked about—and I follow up.

How was your mom’s surgery, I text A.

Hope you feel better today, I text E.

Any moves on the housing search, I text D.

Thinking of you as the deadline gets closer, I text T.

I sit back and feel useful. I am clear and confident, drilling into the world of other people’s business.

***

When M told me that her brother had sexually abused her, I listened all night and didn’t turn away. I asked questions, looked her straight in the eyes, reminded her it was OK to talk about it as she wept and froze, then wept and froze again. I felt proud that I could be there for here, that I could handle it. I went home that night and couldn’t sleep, couldn’t work, could barely to talk to anyone for weeks.

***

In my 20s I learned I was a caretaker, an empath—I took the Enneagram, that personality test that sums you up with one neat number. I took the Myers-Briggs, did my full astrology chart, got all the tests you need to get the words to describe you. And they made me feel good: I am compassionate, a person who feels things strongly.

“It’s that INFJ jam,” M tells me once the Myers-Briggs told us I was an Introverted, Intuitive, Feeler, and Judge, “your antennae are always out for how everyone’s doing.”

“You’re such a Pisces,” A says as she shakes her head. “You care too much.”

I like having a type, a reason I am the way I am. I like the simplicity of the three types (greedy, aversive, and deluded) in Buddhist psychology. But when someone pegs me as a greedy personality type and smiles knowingly, sometimes I mostly feel sad. They nod at me knowingly and say, that explains it. No more has to be said. I feel lonely, then, flat in just being myself.

***

I’ve always been obsessed with other people’s business. You can call it gossip if you want to, but it’s not usually mean. I just collect other people’s business and remember it. It runs in the family: my grandmother would listen in on other people’s conversations across a restaurant and report back to everyone else at the table about who hated their food, who was cheating, what was up with the sad couple in the corner booth. I watched, and I learned it from her.

In high school and college I was known for tuning in to people’s stories, prized as an advice-giving friend because I always remembered what people told me. I remembered who else they’d had crushes on, the early hurts they’d confessed to me. I always remembered, always cared.

It was abrupt, then, when I started learning about “healthy boundaries.” When I lay in bed for weeks after helping a friend through a psychotic break, people started to tell me I needed to get my shit together.

You need to let other people take care of themselves, friends told me, and then “you do you,” that awful millennial refrain. And so I set about “building healthy boundaries.”

***

Since at least the mid-1980s, counselors, support groups, and self-help books have emphasized boundaries as a way to define oneself, one’s values, and one’s capacities. The term is slippery, for sure, and often misused. In the simplest sense it is recommended that one develop these metaphorical boundaries in order to develop autonomy. Co-Dependents Anonymous suggests many practices for developing boundaries in order to help members not be “controlled by other people’s thoughts, feelings, and problems.”

And so I began to learn that being enmeshed in the experiences of others is somewhere on the spectrum between adolescent and pathological. First a therapist, then fellow college instructors, and then friends—everyone started to tell me I needed to “have boundaries.” Most of them would draw a line front of them or stand up straight as they said it, tall and unmovable.

I tried. I stopped wrapping my whole body around my friends as they cried. I told my parents I was available to talk once a week. I tried responding to emails only once a day. I told my students they could reach me during office hours, not before or after. I too started to stand up straight, nod quietly when someone told me about their hard day. I didn’t offer to sleep over.

It’s true there are good things about boundaries. I get a lot more of my own work done these days, my mind less busy with other people’s business. I’m proud, but I feel a little sad. These days I know more about where I end and another person begins, but sometimes I wonder if being controlled by other people’s thoughts and feelings is really so wrong. Sometimes, sitting gravely a few feet away from someone I love while they tear up, I think: what about boundaries-less-ness? When do we get there? I wonder when I’ll be able to relax, when it will be OK for us to feel things together.

***

On the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur Jews perform tshuvah, usually translated as repentance or return, the return to an ethical way of living that we turn back toward on this holiday of accounting. Yom Kippur is my favorite holiday. I love its strictness, its demands on me, the ways I can take a break from driving my own ship and soften into the rules of the day.

On the eve of Yom Kippur I stand in an urban farm in Berkeley, chilly in the Bay Area night, chanting Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach’s arrangement of a Yom Kippur prayer: return again, return again, return to the land of your soul.

I feel mostly tired. I look out at high dark beds of chard and kale and feel unmoved. Really, me again? I think, Again with my soul? I’m tired of turning inward, and inward again.

The music swells, grand and high, and a waft of sweat smell runs through the tent. For better or worse, there are many of us here, many of us crowded on folding chairs and spilling out onto blankets in the dirt, leaning against the raised beds. We stand together for a silent prayer, and I watch the ripples of clothing, the kids squirming in the row in front of me, the rustle of the rabbi resettling his prayer shawl. And I begin to feel some relief.

For me, Yom Kippur has always been a relief from things being just about me. Oddly enough for a holiday that asks us to bring forth our personal memories and mistakes of the last year, I come to Yom Kippur for the relief of the swelling into something bigger than me. I love the Al Cheyt, the part of the confessional service when we chant all the categories of mistakes we may have made and pound upon our chests. Because we have these mistakes in common—these are not categories that explain me to myself, but categories that explain all of us to all of us. We have these categories because they are things that most everyone does.

***

Many rabbis have written that repentance in community is what makes repentance possible at all. Because we’re not doing the work of personal accounting alone—we’re doing it in community, for community.

It’s hard to return to the self over and over again— to look searchingly at our own actions and ethics—unless we have a broader community supporting us, giving us structure and reason to continue, telling us that this process of tshuvah matters also to them. There is no Pisces without its Aries moon, there is no type 2 (“The Helper”) on the Enneagram without type 8 (“The Challenger”).

“No one else can do transformation for us, but on the other hand we can’t do it by ourselves either,” writes Buddhist Rabbi Alan Lew. “The possibility of transformation always exists, but we have to consciously turn toward it in order to activate it. At the same time, our initiative can only take us so far.”

Our initiative gets us to the group gathering, the holiday or otherwise, but the rest is not entirely up to us: it’s what happens when we’re together. Many Jews who don’t observe any religious holidays at all return to a Jewish community for Yom Kippur. Who knows why: they feel some vague obligation or guilt, they remember this one from childhood. I think part of it, though, is because they seek the relief from their own individual distinctness.

Yes, Yom Kippur is strenuous, rigorous—the best-known fast on the Jewish calendar, a day on which what we can and can’t do is greatly restricted. But for me, Yom Kippur is one of the most relaxing days in the year, similar to the feeling I have on meditation retreat, because I can be both fully myself and with others at the same time. In both of these situations I’m not being asked to take on everyone else’s troubles, but it’s also not recommended I stay strictly within my own individual boundaries, closed off from others.

And so I am less exhausted when I look over the sweaters and hats squeezing under the tent for Yom Kippur in Berkeley, all of us shielding each other from the fog rolling in. I’m less exhausted because we’re here together, the greedy and aversive types. We know enough about ourselves and our own unique tendencies. It is time to swell together.

***

In The Way of Tenderness: Awakening Through Race, Sexuality, and Gender, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel writes of growing up in Louisiana and being taught by her parents to always nod at people she passed, even “right in the midst of an environment in which harmful discrimination was everywhere.” Manuel writes, and she is careful to note that seeing one another does not mean understanding or erasing oppressive experiences.

Rather, the nod is a simple acknowledgment that both people are on the street, in public, together. “Of course, if we were to stop and think about the person, a whole range of emotions might surface,” she writes, ‘But if we took the tender gesture of the nod as given, without preconceptions, the nod was just a nod. In the zendo [Zen meditation hall] we bow with our hands joined. This is an acknowledgement of something beyond “you and I.”’

The nod indicates that we are citizens together in something beyond, and still boundaried in our own bodies. Whether or not we feel comfortable bowing, all of us can find a way to nod, a way to acknowledge someone else’s presence without assuming we know everything about that presence.

***

At a meeting to talk about alternatives to racist policing in Oakland, G suggests we each commit to introducing ourselves to our neighbors and offering to make a earthquake preparedness plan for our block. It seems indirect at first, but G explains that if everyone on our block is motivated to stay safe in an earthquake it might motivate them to know one another. It might make them feel more like they’re on the same team.

The implication being: if we know who lives on our block, we’re more likely to call on our neighbors when we need something, rather than to call in an external set of support like the police, a police that at the moment, in my city and other cities, brings with it systemic racism and a disproportionately high threat of violence toward people of color.

The implication being: the thing we call out to for help may not need to be the police. It might not have to be 911. What if the larger structure already exists among us, and we just need to see it? If we know who keeps the water bottles in their basement, who keeps the matches, there is something beyond us, holding us, a larger structure that we’ve created with our own individual presence and skills.

“To a body of infinite size there can be ascribed neither center nor boundary,” writes poet Myung Mi Kim, and so it’s true we must give up something for that larger structure. We don’t have to give up our entire selves— just the sense that we are alone at the center of everything.

***

“Self-actualizing people are, without one single exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside themselves,” writes American psychologist Abraham Maslow, known best for his development of the hierarchy of needs. “They are devoted, working at something,” Maslow continues. “Something is very precious to them—some calling or vocation in the old sense, the priestly sense.”

The priest here is one working in devotion, one devoted to bringing their full strength and capacities to something greater than themselves. While we can’t all be priests or monks laboring constantly in structured devotion, we have opportunities each day to offer ourselves to something greater. Instead of being satisfied with our self-knowledge or erasing ourselves entirely (trigger the panic of the so-called “Me” generation), we can bring our self-knowledge as skill.

And so our self-growth doesn’t  have to stop at boundaries, doesn’t have to pause after we get the results from our personality tests. “We imagine we are trying to carry out our own purposes, but without our realizing it, our lives become subsumed in a larger purpose,” Lew writes.

When we bring our attention to our selves in context, we bring attention to the ways we participate in community—see under sangha, tshuvah, community organizing, too—and so we can actually relax into the larger. If we bring our full identities into practice with others, we can function within our identities in a way that is participatory rather than self-involved, and so allows us something beyond.

This “something beyond” doesn’t have to mean God, doesn’t have to mean some New-Agey aura that expands out in pink and purple from our heads as our pupils grow cartoonishly huge. It can just mean citizenship. It can mean, “I know that you and I both live in the same neighborhood.” It can just mean a nod.

The post Healthy Boundaries appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Journalist Katherine Ozment’s new book, Grace without God: The Search for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging in a Secular Age details the author’s attempt to answer her 9-year-old son’s question of “what are we?” after he witnessed a Good Friday ritual. After Ozment realized that she couldn’t decide what her “religionless” family might be missing, she set out to answer these questions for herself, and interviewed the nation’s faithful Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and Jews, as well as members of non-denominational spiritual and ethical communities.

Even though the number of “religiously unaffiliated” Americans continues to rise, the need for organized faiths hasn’t disappeared. People still crave the things that religion once provided—the feeling of community, a moral blueprint, opportunities for ritual practice—and in wake of their absence, have begun designing practices that serve similar purposes. Drawing upon traditions from Zen Buddhism and Judaism, one group at the San Francisco Zen Center created a ceremony to mark their teens’ coming-of-age.

—Marie Scarles, Editorial Assistant

Religions have long provided coming-of-age ceremonies marking the transition from adolescence into adulthood. Adolescence is a difficult time, and yet in America today if you don’t go through a religious coming-of-age program, transitioning into adulthood consists of getting your driver’s license and graduating from high school. We mark this transition by letting young adults drive and continue their studies. Where is the opportunity to state values and commit to something beyond academic achievement and material success? Religions provide structures to acknowledge this passage, but parents who don’t want their kids to profess a creed and pledge allegiance to a faith tradition have to create meaning themselves.

As fog lifted off the Pacific coast on an unseasonably cold Mother’s Day, sixteen families gathered under the rustic roof of the Green Dragon Temple at the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County, California. Incense filled the air, and ritual bells alerted the group that the ceremony—a culmination of nine months of study by a group of teenagers—was about to begin. Sixteen girls and boys would pass from adolescence into adulthood before their mentors and families. Even though the event was being held in a zendo with a statue of the Buddha near the center, the ceremony itself was a secular one. Many of the parents who had signed their kids up for the yearlong program were seeking a meaningful coming-of-age ritual that differed from Christian confirmation or a Jewish bar mitzvah.

Kathryn Guta was sitting beside me on the raised platform along one side of the room. As we waited for the official ceremony to begin, she told me she had been raised Catholic but left and hasn’t looked back. When she adopted her daughter, Lakpa, from Nepal, she knew that she wanted her to be grounded in basic morality, and to learn tools to quiet her mind and examine her experience in a nonjudgmental way. She decided to let her choose her framework, so when Lakpa was young, Kathryn took her to all kinds of religious communities, searching for the right fit. At first, Lakpa didn’t like any of the groups they tried. Then Kathryn found the Zen center and started attending public lectures there herself. She learned about the coming-of-age program and liked that it was a structured approach and focused on important virtues while being free of religious dogma. Each month the students explored a value, such as listening, persistence, and connection. Through the study of these values, the mentors hoped to help the teens explore what they stood for and what they would seek to give to the world.

Lakpa had been sick that morning and wasn’t sure she could make it, but her mother encouraged her to come. She wanted her to see the program through because she wanted to give her daughter something, as her own parents had given her the Catholic faith. “Soon she’ll be on her own,” Kathryn said. “This is the last chance I have to do something like this for her.”

The ceremony began with the students walking in from the back of the room in two lines, one of girls and one of boys. They streamed past the large wooden Buddha set on a platform-like chair and came to sit on cushions in front. Though their hair was neatly combed, no one was formally dressed; they wore plain white shirts and dark pants. Then the mentors took turns asking the girls and boys rise and tell the group one word that sums up what they stand for and one gift they will give to the world in their lifetime.

The mentors then called up the parents to speak directly about the qualities they most appreciated in the children and their hopes for them. The ceremony was sealed when the mentors gave each student a new name that combined the quality they saw in him or her and their hope for the student in adult life.

When Lakpa stood, her hands tucked into her light-colored hooded sweatshirt, she coughed several times, cleared her throat, and said, “I stand for friendship, and my gift to the world is humor.” Kathryn came to the front of the room and spoke about Lakpa’s struggles, comparing them to the recent Nepali earthquake and calling her daughter a mountain. “You came from the mountains and you have become a mountain. Your feet are planted in the sweet earth. You have also experienced earthquakes.” At this point, both mother and daughter began softly crying. Kathryn closed by saying that, despite all the difficulties, it has been her honor to be Lapka’s mother. The mentors instructed Lakpa to take her gifts into the world as she moves into adulthood and presented her with a card bearing her newly given name: Mountain Humor.

Other students rose and recited what they stood for (change, kindness, compassion) and what gift they offered the world (acceptance, honesty, joy). Their parents walked up and, standing about six feet from their children, told them how profoundly they had touched their lives and what they hoped for them: that you will be happy, that you will be at peace with yourself, that you love yourself as much as we love you. One father told his daughter, “I’m a bow and you’re the arrow. As much as I’d like the arrow to go far, I’d like the bow to be stable.” He ended by saying, “Thank you for everything you’ve given us.”

The parents’ stories were at once unique and universal. They were as different as the kids, each of whom stood and proclaimed an identity and purpose, and alike in their love for their children. The ritual called on them all to put forth their best selves, the ideal of what it is they see in themselves. It was the epitome of the “as-if” world Michael Puett says ritual gives us, that ceremonial situation in which all is aligned so that when we go back out into our chaotic lives, we can remember this touchstone and return as needed to the sense of what is best in us.

The program began about 20 years ago when several parents approached the abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center at the time, Norman Fischer, and asked for his help guiding their sons through adolescence. The parents wanted a Buddhist ceremony similar to the bar mitzvah Fischer had created for his twin sons. Fischer obliged, spending two years meeting regularly with the boys. Over the course of that experience, he developed a program based on nine qualities of maturity, or virtues, that they explored together. Today’s program follows that model.

How do we become who we are meant to be? This is a question religion has long engaged. But just because we lose religion, we don’t have to lose the question, or the rituals that help us answer it. Coming of age is a human transition, not a religious one. We all leave childhood for adulthood and take up our places in the world.

Before the ceremony, the students and parents attended a dharma talk. “Today is one of those days that’s never happened before,” the teacher said by way of opening. He laughed and went on to explain: “It’s boundless and unpredictable. What will you do with today?” He said that the Zen tradition is about finding your place. “Can you stand your ground, speak your truth, and honor your gifts?” he asked. He encouraged listeners to seek a life based not on image but on a felt sense, on what we know in our “heart brain.” He said material wealth and exploitation would not bring an extraordinary life. In fact, that would be an ordinary one. Instead, “what is extraordinary is to settle down in what is ordinary and bring it alive.”

The post Coming of Age in a Secular Era appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In 1990, a group of eight rabbis and Jewish scholars came to India for an audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, who had asked them to unlock the mystery of Jewish survival in exile for two millennia.

At one point in their discussion, after one rabbi explained how, in our prayers and customs, every Jew is to be reminded of the exile, the Dalai Lama said: “This is what I call the Jewish secret—to keep your tradition. In every important aspect of human life, something is there to remind you: we have to return, to take responsibility.”

Although in many ways Buddhism and Judaism are very different, I think each can serve to enlighten the other. In this light I offer a sample of Hasidic Jewish insights that I believe can be of use to both Buddhists and Jews.

Rabbi Michel of Zlotchov once said to his children, “My life was always blessed in that I never needed anything until I had it.”

♦ 

Rabbi Rami Shapiro writes: “Aren’t all religions equally true? No, all religions are equally false. The relationship of religion to truth is like that of a menu to a meal. The menu describes the meal as best it can. It points to something beyond itself. As long as we use the menu as a guide we do it honor. When we mistake the menu for the meal, we do it and ourselves a grave injustice.”

♦

Soon after the death of Rabbi Moshe of Kobrin someone asked one of his disciples what was the most important thing to his teacher. The disciple thought and then replied, “Whatever he happened to be doing at the moment.”

The post Buddhism Meets Hasidism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

At 6 a.m., my teacher strikes the singing bowl. The tone spirals out, becomes hollow. At the center of a room emptied of sound, we sit cross-legged, facing a brick wall. Slowly the mind quiets, the breath deepens; the sounds from outside seep through the bricks—a jogger, two kids laughing and arguing their way to the bus stop, an ambulance, a helicopter.

Right now there is no text, no prayer, no millennia of continuity, no God inspecting my deeds. There is my teacher and there is me, sinking below the turbulence in which I had swum for four decades. When my teacher strikes the bowl again, it jars me back to the surface. As the sound once again spools out—my lungs are open, my head is clear, and my knees ache. With silence and stillness, another day begins.

That was a decade ago. My story is not unique. Raised with little knowledge of or connection to Judaism yet seeking a spiritual path, I found Buddhism. A swift but deep journey into Buddhist practice led me, eventually, back to a Jewish practice informed by study and meditation. Something like this has happened to thousands of Buddhists in the West. Some Jews return to Judaism, some fully embrace Buddhism, but most find Judaism compatible with the contemplative practices they learn in the meditation hall. As writer Ellen Frankel has pointed out, alienated Jews seek a religious path that is open to them but not laden with antiquated dogma—a path that does not require conversion, yet engages the spirit. It’s hard to know exactly how many Jews practice in American sanghas, but it is undeniable that they make up a significant portion of the community. Indeed, Jay Michaelson, a contributing editor to The Jewish Daily Forward, claims that the Western practice of Buddhism is itself an invention of disaffected Jews. One imaginative ayatollah goes as far as to suggest that Jews, eager to escape universal loathing, created Buddhism as a cover.

Buddhism helped me through a time of intense spiritual dislocation. Seated in meditation or in study with my teacher, I began to apprehend an internal narrative depicting myself as a helpless victim of stronger wills rather than an active cocreator of my circumstances. In the zendo, I learned how to sit still with and gradually overcome that story. And doing so has transformed the connection to God that I experience in the synagogue. Now, the interplay between synagogue and zendo is helping me through an even more difficult period.

Less than a month ago, my wife was diagnosed with cancer. When the call came, we were standing outside a frozen yogurt shop with our eldest daughter and her boyfriend. Our daughter immediately dissolved into tears—the mothers of two close friends had lost battles with cancer in the past couple years. Our daughter’s tears caused my wife to immediately begin sobbing; the boyfriend and I placed our arms around our loves and cast our helpless gazes to the ground.

So much has been written about the choices available to Western Jews as they go about customizing a spiritual life. But what becomes of your spiritual life when it’s confined to the single, unglamorous task of caretaking? When your reservoir of compassion repeatedly runs dry, and when you suffer everyday in seeing your partner suffer—what then?

In my early days of Buddhist study, when my teacher asked me to carry a journal and to hold the thought “Not Two” in my mind for a week, I wasn’t certain what she meant, or what I should or shouldn’t be thinking. One autumn day, I visited my parents in the Chicago community in which I’d grown up. I parked my car in the shade of a maple tree. When I returned to my car, I saw that one side of the tree’s canopy of leaves had turned red and gold while the other remained green. In that moment, I had a flash of perception about the helpful illusion of dualism. It was fall and not-fall; the tree was one and not one; and I was one and not-one with the tree, and with each and all of its leaves.

This lesson reverberates each time I accompany my wife to her doctors’ appointments and chemotherapy sessions. For her, these visits are equal parts anxiety, boredom and physical pain. She receives questionnaires with seemingly endless, vague questions and she scours educational materials. I take notes. In all of this, we are alone and not alone.

Each morning, prior to meditating, I pause to reflect on the Not-Two-ness of my wife and I, the pain and the waiting, the healthy cells and the cancer.

But prayer, too, is helpful. It is said that we pray not to change God’s mind but to change our own disposition toward the world, and indeed all of creation. Jewish prayer, which in its traditional form is an intricately choreographed series of words and actions, has always sustained my wife. Praying with her in community, before the Ark that holds the Torah, it is possible to feel the Not-Two-ness of the entire community—its yearnings for peace and wholeness.

Joseph B. Soloveitchik, in The Lonely Man of Faith, noted that there are two stories about God’s creation of Adam in the book of Genesis. The first (Gen. 1:26–29) says only that God made Adam in His image; the second (Gen. 2:7), meanwhile, says that Adam formed from the dust of the Earth and God breathed life into his nostrils. The first Adam, says Soloveitchik, is a creator: restless and driven, eager to harness the abundant resources at his disposal. He asks not “Why?” but “How?” The second Adam, on the other hand, is seized by curiosity and wonder. He is a receptor and explorer of the abundance in which he finds himself. The first Adam builds and works through community; the second Adam reflects on his aloneness and seeks to understand.

This is the Not-Two-ness of Judaism.

Each morning during these past turbulent weeks, I have risen before my wife, quietly making my way downstairs to meditate. Even as I sink below the surface of my roiled mind, I stay alert for her footfall. As soon as I hear those first steps—even when in the midst of meditation—I bound up the stairs to check on her. I continue to pray that the forces of healing will vanquish her cancer. And I continue to sit in silence each morning, breathing, thinking and not-thinking, becoming aware of all that arises and falls away, within and without.

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As the teachings of the Buddha take root in the West, they are inevitably influenced by their encounter with our existing religions. Similarly, as we who were raised in Christian and Jewish traditions engage in a dedicated way with Buddhist teachings and meditations, our religious beliefs, rituals, and practices are reciprocally influenced.  As the Dalai Lama acknowledges, “Buddhism has evolved differently in different times and places and yet the essential Dharma remains the same.  The Buddha’s prime concern was that all beings should find peace and freedom from suffering.  His advice that we should try to help each other if we can and at least avoid doing one another harm remains relevant everywhere, reaching across the boundaries of nationality, language, religion and culture.”

In the Jewish tradition of my upbringing, there is a ritual of prayers and candle lighting to welcome the Sabbath at sundown each Friday.  There is another ritual for bidding the Sabbath good-bye and entering the new week, at sundown on Saturday.  This ceremony is called Havdalah, which literally means “separation.”  We are marking the separation between the Sabbath day of rest and reflection, and the six days of ordinary work and activities.  Although there is a broad continuum encompassing the varying degrees to which Jewish individuals and communities observe the Sabbath, to honor the Sabbath at all is to recognize that Havdalah, or separation, does indeed exist.
 
Raised in a Reform Jewish household, we usually had the traditional challah, or braided bread, at dinner on Friday evenings.  With a simple Hebrew blessing over the bread, we marked the arrival of the Sabbath.  Sometimes we also blessed and sipped wine.  Years later I discovered the reason we rarely lit Sabbath candles was that my maternal grandmother had inadvertently caused a small household fire one Friday evening when her Sabbath candles set a tablecloth ablaze.  My grandfather then forbade Sabbath candle lighting, so my mother did not have that tradition to bring into our family. 

Although I have always identified culturally and ethnically as an American Jew, my knowledge of Judaism as a religion was severely limited.  It consisted primarily of annual Children’s Services at a Reform Synagogue in New York City on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.  The awkwardness of obligatory synagogue attendance was heightened by the physical discomfort of the outfits my sisters and I were required to wear on these occasions.

Many years later, as a young adult in graduate school, I spent a few years delving more deeply into Judaism.  Although I never found my spiritual home in a synagogue, I taught myself to read Hebrew prayers and blessings, studied the Torah, observed the weekly Sabbath and major Jewish holidays, and participated in a community Chavarah, or group of people celebrating their Judaism together, unaffiliated with any congregation.  My journey led me to meditation practice, which I began as an attempt to bring greater sanity and balance to a stressful inner world, and to cope with the ever increasing suffering in the world at large. 

Meditation practice resonated for me in a way nothing had before, and it was my interest in deepening my meditation practice that led me to Buddhist retreat centers.  On silent retreat year after year I was exposed to the teachings of the Buddha, and this is the spiritual path I have traveled for more than two decades. I have dedicated these years of my life to understanding the fundamental teachings of the Buddha to the best of my ability.  The Four Noble Truths, The Noble Eightfold Path, The Five Precepts, The Law of Karma, and the Four Brahma Viharas:  these are the precious teachings and practices that shape my view of life and the world, and that over time, increasingly guide my actions.
 
I am aware that mine is but one of many individual stories of how Westerners have come to Buddhism. The Dalai Lama is quoted as saying that Buddhism is more a “science of mind” than a religion. Because the Pali word citta means both “mind” and “heart,” and because Buddhist teachings and practices so skillfully show us how to develop both the intellect and the emotions, I interpret the Dalai Lama’s assertion to mean that Buddhism is a science of mind and heart.  This has certainly been my experience.
 
There is ongoing discussion, and significant disagreement, among Western Buddhists about how much melding and morphing traditional Buddhism can undergo without diminishing or distorting its essence. Some Westerners have become what is referred to as “Buddhist converts,” meaning they have adopted Buddhist principles and practices as their chosen religion.  Others continue to identify with the religious tradition of their upbringing, and to one degree or another study Buddhist teachings, and practice Buddhist meditations, more as a way of understanding and navigating this human incarnation, than as a formal religion.

Beloved Vietnamese meditation master Thich Nhat Hanh urges Westerners not to abandon our religions of origin, if these religions continue to hold meaning and relevance to us.  Rather, he encourages us to explore what Buddhism offers, and to take to heart the Buddhist teachings and practices that enable us to decrease personal and communal suffering and to promote greater love, healing and peace in our lives and our world. He calls Buddhism  “the strongest form of humanism we have,” explaining that “it came to life so we could learn to live with responsibility, compassion, and loving-kindness.”  He sees the Five Precepts as “a global ethic,” a set of guiding principles not just for Buddhists, but for all of humanity.

I consider myself and my family fortunate in that my meditation practice and Buddhist path were firmly established before I became a parent.  Like all parents, I needed to consider what type of religious training, if any, I wanted my children to have.  And like many American Buddhist practitioners, I am continually exploring ways to offer my children some measure of the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha’s teachings, as well as an appreciation of mindfulness.

Just as I love and respect the teachings of the Buddha and his legacy of healing meditation practices, I have also grown to love celebrating the major Jewish holidays:  the Sabbath, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Passover and Chanukah. I agree with the Dalai Lama when he says, “Often we encounter things in another tradition that help us better appreciate our own.” My understanding of the Buddha’s teachings has enriched my observance of the major Jewish holidays, and motivated me to modify traditional Jewish rituals and blessings in ways that reflect the Dharma.

Perhaps of all the Jewish holidays, I love Shabbat the most.  For many years before becoming a parent, I had celebrated the Jewish Sabbath with a half-day silent self-retreat at home every Saturday morning. I ate a silent breakfast and lunch, and in between did alternating periods of sitting and walking meditation and yoga. During those years, my Saturday morning routine provided me with a strong sense of balance, contentment and refuge amidst the many and varied events of my personal life and of the larger world.  It was something I held close, and looked forward to all week long.  My Saturday self-retreat went by the wayside as I adjusted to motherhood.  However, the teachings of the Buddha have been integrated into my family’s Friday night blessings and Saturday evening Havdalah ceremony.

Havdalah is one of the most ancient Jewish rituals.  It is a beautiful, visual, participatory ceremony that consists of six interrelated parts:  the introduction, the blessing for the wine, the blessing for the spices, the blessing for the lighting of fire, the blessing of Havdalah, or separation of Shabbat from the six days of labor, and the conclusion.  Different Jewish sources offer varied explanations for the symbolism of this ceremony.  The introduction speaks about life and happiness.  The wine symbolizes joy, and the potential for healing pain in our lives and the world.  The sweet aroma of the spices represents the sweetness of the Sabbath day of rest, and offers us a sweet smell in exchange for the Sabbath that is ending. The light is from a special braided Havdalah candle that contains multiple wicks.  It reminds us that just as fire can be used for beneficial purposes or for destruction, our actions can create either happiness or suffering.  We commit ourselves to choosing our actions wisely, so that we can promote greater peace and harmony in ourselves, our families, our communities, and our world.

After the blessings for the wine, spices, and light, the Havdalah blessing urges us to consciously recognize both the sacred and the ordinary in our lives. Following the Havdalah blessing is a short Hebrew song about the Prophet Elijah who many Jews believe will herald the future time of ultimate redemption and happiness.  The Havdalah ceremony then concludes with the wish for a good week.

Our family’s revised Havdalah ceremony follows this order.  Each family member, and any friends who have joined us for Saturday dinner, has a written copy of the ceremony.  We assemble in the dining room and light the Havdalah candle.  One of my children reads: “With compassion and loving kindness, we honor all beings, nature, and life itself.  May all beings live in peace, be free from suffering, and know true happiness.”

We raise the cup of wine, over which we recite the Hebrew blessing and a modified English translation:  “Blessed is the Guardian of the Universe, who brings forth fruit from the vine.”  The wine is circulated for everyone to sip.

Next we raise the spice box, inside of which is fresh ground cinnamon.  We read the explanation for the spices, say the blessing in Hebrew and English, and circulate the spice box for each person to enjoy the sweet aroma.  “The added soul Shabbat confers is leaving now.  The sweetness of these spices consoles us at the moment of its passing, and reminds us that all things arise and pass away.  May our awareness of the impermanence of life help us to experience each moment as precious, and may our every action serve to heal the world of pain.  Blessed is the Guardian of the Universe, who brings forth all the spices.”

After the spices have circulated, the burning candle is held up, and all gather closer, in order to see the interplay of shadow and light on our outstretched hands.  We bless the light, and offer gratitude for the Sabbath.  “Blessed is the Guardian of the Universe, who brings forth the light of fire.  We give thanks for the Sabbath day that now is ending.  We are grateful for its many blessings:  for peace and joy, rest for the body, and refreshment for the soul.  May something of its meaning and message remain with us as we enter the new week, lifting all that we do to a higher plane of holiness, and inspiring us to work with new heart for the liberation of all beings.  May the quiet of Sabbath open our hearts to all the miracles of life.  In the week ahead, may we continue to cultivate compassion, loving-kindness, ethical conduct, truthful speech, and deep listening.”

Next is the short joyous song about Elijah:  “Eliyahu Hanavi,” and then the Havdalah blessing in Hebrew, which we revised in English to say, “Blessed is the Guardian of the Universe, who separates sacred from ordinary, light from darkness, the seventh day of rest fro the six days of labor.  May this Sabbath day help us to see the commonplace in the holy, and feel the sacred in the ordinary.  May we live fully both the sorrows and the joys of life.”

The candle is extinguished by submerging it in the wine cup.  Our ceremony ends with the  Hebrew chant, “Shavua tov, shavua tov, shavua tov, shavua tov,”  which we repeat in English, “Good week,” and in Spanish, “Buena semana.”  We embrace one another, and sing the following wish, “A good week, a week of peace, may gladness reign and love increase.”  With the conclusion of Havdalah, we enter the new week, always feeling at least a little bit refreshed, and always a little more in touch with the potential for goodness in ourselves and in the world.

The Sabbath day offers the possibility of slowing down, of being mindful, of connecting more deeply with what is most meaningful to us.  Havdalah is a potent reminder that human beings embody two complementary aspects: the sacred and the ordinary. 

This concept of “the sacred and the ordinary” is a Jewish teaching.  However, it translates for me into what is often referred to in the Buddha’s teaching as absolute and relative reality, or  unconditioned and conditioned existence.  Although we are often preoccupied with wordly concerns and activities, Havdalah urges us to recognize that we live simultaneously on two planes of existence.  Attending to our ordinariness without considering our sacred aspect easily leads to isolation, depletion, and delusion.  We can become overwhelmed by the inevitable changes in life.  We forget our true nature.  Exclusive contemplation of the sacred, of absolute reality, could foster a sense of disconnection from our humanness:  our body, our emotions, our place in society, as well as consideration for the earth itself. 

The sacred and the ordinary is what Jack Kornfield calls “the universal and the personal.”  In his new book “The Wise Heart,” he explains, “We are spiritual beings incarnated into human form.  We need to remember our zip code as well as our Buddha nature…Our existence has both a universal and a personal dimension.  This psychological paradox is called the Two Truths…Both dimensions must be respected if we are to be happy and free.”

In addition to the simple beauty of our weekly Havdalah ceremony, and to the pause of mindfulness that it provides, I find in Havdalah something yet deeper and more meaningful.  It serves as a potent reminder of the Buddha’s assertion that we must honor both the universal and the personal within ourselves, in others, and in our world.  Week by week, year after year, I watch my children grow, and I continue to appreciate the beauty and importance of this reminder. 

The post Family Dharma: The Sacred and the Ordinary appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.