Norman Fischer, sitting cross-legged on his cushion and wearing a kippa, or skullcap, is talking about the exodus from Egypt, the climactic moment when the Hebrews are cornered by Pharaoh. “They can’t go forward and they can’t go back,” he says. “It’s as if everything funnels down to that one moment and then”—Fischer’s arms suddenly sweep wide to part the Red Sea—“Liberation!” he shouts.
It’s a week before Passover on a bright, San Francisco spring day, and Fischer is helping lead a one-day retreat of sitting meditation and Jewish wisdom teachings at the Makor Or Jewish Meditation Center. Except for the Jewish teachings and the kippas, the retreat is largely indistinguishable from a one-day Zen retreat. This isn’t surprising, since Fischer is the former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and runs the Everyday Zen Center in Mill Valley across the bay.
I have joined several dozen Jews from a variety of backgrounds gathered in the small house that is Makor Or. I’m here, mostly, as a final step in vanquishing my lifelong notion that I need to decide whether I am a Buddhist or a Jew. It shouldn’t matter—I sit, I walk, I sing, I pray. I read Fischer’s Zen-inspired translations of the Psalms. There’s no conflict—although it has taken me up until now to realize that.
Fischer was never torn the way I’ve been. “I never felt that I rejected Judaism, or became a Buddhist,” he says. “I was ordained as a Zen priest, but I never saw that as switching. It’s really karma.”
My karma has led me from Hebrew School and a Bar Mitzvah in Redwood City to Ch’an retreats in Taiwan to Vipassana retreats in Marin County to Sabbaths in Southern California and back to Hebrew School—this time for my two children. I’m a tiny piece of an interesting phenomenon. Western Buddhism is chock-full of Jews: Roshi Bernie Tetsugen Glassman, Lama Surya Das, Natalie Goldberg, Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Sylvia Boorstein, Mel Weitsman, Dennis Genpo Merzel Roshi, Philip Kapleau, and on and on. So many Jews have taken to Buddhism that a term has been invented to describe them—“Jubu,” or occasionally, “Buju.” Their stories form a genre, ranging from The Jew in the Lotus, about a dialog between the Dalai Lama and a group of American Jews, to That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist, Boorstein’s book about her dual identities.
Like me, some of these Jews have integrated Jewish and Buddhist practices into their lives. Others are committed wholly to Buddhist practice. None of them can escape their heritage, any more than blacks or Asians studying Buddhism can escape theirs. Not that some Jews don’t try. “In every person I know who has turned to Buddhism, there was both a sincere desire for spiritual gratification, and a desire to get away from Judaism,” maintains Alan Lew, Makor Or’s director and the rabbi at Temple Beth Shalom.
Lew spent years studying Zen. He was a practitioner at the San Francisco Zen Center and its Tassajara retreat facility, and the director of the Berkeley Zen Center. But as his practice deepened, he was startled to find Jewish “background noise” coming up in his meditation—Jewish imagery, phrases, childhood memories, desire for Jewish community. When that noise deepened into a core of Jewish identity, he decided to become a rabbi. He recounted his story in One God Clapping, a Bay Area bestseller.
Ten years ago, Alan Lew and Norman Fischer were key figures in my journey to making peace with my spiritual path. On a day of drumming rain, the two of them convened a daylong, Jewish-Buddhist dialogue in a giant yurt at San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm in Marin County. Dozens of us crammed into the tent to sit zazen, pray, do yoga, study Torah and read a sutra with a Zen abbot and a rabbi. No mix-and-match Zen prayers or Hebrew mantras. Just each tradition doing what it did best. I felt a sense of homecoming.
Why has being a Jew and a Buddhist been such a struggle for me? Some of it is undoubtedly cultural. Jews have a history of wrestling with spiritual issues, reaching back to the biblical tale of Jacob wrestling with God’s angel. The word “Israel,” or Yisrael, literally means “one who struggles with God.” The Talmudic practice of pilpul (“to dispute violently”) pits students against each other in spiritual argument. I don’t need the other students. My head pilpuls everything to death.
My father escaped Nazi Germany and my mother lived through the bombing of Britain. They came to the United States in 1948, two lucky European Jews who survived when millions didn’t. They settled in Palo Alto and brought my siblings and me up as thousands of post-World War II Jews did: immersed in temple life, festivals, Bar Mitzvahs and gatherings of Jewish family and friends. But there was little or no exposure to God or the rich reservoir of mystical Jewish tradition that the Nazis nearly extinguished when they destroyed Eastern European Jewry. I loved the social and ritual rhythms of that life, but when I began searching for spiritual answers at around 17, I turned elsewhere.
So did Fischer. His family kept kosher, went to services and developed its community around the temple. He enjoyed it. A rabbi was one of his mentors. Fischer used to lead prayer services. But when he developed a “religious impulse” to understand death and reality as a teenager, he began studying Zen, not Jewish thought. “It really seemed to me at the time that Judaism had nothing to say about those things,” Fischer says. “Judaism seemed more like a cultural system.”
Lama Surya Das describes a similar experience on Long Island. “I would ask a question in Hebrew School, and they would say, ‘No one knows. Be quiet,’” he says. “The parents wanted us to marry a Jewish mate, but the belief in God was erratic. I didn’t feel a burning devoutness in Judaism that I feel in my own Buddhist practice.”
Seeking my own truths, I started meditating at 17. A high school counselor thought Transcendental Meditation would be good for a high-strung kid like me. I loved it—especially my teacher’s guarantee that I would become enlightened if I just meditated twenty minutes twice a day for five years.
I stuck with TM through my sophomore year of college. But when TM-ers began talking about levitating and walking through walls, I decided to check out Zen. I settled on the Berkeley Buddhist Priory, an offshoot of Shasta Abbey, a Soto Zen sect in Northern California. I had a little altar in my room, sat for an hour a day and regularly attended one-day retreats. (I also regularly went to Shabbat, or Sabbath, dinners at my parents’ house and had an observant Jewish girlfriend.)
I loved Zen, but I still felt uneasy at times, wondering whether it was possible to be both Jewish and Buddhist simultaneously. My Zen teacher thought it was possible. “But you may become like the hiker who jumps from path to path on a mountain,” he warned. “You may not get to the top.”
After I graduated from college, I moved to Taiwan to study Chinese and Buddhism, and start my career as a journalist. I studied with Master Sheng-yen, a teacher of Ch’an Buddhism who divides his time between Taiwan and the U.S. I immersed myself in the life of his temple outside Taipei—meditating, studying sutras, working in the garden, sitting in intensive retreats called ch’an ch’i.
Sometimes, chanting the Heart Sutra in Sanskrit at 4:30 a.m., I’d have the strange feeling that I was actually chanting Torah. The sing-song cadence, the chanting unbroken by punctuation, the sense of revealed truth took me back to the years when I was one of my old cantor’s prize Torah readers.
When I decided to take the Buddhist precepts, I worried that I might be “converting” from Jew to Buddhist. I asked one of the Chinese nuns-in-training at the Taipei temple what she thought.
“Don’t the ten commandments talk about not killing, not stealing, not lying, not being promiscuous and not drinking?” she asked.
“Well, everything but the drinking part,” I replied.
“So how are you really breaking with your tradition? There’s nothing about the precepts that say you have to stop being Jewish.”
That was enough for me. I took the precepts.
After three years in Taiwan, though, I returned to the U.S. and decided to explore Jewish practice again. I was shocked how little the Jewish people I encountered knew—or cared to know—about Buddhism and my experience.
I contacted the rabbi I grew up with and told him about my Buddhist studies in Taiwan and my desire to learn Jewish spirituality. He was delighted. “You’d be surprised how many kids I talk to have also been involved in cults,” he remarked.
A Hassidic friend of my family proudly told me how he had hammered a small buddha into bits and tossed it off the Santa Cruz pier into the ocean. His rabbi had told him that the buddha, a present from his brother, was an idol that must be destroyed.
My most eye-opening experience with misinformed Jews, though, came in 1990, when an editor at a Los Angeles Jewish newspaper assigned me to write a story about the journey of a delegation of Jewish leaders to visit the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. The Dalai Lama initiated the meeting to discover, among other things, how Jews had managed to maintain their religion and culture after 2,000 years in diaspora.
The Dalai Lama and his Jewish visitors had plenty to talk about: the nature of existence and divinity, the shared longings of exiled Jews and Tibetans, the search for ways to make ancient traditions relevant to a new generation. Buddhism, I pointed out in my article, had been a magnet for some of the Dalai Lama’s Jewish disciples who felt their birth religion had no spiritual answers.
After reading my story, the editor-in-chief rejected it. “The idea of a Jewish-Buddhist dialogue is hogwash,” he said. “What does the Dalai Lama have to do with the Jewish community? I’m not interested in another story about bored, middle-class Jewish kids experimenting