![]() A JuBu's Passage to India I feel like a fraud calling myself a Buddhist. For starters, I’m too much of a theist, too attached to the notion of a personal God whose presence is manifest in my daily life. There are many other reasons. What I really want is ecstasy, not equanimity. I’ve never officially taken refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, or any sangha. My formal meditation practice is limited, and half the time I waste my meditation hour berating myself for not being able to make my mind pipe down. And impermanence shakes me on some bone-deep level I can’t verbally access. I hate letting go. But the Judaism I’ve come to practice is so colored by Buddhism that the pure, uncut stuff of Jewish-American culture sends me reeling. I have trouble relating to shuls that don’t have meditation minyans. Often I like to strip the liturgy down so I can sit for a while with what our prayers evoke in me. I question the validity of focusing solely on Jewish narratives and Jewish suffering when suffering is so universal. JuBu is a patchwork identity, but it may be the closest I’m going to get to a label that doesn’t itch. I want I-Thou relationships and a fundamental consciousness of nonduality at the same time: if that doesn’t make me some kind of pushme-pullyou, I don’t know what would. On my better days, I see an appealing complementarity in the two impulses. On the one hand, the distance between God and world, waiting to be bridged; on the other hand, an awareness of how illusory those categories, and that distance, really are. The prophetic (Jewish) call to action balanced by a (Buddhist) sense of how my actions in the world shape my karma. Two traditions ought to give me two useful lenses through which to see the world, ensuring that I can always keep things in perspective and in focus. That was the theory. But would it carry me through my first trip to India intact? The first book I read about India—at least, the first one that made a strong impression—wasn’t really about India, though it’s a true story for which India was the backdrop. It was the JuBu bible, Rodger Kamenetz’s The Jew in the Lotus, which tells the story of a group of rabbis (and a poet) who went to visit the Dalai Lama in exile to share the Jewish people’s secrets to Diaspora survival.
Given the vivid descriptions of India that The Jew in the Lotus contains, I had come to feel about India the way many Jews seem to feel about Israel: as if the place itself might be innately holy, capable of changing me. At the same time, my husband and I tend to be skeptical of prepackaged religious experience; we wanted to find the kind of holy encounters that arise unexpectedly. Ordinary spiritual travelers might have made their way to Dharamsala, to walk the streets those rabbis and lamas walked, or maybe gone in search of the Bodhi tree beneath which Gautama famously achieved enlightenment. But we avoided those sites, and instead planned an itinerary that began in Bombay, wound through Rajasthan, and ended in New Delhi. We spent most of our time walking, from hilltop forts down into cities, through bazaars and twisting lanes, taking in as much India as we could handle through our eyes and our hands and our feet. Before we left I made all kinds of promises to myself: I would be open to whatever experiences arose, I would endeavor to encounter India with an open heart and open mind, I would enjoy everything. I would be the perfect Jewish-Buddhist traveler. Whatever that means.
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From previous issues:
The Mall Balloon-Man Moment of the Spirit
Josh's Dinner in the Cafeteria
Keri HaRishon
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