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My Jewish Heritage and Buddhism by
Richard Stambul
In the fall of 2005 I was asked by Rev. Usuki to present a talk (at the annual Tri-Temple mini-seminar sponsored this year by our own WLA Buddhist Education Committee) about my personal connection with Buddhism and how my Jewish heritage impacts those beliefs. I’ve been honored by many requests to reprint my discussion that day, however, feeling it is too tedious to reprint in its entirety, I have, instead, edited my notes for this article. I claim no originality as it has been a lifelong process I am only beginning. And I do so after learning that by sharing my personal beliefs with my friends in our Sangha, I improve myself in the process.
Drawing from a wonderful book entitled, The Jew in the Lotus by Rodger Kamenetz, I like to describe myself as a man with Jewish Roots and Buddhist Wings. I was born into a Jewish tradition with rich cultural traditions including food, dance, music, and history, but my spiritual nourishment has surprisingly (for me) come from Shin Buddhism. That makes me different in perspective from others in our Sangha. I live in a dualistic world in which I am so fortunate to honor my Jewish family, its traditions and history, and, at the same time, to continue on my path inside Jodo Shinshu Buddhism that has shined a spiritual light for me (hence, the Buddhist wings with which I feebly try to “fly up”).
As the poet Louis Reyes Rivera recently stated, “Always there is need for song. And every human has a poem to write, a compulsion to contemplate out loud, an urge to dig out that ore of confusion locked up inside. But with the contradictions of privilege and caste, of class and gender-distinctions regulating access, of those ever-present distortions in textbooks with their one-sided measure of human worth, and with the culture of white man still serving as ultimate yardstick to what is acceptable,”…“not everyone is permitted to learn to read, much less to study poetry or hone the art and take the risk of putting one's self on paper.”
While wanting to be naturally soothed by self-definition, too many among us learn to rely on commercial lyricists to reflect our joy and pain. In attempting to write out my “poetry”, my thoughts, for this seminar, I found myself substituting the thoughts, the feelings, the memories, the deeds of others lest my own thoughts and feelings were inadequate; insufficient; incapable of rising to receive the accolades of my friends joining me this morning, at this time, to honor the Dharma. At best, we latch onto committed activists who take on as social vocation the work of bridging the human spirit with word made flesh. At worst, we fall prey to professional wordsmiths (politicians and preachers alike) who conjure up another religion that dissuades us from social contention. Somewhere in between these two extremes, we sometimes meet (as we do now in this “Dharma Dojo”) to hear the experience and thoughts of others from which we may extract some personal benefit.
Eventually, I came to understand that the one true religion isn’t Zen or Taoism. And it isn’t Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, or Sufism. Nor is it Christianity. The one true religion doesn’t have a name. All the religions with names are derived from the one true religion, which is here and now, eternal, the living law of what actually is. Christ and Buddha, Moses and Mohammed, and every other real spiritual teacher saw the same thing. There is nothing else to see. But all of them had to speak to the people of their time and culture, which is why they sound so different to us. But the source is the same. Aldous Huxley called the one true religion the “Perennial Philosophy.”
And still we meet to confer together in our search for the poetry and dance and sustenance of the soul.
“The Perennial Philosophy is what’s true for everyone, everywhere, always. All stress the importance of telling the truth. All say----if they are true----that we shouldn’t harm each other because we’re all brothers and sisters. When Christ said that one must be born again, he was speaking of the enlightenment experience. The goal of life is the realization of god within each of us. Ultimately, you can’t get it out of a book; you have to experience it directly. “The kingdom of heaven is within...”
And an older, more ancient good Book teaches that Moses led the children of Israel out of the land of bondage, and out of the land of Egypt, to freedom, to a promised land of milk and honey. We all look to escape the slavery of Egypt; but the slavery of Egypt and the freedom of Israel is merely a metaphor for our sometimes earnest efforts to shed the chains of our own slavery: to escape the midnight horrors of our own childhood; our own nightmares; our own lives; our own choices; to end the blame we shower on our own parents, on others, on our own past, our own mistakes, as an explanation, or an excuse, a reason, a declaration of non-responsibility. I search for Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy because of my own fear, my own loathing of my fear to carry on my search in my own words; to look for my own poetry.
As many others before me have said, “...you can’t get it out of a book...” So what is my own poetry? My own fears of inadequacy and insufficiency in my life’s story? My life in Samsara? I seek and take refuge in the Sangha with each of you, to find an awareness of my own limitations, my own fears, my own ignorance, my own anger, on a spiritual plane in which I may hopefully learn to accept myself as I am. When each of us finally arrives at the end of our own waterfall, joining together again as we began...when each of us finally ends the exodus from our own inner-Egypt, filled with compassion rather than judgments, perhaps we will learn some acceptance of our deepest selves that permits us to be compassionate with ourselves, and to all beings as the gift we truly are to and for each other.
Ku no shaba ya,
sakura ga sa ke ba,
saita to te.
A world of grief and pain,
Flowers bloom;
Even then.....
-Kobayashi, Issa
© 2008 West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple Online
