The Spiritual Blend Of Jubu

[sabaijai]

The spiritual blend of JuBu: Mix of Judaism, Buddhism works for some people

By Louis Sahagun

Los Angeles Times

Posted July 14 2006

LOS ANGELES · The altar in Becca Topol's living room carries a statue of Buddha and a garden stone painted with the Hebrew word for peace, "Shalom."

"I'm a Jewish Buddhist -- a JuBu," said Topol, 37. "My Buddhist practice has actually made me a stronger Jew."

While Buddhism has enriched Topol's Judaism -- giving her a deeper sense of spirituality -- it has produced confusion in fellow JuBu David Grotell.

"Although I have a meditation spot in my home, as a Jew, I just can't allow myself to put a statue of Buddha there," he said.

No one knows for certain how many JuBus there are; the last surveys were conducted in the 1970s. Most of the 3 million Buddhists in the United States are Asian, but perhaps 30 percent of all newcomers to Buddhism are Jewish. (By comparison, U.S. Jews number 6 million.)

Alan Lew, who studied Buddhism for a decade before changing course to become a rabbi, calls the paradoxical blend of Judaism, which bows to one God, and Buddhism, which has no supreme being, "a fruitful and beautifully creative meeting of two religious streams that came together in the United States."

"Most people don't go very far into Buddhism; they just want to feel a little better," said Michael Shiffman, founder of L.A. Dharma, a nonsectarian Buddhist organization in Los Angeles. "But can you be Jewish and not believe in God? Good question."

Essentially, Buddhism creates a solitary and quiet path away from suffering and toward a moral life based on an all-inclusive vision of interconnectedness, wisdom and compassion. A method for achieving that awareness is daily meditation.

Buddhism does not require that adherents join anything or reject anything -- even the notion of God. In this regard it differs vastly from Judaism, a community-based tradition that relies on observances, laws and prayers such as the mourner's "kaddish" -- the prayer for the dead -- to connect adherents with a personal god.

So what do Jews find so attractive about Buddhism?

"Suffering is at the heart of the matter," suggested David Gottlieb, whose autobiographical book Letters to a Buddhist Jew examines the life of a "Zen Jew" struggling to resolve his two identities. "Judaism, at its best, embraces suffering and, at its worst, enshrines it. Buddhism explicitly seeks to end suffering, and doesn't look to the past."

A majority of JuBus, as they call themselves, are Baby Boomers who were raised in loosely religious families and began to feel unfulfilled in the tumultuous and experimental 1960s and '70s. They joined the legions of other young men and women searching for spiritual nourishment, and ended up turning to Buddhism, a welcoming meditative practice devoid of the cultural stigmas contained in, say, Christianity or Islam.

And many, like Alan Senauke, now a Buddhist priest in the Bay Area, discovered the two traditions combined easily, almost on their own.

Although he no longer celebrates Jewish holy days, with the exception of Passover, Senauke said, "My Judaism and Buddhism are like vines so entangled they are not separate."

"Because of my Jewishness, I'm faulty as a Buddhist, and because of my Buddhism, I can never really be a practicing Jew," he said. With a smile, he added: "I'm comfortable with that."

"Look at it this way," said Senauke, who is also a noted bluegrass guitarist. "I've been playing Southern music for 45 years, but I'll never be a Southerner."

The boom in Buddhism has left some Jewish leaders wondering how they could better serve their people.

"I'm encouraged that people want to find something more spiritual," said Rabbi Bentzion Kravitz of a group called Jews for Judaism. "But I'm also disillusioned that they have not found it in Judaism. Maybe we haven't done a good enough job of making Jewish mysticism accessible to the masses."

But Marc Lieberman, a San Francisco ophthalmologist who helped arrange a historic dialogue between Jewish leaders and the Dalai Lama in 1989, calls the JuBu phenomenon a fine example of "good old American innovation."

"I'm a healthy mosaic of Judaism and Buddhism," Lieberman said. "My Jewish side is a tribal sensibility; a reflexive identity with the pain and agony of my people, and the pride and glories of their traditions," he said. "But my Buddhist side asks, `Does that exclude others in the world?'"

[bina]

errr.....i guess thats what i am??? a jubu???

a buddhist jewish american kibbutznik with thai partner???? ....

i thought i was just me,

bina

[sabaijai]

errr.....i guess thats what i am??? a jubu???

a buddhist jewish american kibbutznik with thai partner???? ....

It's the marketing categorisation impulse, goes along with bo-bo (bourgeois bohemian), etc.

i thought i was just me,

And behind that, anatta ...

[camerata]

Jubus

Ven. Shravasti Dhammika

A few years ago as I sat in the library of a Buddhist society in Australia the librarian came up and began talking to me. During our conversation he described himself to me as “an Anglican Buddhist.” Not a Christian Buddhist mind you, but an Anglican Buddhist. There is probably something wrong with me but I find this kind of thing completely bewildering. But then, of course, I’m just a simple monk.

Judging from the literature coming out of Buddhist America the new orthodoxy there seems to be that you can be both Jewish and Buddhist. Such people call themselves Jubus or Bujus. Some time ago I saw a book on meditation by Sylvia Boorstein. The title, Its Easier Than You Think, told me straight away that the author must be American. I picked it up and leafed through it. I thought it quite good but its claim that you can be a good (practicing?) Jew and a Buddhist astonished me. One of the author’s other books, which I later read, Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist, discusses this theme in more detail. And how about this one? Buddha Turns the Kabbalah Wheel: Jewish Buddhist Resonance From A Christian Gnostic Perspective by Thomas Ragland. Just reading this title makes me feel like I’m having an identity crisis.

Is it possible to be ethnically Jewish and a practicing Buddhist? Absolutely! Is it possible to be ethnically Jewish and a practicing Buddhist and have a deep regard for and interest in your Jewish heritage? Yes! Is it possible to be ethnically Jewish and a practicing Buddhist and participate in the various Jewish holidays and some of its rites in order to keep in touch with your roots or to please the family? Yes! Is it possible to be a practicing Jew and a practicing Buddhist at the same time? No it is not! The two are mutually incompatible. A Buddhist would have to see most of the practices of Orthodox and even Reformed Judaism as harmless but empty rituals that contributed nothing to the development of virtue or the freeing of the mind. If anything, they reinforce a specific identity; the very thing Buddhism seeks to transcend. The Torah’s unambiguous demand for total allegiance to the God of Israel and the Buddha’s God-free spirituality and world view, separate the two religions from the word go. Do Jewish and Buddhist ethical values have much in common? Yes. But to believe that you can accept all the core principles of Judaism and Buddhism is to have a profound misunderstanding of both and, quite frankly, to betray of the uniqueness of both.

Would it be possible to be a practicing Jew, do meditation, benefit from it and to have a regard for Buddhist spirituality? Yes! Would it be possible to be a practicing Buddhist and have a respect for Jewish beliefs? It would be obligatory. But to believe that you can do justice to the behavioral and intellectual requirements of both at the same time is a delusion. In the good old days the ‘we’re absolutely right and everyone else is absolutely wrong’ approach to religion was responsible for a great deal of smugness, prejudice and hatred. Now, in the ‘good new days’ the ‘we’re right but everyone else is too’ approach is causing nothing but confusion, dishonesty and hypocrisy. I’m not sure which one is worst.

Just so there is no hard feelings, treat yourself to a bit of Jubu humor...

If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?

Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?

Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story.

Accept misfortune as a blessing. Do not wish for perfect health or a life without problems. What would you talk about?

There is no escaping kamma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?

The Torah says, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The Buddha says, ‘There is no self.’ So, maybe we are off the hook.

Incidentally, everything said above applies to those who believe that you can be a Christian, a Mormon, an Exclusive Brethren, a Catholic, an Anglican, a Sikh or an Inuit walrus worshipper and be Buddhist as well. And just to show that it is I who am out of step, the BBC North Yorkshire website has an article about Sadhu Dharmaira who describes himself as a Zen Hindu monk. When asked to explain this apparent anomaly Sadhu said “Of course there is no such thing as Buddhism or Hinduism.” Wow! Deep! And on her website, Irshad Manji mentions a friend of hers who is – wait for it – a Buddhist Muslim! Is it just me or did I hear the sound of a fatwa being hurled?

Have to go now. I want to get back to a really interesting book I’m reading called A Marxist Capitalist’s Analysis Of the Future of Christian Atheism in the 19th Century.

Source: LankaWeb.

[camerata]

Sarah Jessica Parker: Hollywood's Newest Jew-Bu?

2008-08-19 - Vanishing from public view to her discreet Irish hideaway, superstar Parker seems to be seeking tranquility down a path that many of her faith have trodden in the past.

New York, NY (August 19, 2008) - Stressed by her latest challenge as producer of not one but two new cable shows, and dismayed by continuing rumors that her marriage is incontinent, superstar Sarah Jessica Parker seems to be finding tranquility down a path that many of her faith have trodden in the past: Becoming a Jew-Bu.

On a recent vacation to her family's vacation cottage in Ireland, Parker was spotted tucked away in a cozy corner of classy Nancy's bar in Muckros, reading a copy of the Sylvia Boorstein classic, 'Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist,' while sipping a glass of moderately chilled white wine and watching the world go by.

Fellow drinkers enjoying a late-night booze-up with Parker and her husband Matthew Broderick at the spit-and-sawdust style Corner House Bar in nearby Ardara noted Parker avidly perusing 'Who Ordered This Truckload of Dung?: Inspiring Stories for Welcoming Life's Difficulties' by Australian lama [ ] Ajahn Brahm.

And at charming Kitty Kelly's, less than a mile from their Irish vacation home, the two were seen were seen wearing matching tops and avidly swapping intellectually challenging phrases from 'Words of Wisdom,' the latest book by best-selling Buddhist author Lama Surya Das, a childhood friend of CBS honcho Les Moonves when the two American boys were growing up Jewish on Long Island.

What's a Jew-Bu? 'It's a synthesis of Judaism and Buddhism intended to grasp the best of both religions,' explains one Hollywood power-player who has been a Jew-Bu for the past decade. 'It combines Buddhist thought with Jewish theology and structure, in effect incorporating Buddhist traditions such as meditation and chanting into traditional Judaism.'

Famous entertainment industry Jew-Bu's include Leonard Cohen, Goldie Hawn, Kate Hudson, Jerry Seinfeld, Gwynneth Paltrow, Larry David, Jeff Goldblum, Al Franken and Whoopie Goldberg, among others.

'Buddhism fills a void left by her traditional Jewish faith,' confides a close friend of Parker's. 'It's a way for her to understand and diminish personal suffering, let go of fears, and to get pieces of mind. She still appreciates the strong community and traditions of Judaism, but wants to discover the wisdom of another religion without abandoning her born faith. She enjoys getting mail.'

Adds another close confidante: 'Sarah travels a lot, mostly by air. And in the Jewish mystical tradition -- where Judaism comes closest to Buddhism -- God exists on many planes.'

The first trickle of Jews began to convert to Jew-Bu practices about 50 years ago. The beat poet Allen Ginsberg was among them, and wrote, 'Born in this world/ you got to suffer/ everything changes/ you got no soul.' By the 1970s, there were enough Jewish Buddhists for Ginsberg's guru, Chogyan Trungpa, to talk about forming the Oy Vey school of Meditation. Now Jew-Bu's are the largest group of converts in the West, with all the hallmarks of an established movement. Armfuls of literature pay tribute to their conversion experiences: "The Jew in the Lotus," "One God Clapping," and, of course, "That's Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist!"

There is even a joke in the Jewish community about a typical Jewish mother who travels to a remote Buddhist temple in Nepal. Eventually granted an audience with the revered guru there, she says just three words: 'Sheldon, come home.'

'It is true that an enormous number of Jews are converting to Buddhism,' said one Rabbi who prefers to remain anonymous. 'I think they feel weighed down by the laws and rituals. Judaism is very good at camaraderie and community, but it doesn't leave a lot of space for the individual or for spirituality.'

'Sarah likes the fact that Buddhism, which she uses more as a philosophy than a religion since it doesn't have its own God, is packed with simple wisdom, including the notion that most human suffering is caused by our resistance to accepting our lives just as they are right now,' concludes one close friend of the vacationing couple. 'Sarah feels that we spend so much time scrutinizing the past and worrying about the future that the present evades us. Buddhism is all about letting go.'

Source: Pr-Inside.

[jumnien]

13 years ago I met two JuBus in California and began studying meditation with them (Jack Kornfield and Sylvia Boorstein). While studying with them, I met Ajahn Jumnien and moved to Thailand ten years ago. Another man who I consider to be a guru, who saved my life, is a Jewish/Catholic ex-bus driver from San Francisco. He's coming to Thailand for a visit next week! Happy, Happy!

[tzohar21]

I see that another member has posted the blog entry from the Venerable Shravasti Dhammika on the subject of Jubus. To which I must reply with the response from my own blog: anotherqueerjubu:

A few months back, Shravasti Dhammika, a Buddhist monk of 32 years practice and the spiritual advisor to the Buddha Dhamma Mandala Society in Singapore, added a post to his blog on the subject of hyphenated Buddhists in general, and Jewish-Buddhists in particular. The good monk wrote that whole idea of hyphenated Buddhists gives him an “identity crisis,” which is a pretty funny thing for him to say, given that an identity is about as insubstantial as it gets in Buddhism. I suspect he was winking when he wrote this, since his sense of humor is on display throughout this posting. After all, mistaking the skandhas for a self would be a shande.

Nevertheless, the question of hyphenated Buddhists, and Jewish Buddhism or Buddhist Judaism in particular disturbed him. And it’s a question that that often comes up in my world, since I identify myself as a Jewish Buddhist. I am hardly alone on this path, since it’s been estimated that 30% of American born Buddhists also identify in some way as Jewish. That’s enough people to become a market! And so,, no surprise, there are quite a number of books, films and t-shirts (blending spiritual path, identity and fashion with Western consumerism) on the phenomenon. The venerable Dhammika refers to some books by an IMC teacher I admire, Sylvia Boorstein, in particular. I don’t think she would define herself as a Jubu — her excellent essay in Beside Still Waters, an anthology of writings by Jews and Christians who have been profoundly changed by their Buddhist practice is her response to the question of hyphenated identity and I recommend it. This is my response to the venerable Dhammika’s post where he writes:

“Is it possible to be a practicing Jew and a practicing Buddhist at the same time? No it is not! The two are mutually incompatible. A Buddhist would have to see most of the practices of Orthodox and even Reformed Judaism as harmless but empty rituals that contributed nothing to the development of virtue or the freeing of the mind. If anything, they reinforce a specific identity; the very thing Buddhism seeks to transcend. The Torah’s unambiguous demand for total allegiance to the God of Israel and the Buddha’s God-free spirituality and world view, separate the two religions from the word go.”

I take issue with a number of things he writes here. Just as I take issue with Rabbi Akiva Tatz, who wrote a book called Letters to a Buddhist Jew, that I will write about in another post. However, what both gentlemen have in common is a lack or experience or deep knowledge of each other’s path, so that neither man has enough of an understanding of the other’s path to make a full judgment or fair assessment.

Today though, I’m sticking to the venerable Dhammika’s comments. So let’s start with his contention that the Torah demands “total allegiance to the God of Israel.”

I’m not sure what his concept of that God is, but I have to respond with the words of Rabbi Irwin Kula: “I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in either.”

The word God itself is problematic. People tend to think of a character, a personage, a being with a personality, and for that matter, a gender. Thinking about god this way is basically a violation of one of the commandments — against idolatry, which isn’t restricted to making physical images. In Judaism one cannot speak the name of the Divine because to name something is to limit it, to have control over it, and the Divine is beyond language or limit.

One of the central Jewish prayers, said several times during services, is the Kaddish. The point of the Kaddish is to break through the tendency of the mind to reify God. Rather than being an empty ritual, it is a prayer designed to break through any definition of what is essentially beyond the limited power of language to express and thus help open the one praying to an experience of the unconditioned state. If one recites it rote, without consciousness, it is no different from simply reciting the sutras without mindfulness. Or for that matter reciting a sutra as a mantra in the hopes of getting a new car (Can you say Sokka Gakkai?).

The Kaddish is a deep teaching about the nature of the Divine, which in the Jewish mystical tradition is sometimes referred to as the Ayn Sof: infinite no-thing-ness. It is beyond form and formlessness. This is not the same thing as Nirvana (or is it?), though I can’t rightly say, never having experienced it. For that matter, it is an experience, from all I can gather, than can only be expressed by what it is not (which is expressed beautifully in the medieval work of Christian mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing). This is the place where language breaks down. So while I can’t say with any authority that these concepts are equivalent, I have a sense that they arise from the same place (or no-place as the case may be).

I remember when I had walked away from Judaism entirely, and had given myself over to meditation practice and the study of the sutras and the various commentaries. My friend Marion asked me what I had found in Buddhism that I hadn’t found in Judaism. I read her some passages and spoke to her about what meditation had given me. She opened up a siddur — the book of Jewish prayer — and pointed to some passages that went to the heart of what I was talking about. In fact, several of these prayers were mindfulness practices — they weren’t something so much to be read as instructions to a practice of awareness. I was dumbfounded, since I had never recognized this before. Like the venerable Dhammika, I saw the liturgy as empty ritual. But of course, no rabbi in my youth had ever taught these prayers as an awareness and mindfulness practice. I wasn’t even sure there were rabbis who understood these prayers in that way.

Of course, that was my ignorance of my own tradition. And the fact that no rabbis in my youth taught in this was was a result of the history of post-enlightenment Judaism in the U.S. and the broken lineage of deep teachers in the last century — . I knew nothing of masters like Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, who taught a meditation technique that reads like a text on Vipassana, and who was murdered in the Holocaust.

When I delved deeper into the tradition of my ancestors I discovered many texts I would never have understood but for my experience with Buddhist meditation. And I met rabbis who not only understood the practices these prayers called for, they actively taught them.

As for a hairy thunderer in the sky demanding total allegiance — well, that’s just a story. A teaching story. I don’t imagine that the venerable Dhammika literally believes all of the Jataka tales. And I doubt he believes in a literal being called Mara. These tales are told to point to a deeper truth.

I can’t deny that Judaism, like Shinto, carries the mythic history and consciousness of a particular people from a particular time. The Torah, like the Kojiki, are the stories that encode the deepest teaching of the tradition. Taking it literally is about as delusionary as believing that the Japanese emperor is a direct descendent of the sun goddess, Amaterasu. Ahem, well. Obviously many Japanese did believe this well into the last century — the Venerable Dhammika neglected to ask the same question about hyphenated Buddhists to the entire Japanese nation, whose population pretty much considers itself both Buddhist and Shinto. But as always, I digress…

The problems arise when people take the stories literally — it’s what leads to kamikaze pilots, the suicide bombers of WWII, not to mention murderous zealots like Baruch Goldstein. Or lunatics like Fred Phelps. I stray again…

Getting back to the empty prayers and rituals…perhaps the most important prayer in Judaism is the Shema – which, rather than being a demand for total allegiance is a radical statement that calls one’s full attention to the unity of reality.

While my interpretation of the prayer may sound unorthodox to many who grew up with the English translation that appears across from the Hebrew in the siddur, it is actually within the realm of orthodoxy (which is not usually where I find myself):

Listen/Be mindful, you who wrestle with the Inexpressible, the Inexpressible is Greater/Beyond Anything you can imagine, and it is Indivisible from Reality - there is nothing that is separate or not a part of It (including you and your struggle).

The Hebrew is a lot shorter, but it’s a language of great economy that manages to express a non-dual experience of the Divine that is both transcendent and immanent simultaneously.

Now certainly there are places where Judaism and Buddhism clearly part ways. There is no monastic tradition (that has survived, i.e. the Essenes) in Judaism. While Buddhism sees the way out of suffering through equanimity, Judaism calls for passionate engagement with all of life — experiencing joy and suffering as the fullness that is human existence. While Buddhist monks don’t marry, don’t work and don’t own anything, historically rabbis have been expected to marry, work and provide for their families. This is where the paths diverge for those who wish to practice, not simply as laymen (ah, the innate sexism and limits of language), but as complete devotees.

By our very nature as humans, we cannot see or express the whole truth. Each of our traditions displays merely one facet of the jewel of Reality. Each does it’s best to give its adherents a practice that will enable them to see this and apprehend an experience beyond the limits of expression. And each has practices that can be bizarre and counterproductive to the goal — how could it be otherwise, given their long history and the addition of any number of adopted teachings and offshoot branches.

The rabbi of Congregation Har HaShem in Boulder, in his blog notes an beautifully strange similarlity between the writings of the Soto Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki and the 18th century Chassidic rabbi, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev. This great master wrote that:

“we are holy in that we can become aware of our essential nothingness – 'Know that you come from nothing' – and that Jewish practice (mitzvoth) raise our consciousness of the nothingness underlying our existence, and the transitory nature of our materiality.”

At this point you would be excused if you quoted Shakespeare and said of me, “I think the lady doth protest too much.”

Yes there are differences, and there are practices in each tradition that would be anathema to the other. I do my best to live fully in the real contradictions while celebrating the ultimate oneness. Duality is real. I live in it every day. There’s just a greater reality. And the teachings of both traditions create a feedback loop that helps take me deeper to a place that transcends both.

Rabbi Arthur Green, in Tormented Master, his biography of the Chassidic master, Rabbi Nachman, related this conversation between the rabbi and a close disciple. R. Nachman explained that he really no longer needed to follow many of the commandments. Because in following the path of mitzvoth, of living in blessing, he had “reached the other shore” and no longer needed the vehicle of the form. But he continued to follow these practices because he had followers — and if he kept up the practice his followers would be inspired to continue, despite the difficulties of the path, and could someday reach the far shore themselves. Sounds like a boddhisatva vow to me.

I’m grateful to the venerable Dhammika — his words gave me an opening to write about all this in more depth than usual and possibly open a dialog. And I am grateful to my teachers in both traditions: their words and their living examples have been a blessing in my life.

One more parenthetical — a postscript: here is a question/koan to consider on the dual path from this Jewish Buddhist — to go with the collection of Jewish Buddhist haiku that gets sent around by email endlessly (and believe me I’ve seen it many times, so please stop sending it to me!):

Mu. Nu?

[Ajarn_Jonesy]

Wow!! There many amazing people in this world, are there not?

I love the idea of saying i am this or that, and if that doesn't work then I am something else.

While i can see a valid point here or there (remarking Buddhism lends it's self to other religions) I don't agree with this. The mantra of today "We are all right, and if they are not right you must make them feel they are right"; Now I am sure there are a lot of good people saying they are jubu's or whatever. Not that it matters, people have the right to do as they choose. I know it's a freedom of expression but do they realize how *eccentric and out of touch they really sound? I am not Buddhist however I find it to be a beautiful religion that I have enjoyed studying. Also these people seem to be forgetting just how strait-edge the Judaeo Christian religions are. So yeah I have to agree with a comment in an earlier post, this is really confusing. I can only tell them one thing. again.... WOW!!