With the Purim holiday coming up, I have been reflecting on the tides and turns of Jewish history against the backdrop of the larger world and great civilizations as celebrated, mourned, and honored in the Jewish Holiday cycle. With this in mind, I thought of the relatively recent contact between Buddhism and Judaism and about the practices and language of meditation and God, wondering, “Is there room for both?”
The Jewish Mama Loshen
Judaism has always learned from and been in deep relationship with the ideas and religious and spiritual practices from the world’s great civilizations and religious traditions with which Judaism has made contact.
One of the greatest examples of this is Maimonides, the great 12th century Jewish philosopher. Also called the Rambam, the man often considered to be the greatest Jewish philosopher in all of history was born and raised in Muslim Spain, became learned in and a master of Islamic medicine and philosophy, and spoke and wrote in his mother tongue – his mama loshen – of Arabic.
More recently, the 20th century saw a tremendous touchpoint between Eastern and Western civilization that has immensely changed Western religion, spirituality, and psychology in unimaginable ways for many centuries to come. This contact has flowered – of all things – a very large number of Jewish teachers who sojourned to the East and returned to the West as fully empowered teachers of Buddhism, Hinduism, and yoga.
Some of these men and women (in no particular order) include Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Sylvia Boorstein (mentioned in this previous post), Larry Rosenberg, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Bernie Glassman (mentioned in a previous post), Dennis Merzel, Mel Weitsman, Norman Fischer, Surya Das (born Jeffrey Miller), Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert), Bhikkhu Bodhi (born Jeffrey Block), Thubten Chodron (born Cheryl Greene), and many, many others. This list is long, though nowhere near exhaustive.
With these names and other in mind, the question begs itself. Why did so many Jews – and do many Jews still – seek meaning outside of formal Jewish practice? In zendos and meditation halls? In yoga studios and ashrams? In psychotherapy offices and Mindfulness Based Stress reduction (MBSR) classes?
And moving forward, might there be enough room for both meditation and God? Can our Western mama loshen include dialects of both meditation and God?
A “Holy Rascal”
Rabbi Rami Shapiro is a very unique teacher and religious leader. He is a Rabbi ordained by both the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College and by the founder of Jewish Renewal, Reb Zalman Schachter Shalomi. Rabbi Rami grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home and aspired to become a Buddhist Studies professor while in college, only before even surprising himself by blurting out that he wanted to become a Rabbi during a private meeting with his Zen Master at the time, Joshu Sasaki Roshi.
Since then, Rabbi Rami ordained as a Rabbi, started a congregation after rabbinical school, and served at its pulpit for over 20 years. More recently, he has broadly expanded his teaching, found the One River Foundation in 2001, and even “asked to be initiated into the Ramakrishna Order of Vedanta Hinduism” (see here). According to his website, Rabbi Rami describes himself as a “Jewish practitioner of Perennial Wisdom, the fourfold teaching at the mystic heart of the world’s religions.”
I have long enjoyed Rabbi Rami’s books and podcasts. There is a quote from Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s book on Holy Rascals that I really enjoy (I really am a big fan of Rami’s writings!):
Religions are like languages: all languages are of human origin; each language reflects and shapes the civilization that speaks it; all languages make meaning out of the raw facts of our existence; no language is true or false; there are things you can say in one language that you cannot say (or say as well) in another; the more languages you know, the more nuanced your understanding of life becomes; and as important as languages are, the final “language” of wisdom is silence. Substitute the word religion for language, and you have the basic holy rascal understanding of religion. (p. 34)
One thing I have learned from my personal spiritual practice with both meditation and God is that the mother tongue of the West and mama loshen of Judaism is God, and meditation is the silent language of the Divine. Perhaps in this global 21st century world, it is not enough to be monolingual?! I pray not!
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Adam Fogel
www.mindfuljudaism.com