The Jew in the Lotus by Rodger Kamenetz

Author:Rodger Kamenetz [Rodger Kamenetz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061745935
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Zalman Schachter gave me a beautiful midrash on this subject. He told me, “Shlomo Carlebach said something that deserves attention. He quotes a Hasidic master, Rabbi Mordecai Joseph, the Izhbitzer Rebbe, who asks: ‘Why is it that a kohen isn’t supposed to go near a dead body?’” According to the law enunciated in Leviticus 21:1-3, 10-12, the kohen or Jewish priest, is forbidden to make contact with a corpse. Thus, a Jew today who knows he is a kohen cannot go to the cemetery except for the funeral of a close family member.

The Izhbitzer Rebbe, in his midrash, takes off from the text in Leviticus and uses it to find a spiritual message.

“So the short of it is,” Zalman explained, “when you see a corpse, you can’t help but be angry with God. ‘Why did He have to make it that way? That that’s the door you have to go through? It’s terrible.’ Now the kohen is supposed to be the gentle teacher of people, so if he is angry with God, he’ll have a real bad time talking about God because what will show will be the anger.

“End of the Hasidic master, okay? Now Shlomo: Ever since the Holocaust we are all like priests who have become contaminated by death. It’s hard for people who are looking for a loving, living God to find him among the angry voices. They go to people who at this point don’t have any anger about God.”

Yes, I thought, they didn’t go to hear about God. And some of them, like Allen Ginsberg, are still angry and others, like Chodron, are seriously disappointed. It was clear that all the JUBUs dismissed out of hand the idea that God could be compelling or real. And I certainly couldn’t condemn them—because there were only a few occasions in my own life where I had any intimation that God might be real.

That was the challenge Zalman had given me the morning he led davening in Dharamsala, when he touched me on the shoulder: Your God is a true God. That is, your God is real.

Long ago, Moses Maimonides commented on this verse from Jeremiah. To the great medieval Jewish philosopher it meant, “He alone is real, and nothing else has reality like His reality.”

Between the faith of my ancestors and the challenge of the JUBUs I am caught in this dilemma: God is reality—or nothing.

Or are reality and nothing somehow the same?

Maybe where shunyata meets ain sof, I would find the high place where Jews and JUBUs and Buddhists could dance together again.

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