How we benefited from JewBus
On September 26 1893, Charles T. Strauss, a Swiss-born Jew, publicly embraced the Five Precepts of Morality in Chicago, thereby becoming the first American formally to adopt Buddhism. Since then, a disproportionate number of American Jews have been attracted to the Eastern religious path. In 2001, for example, in a study of North American Buddhist centres, the sociologist James Coleman found that one in six of his sample of practitioners had a Jewish background. One teacher of the Tibetan school was reputed to have said he had so many Jewish students they could start the “oy vey school of Buddhism”.
But as Dr Emily Sigalow — a sociologist who works for the UJA-Jewish Federation of New York — shows in her fascinating book, American JewBu, it was not simply a case of Jews who were disenchanted with Judaism taking up Buddhism as an alternative. Many Jews happily combined the two traditions and many committed Jews took insights and practices from Buddhism to enhance their Jewish lifestyle in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
From Strauss onwards, she argues, Jews played an important role in modernising Buddhism to make it more palatable to Western tastes. Jewish teachers helped to elevate meditation — which in Asia was primarily the prerogative of monks — as a universal practice while discarding temple rituals or doctrines such as the cycle of rebirth.
While it is difficult to determine if and how it was the Jewish background of some teachers that led them to “abandon many traditional elements of Buddhism”, she says, “it does seem likely… that these teachers deliberately minimised the mythological and monastic elements of Buddhism because they felt especially unfamiliar to them both as Jews and Americans.”
Jewish teachers were among those who instilled an “activist ethic” into American Buddhism, drawing on Buddhist teachings in the pursuit of social justice. The Jewish scientist Jon Kabat-Zinn led the way in promoting the psychotherapeutic benefits of meditation as a method of stress reduction.
Sigalow offers a number of reasons why Buddhism proved congenial to Jews. Judaism and Buddhism “do not have a fraught history with each other”, unlike the tensions with other Abrahamic traditions.
Jews also typically shared a similar background to “convert Buddhists” in the USA, being “urban, educated, middle class and liberal”, so they felt socially at home. The open nature of Buddhist centres were also appealing in having few rules and encouraging attenders spiritually to take what they liked rather than expecting them to “convert” wholesale.
Sigalow charts the growth of Buddhist-Jewish dialogue, sponsored in particular by Nathan Cummings Foundation (named after the founder of the Sara Lee
Corporation). The 1990 encounter between the Dalai Lama and a group of Jews inspired Rodger Kamenetz’s best-seller, The Jew and The Lotus.
But another development also helped to advance the love affair between Jews and the east: the founding of the Jewish Renewal movement by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, which was receptive to borrowing from other religious traditions.
Meanwhile, the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, whose founders in 1998 included a rabbi, Sheila Weinberg and which was backed by the Nathan Cummings Foundation, brought together Jewish and Buddhist teachers to create a Jewish meditation curriculum and a training programme in mindfulness. Jewish meditation centres began to spring up, such as Makor Or — housed in Temple Beth Sholom in San Francisco — which was opened by Rabbi Alan Lew, a Conservative rabbi who studied Zen, and Norman Fischer, a Buddhist priest who retained an association with Judaism.
Jewish meditation, as it emerged in contemporary America, represented an “entirely new syncretic religious practice that has roots in both the Jewish and Buddhist traditions,” Sigalow writes. Its proponents “weeded out elements of Buddhism that did not feel relatable to them as Jews, including reverence to the
Buddha, traditional cosmological explanations, and bowing practices. They introduced meditation and mindfulness as psychotherapeutic as opposed to historic religious practices.”
Buddhist techniques could help to enrich Jewish practice. Sigalow quotes Jeff Roth, a leading Jewish meditation teacher: “If you’re only talking about reminders to pay attention, you can use a mezuzah instead of a Buddha statue. A mezuzah reminds you to pay attention… Every time you go through a doorway, stop, pay attention.” A rabbi from New England sees reciting a brachah as a type of mindfulness in which one pauses before eating.
Some teachers of Jewish meditation further Judaised it by introducing Chasidic or kabbalistic ideas.
We often consider Judaism’s contact with other faiths in the historical context of Jews as an embattled minority, struggling to endure against external threat. What is intriguing about the story Sigalow tells is that the Jewish exploration of Buddhism has been voluntary and not only that but that it has had — depending on your point of view — a positive influence on Judaism.
American JewBu — Jews, Buddhists and Religious Change Emily Sigalow, Princeton University Press, £25