Spirit and Story Archive

Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

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Crossing Boundaries: Confessions of a Reluctant Spiritual Explorer

By Shari Cohen

As I turned off Route 1 descending to the Pacific from the heights of Mt. Tamalpais, at the sign for Green Gulch Farm, part of the San Francisco Zen Center, I felt a pang of guilt verging on betrayal. (“Betrayal of whom?” I asked then and ask again now.) I felt as if I was crossing a border, even though there was no passport control. I noted the guilt pang and drove on, reassuring myself that I was here because it was a convenient retreat possibility, located on one of the most spectacular pieces of coastline anywhere, close to San Francisco, and promising to be restorative.

I pulled into the parking lot and approached the office, noticing that the figure behind the desk did not have hair. I realized upon approaching that this was a woman with a shaven head – a Buddhist priest -- who seemed annoyingly reluctant to raise her voice above the quiet that hung over the place, a quiet I realized later on was truly foreign to my Jewish aesthetic. I noted, too, that in the small bookstore set up in the office, the books on popular Buddhism had a large proportion of Jewish authors among them. I cringed as it occurred to me that perhaps I was being inexorably pulled toward becoming a generational statistic as I acted out a version of a journey that had been so common as to be a cliche for Jews of my generation. But this was not primarily about personal spirituality; it was about sociology – at least that is what I told myself.

I asked the bald woman behind the desk if I could get some instruction in meditation, as had been advertised on the Web site. She continued to convey reluctance and lack of interest, but agreed, in a vague sort of way, that she’d show me a few things. There was no indication of when or where.

Later, as I settled into my room in a beautifully designed Japanese-style guesthouse with no locks on any doors, a copy of "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" on the desktop, and a kitchen stocked with fruit, tea and home-baked bread, I saw her approaching and realized she had come to look for me. This would be my lesson. I found out on the short walk to the zendo that the building had once been a farmhouse, and extracted a few other details about the history of the place as I strained to make conversation: New York gregariousness meets northern California coast Buddhist repose?

"Tomorrow morning we do a formal meditation -- zazen." Now she was in her element: showing me how to sit on the meditation pillow, and then how to bow when getting up. But she must have known that I wasn't likely to convert; few people do who come here for short stints like this. So this was some sort of gift, for me to take with me as I left. I saw it that way, too – as a skill or practice that I could draw upon when I felt it to be comfortable and relevant. But at the same time, it was different from visiting a museum or eating a meal in the home of someone from a foreign culture and taking the recipes home.

She framed everything in terms of "we" – the community in which I was a guest. She showed me how "we" hold "our" hands: in one way when entering the zendo, in another when sitting. She also showed me how to step across the threshold, how and when to bow. I promptly forgot all the choreography, and did everything wrong that I could have as I entered the zendo that next morning at the crack of dawn – from making too much noise walking in my shoes along the boardwalk outside the building, having approached from the wrong direction, to using the wrong foot when crossing the threshold, to forgetting where and when to bow and exactly how to hold my fingers. This feeling was most familiar to me from various orthodox Jewish households, strangely enough. I remembered my Shabbat with the Lubavitch in seventh grade. Although I am a relatively educated Jew, I find myself in Jewish settings where I don't know "how" to "do" everything "correctly" – whether it is washing my hands before the meal (how many times do you pour the water and on which hand first?) or those things that women are not supposed to do, like shake the hand of a man, or sing. But in those settings it is different…or is it? I am as unlikely to become a highly observant Jew as a practicing Buddhist, but in Jewish settings there is the presumption of a standard that is in some way mine, and from which I am departing.

First came a forty-minute meditation, which I found myself able to do with little discomfort, probably because I was in a pre-caffeinated state, or maybe it was just beginner's luck. I reminded myself to pay attention to breath, to hold my spine straight. Focusing on your breath is like focusing on life itself; that's what they say in all the books. Interesting, I found myself thinking, that this can be done alone; it can be fully decentralized; no need for a minyan. This is why it has entered office places and self-help books.

And yet we were doing this in a room with others, even when the purpose was so much based on concentrating on, or through, the self. Maybe this is because it is a discipline that is easier to do when motivated by others – like singing in a chorus or working out in a health club. After this moment of analysis, I was able to leave my sociologist self behind, entering the state of present awareness that meditation is supposed to access. Surely this would be a worthwhile practice to incorporate into my days (just as swimming would); its insight about openness and its quiet, physical discipline offer a mechanism for connection to -- and balance within -- oneself in a way that communal Jewish prayer does not.

As the meditation came to a close, and candles and incense were lit, the room stirred. I wasn't sure what would come next. But before I knew it, everyone was standing up. A priest stood in front of the altar, which was comprised of a large statue of Buddha and several smaller ones flanking him below, closer to the base. We stood in two lines facing one another, about thirty people, perpendicular to the altar, with the priest leading the chanting.

Suddenly there was a shift. I had not been instructed about this part. The guy next to me whispered that I should move the meditation pillow from the center of my mat to the side and stand behind the mat facing the altar. I looked around and noticed that I was the only one who had not done this. I quickly complied and by the time I looked up from moving my pillow saw that everyone was facing the altar, waiting, watching the priest. As he chanted, he kneeled and then he bowed, with his head to the floor, like you do in the Avodah ** service on Yom Kippur. He did this and rose again, only to bow again, doing this nine times. Everyone followed, including me. How could I not?

Earlier, sitting and meditating in the darkened zendo had seemed benign, accessible, non-religious. But now theology entered, along with an act – bowing down to a graven image – the central taboo in Judaism. It reminded me of moments when I have been singing one of the great choral pieces with complete passion and involvement -- Beethoven's Mass in C Major, or Mozart's Requiem -- experiencing the elation of being part of a chorus of 150 voices, and realizing that after "Credo in unum deum" (I believe in one god) comes “Et in unum dominum jesum christum, filium dei unigenitum” (And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only begotten son)…or that the words of the “Agnus dei” (lamb of god) -- often the most beautiful movement – express the heart of the difference between Judaism and Christianity.

On another level, though, I was struck by the fact that this experience of bowing – albeit before an idol -- felt easier in some ways than when I had to bow to the floor as leader of the Avodah service several years earlier. That too was a simulation, a play. But it had felt more literal – part of my own liturgy, set up to make me representative of the congregation. And just as a black and white – as opposed to color -- photo causes you to stand back from the image it depicts, the experience in the zendo allowed me to reflect on just what it is that exists at the limits of my religious comfort zone. And I mean that in two ways: between my religion and other religions and between my secular identity and religious acts in which I find myself participating.

It was in retrospect that I felt profoundly uncomfortable with having bowed before the Buddha, thinking that I had violated the very heart of my Jewishness, more than those times when I had eaten pork or seafood. At the same time, I was surprised to feel those boundaries since I am not aware of being religious in that way. When I told one friend that I thought I might have bowed down to an idol and that I felt guilty about it, he said: "Well, there is no God anyway." But I don't think it was God who inspired the guilt.

My first inclination was to retreat – I drove away from Green Gulch, up the coast into Point Reyes, my favorite place in California. I did this in part to restore my sense of self – as someone who first, does not bow down to idols and second, as someone who is not particularly drawn to spiritual experimentation. Later that day I took a dramatic, long hike in the dry hills above the Pacific that ended at Muir Beach. As the sun began to set, I sat in the lovely, precise, silent, formal Zen garden, feeling absolutely compelled to do something to acknowledge the arrival of Shabbat even though I don't regularly celebrate Shabbat. I hummed parts of the kabbalat Shabbat service to myself. This was in part to mark a transcendent moment Jewishly – a reminder to myself of what Shabbat means. But it was also to declare, I'm not sure to whom, who I "really" was.

As I sat there in the garden, I began to focus on difference. My first inclination was to separate and define against: I am this and not that. They bow to idols, we don't; they create formal gardens where silence reigns, we are noisy. They retreat from the world, we engage it.

But I also thought about the attraction, and the ways in which this defensive reaction was impoverishing. How impoverishing it would be not to borrow the insights offered by meditation, by the openness counseled by Buddhist teachings, such as "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few. The goal of practice is to keep a beginner's mind, an empty and thus ready mind." How impoverished I would be, for example, if I felt I could not sing the great choral repertoire, comprised mostly of Christian music – the activity in my life that I could most comfortably label spiritual.

There is a safety in Buddhism for Jews that doesn't exist in Christianity. Unlike Christianity, Judaism's alter ego, Buddhism is foreign, though it is just historical accident that it was not Buddhism, but Christianity with which Judaism had its major historical dialogue and disagreements. Buddhism is removed from its cultural context; it has come to the U.S. as a tradition from which we can borrow at will. And borrow we have on a massive scale. In some ways, for a Jew, the singing of the great choral works, composed to Christian religious texts, is also a borrowed practice. But singing this music in Carnegie Hall, rather than in the church, makes it no longer "Christian," but somehow universally accessible.

And I don't feel compelled to Judaize these practices either – to bring meditation into the Jewish service or to put the Jewish liturgy to classical music, though certainly such blending can be fruitful. Instead I can borrow, refracted through my particular Jewish lens and sensibility. The Credo portion of the Mass includes, at its core, a declaration of monotheism. The Buddhist focus on a fluidity that cannot be pinned down is a useful angle on the Jewish notion of God. In this sense, experiencing the different ways that different traditions make us aware of our humanness is not a dilution, but a deepening. Rather than incorporating these into Jewish tradition, I can relish these enriching and multiple experiences that remain outside.

Thank God -- or whomever -- that we live in a moment in history and in a place in the world where this permeability of boundaries – between the secular and the spiritual and between different religious traditions and practices -- is possible. I don't think it is too strong to say that it is necessary.

(** The Avodah service on Yom Kippur recounts the sacrificial ritual practiced by the High Priest in the Temple, when he confessed his own, his family’s and the sins of all Israel.)

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