By Louis Sahagun
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?'”
