Zen Mind Jewish Mind: Koan, Midrash, & The Living Word - Softcover

Shapiro, Rabbi Rami

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1958972657 ISBN 13: 9781958972656

Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing, 2025

Synopsis

A Spirituality & Practice “Best Spiritual Book of 2025”

“A great way to deepen your spiritual life is to take a deep dive into a tradition other than your own—especially if you have a competent guide, and Rabbi Rami is an extraordinary guide. Not into Zen? Not a Jew? Not a problem. Anyone on any path will benefit enormously from this profoundly illuminating book.” —Philip Goldberg, author of American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, How Indian Spirituality Changed the West

With reference to Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Rami Shapiro begins with beginner’s mind as “empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities. It is the kind of mind which can see things as they are, which step by step and in a flash can realize the original nature of everything.” Then, Rami ponders beginner’s mind in the child of the Passover Haggadah “who knows not how to ask.” The parents of this child are told to open (patach) the child to the art of questioning. Asking questions is key to Jewish mind.

The questioning perennial beginner is central to both Zen and Jewish, Rami demonstrates: a daring, iconoclastic, often humorous mind devoted to shattering the words, texts, isms, and ideologies on which expert mind—closed to inquiry—depends.

Zen Mind / Jewish Mind is not a scholarly study of anything, let alone Zen or Judaism, and despite all the footnotes, the book rests solely on Shapiro’s fifty-plus years of playing in the garden of Judaism, Zen, and advaita/nonduality. Chapters include “Dharma Eye, God’s I” (1), “Koan and Midrash” (4), and “The Yoga of Conversation” (7).

About this title

About the Author

Rabbi Rami Shapiro, PhD is an award-winning author of over thirty-six books on religion, spirituality, and recovery. He codirects the One River Foundation, is a contributing editor with Spirituality and Health Magazine, hosts two podcasts—Essential Conversations with Rabbi Rami, and Conversations on the Edge—and a weekly Zoom “talk show” called Roadside Assistance at the Corner of Tohu va-Vohu (Wild and Chaos). He is the author of dozens of books including Judaism without Tribalism (Monkfish, 2022), and the 2020 recipient of the Huston Smith Award for Excellence in Inter-Spiritual Education.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Zen Monk, Jewish Monk

 

You’re probably very familiar with the great songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen. He was born and raised in a Jewish family in Montreal, where he was buried in a Jewish cemetery. His bar mitzvah was at Montreal’s Congregation Shaar Hashomayim; the choir from that synagogue sang backup vocals for his Grammy-winning song “You Want It Darker,” which was released seventeen days before his death in 2016.

In between, however, Cohen was—among many other things—a serious Zen monk for several years. In fact, for a time he was the head monk at Mt. Baldy Zen Center, a monastery in the San Gabriel Mountains, where he was given the Japanese name Jikan, which means “silence.”

During the 1990s, I spent some time at Mt. Baldy. Jikan was the head monk, and the two of us had many interactions and conversations. I’ve included some of these, verbatim (to the best of my recollection), in this book.

Edition details

• Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1958972657
• ISBN 13: 9781958972656
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160