The Jew in the Lotus; A Poet's Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India

x, 304, [4] pages. Inscribed by the author on the title page. Inscription reads For the hands of Lucy Prinz Well met, Rodger Kamenetz. Includes Acknowledgments; Introduction; Sparks; Flames; Roadblocks; Heights; Blessings; Contact; The Angel of Tibet and the Angel of the Jews; Always Remind; Debating Monks and Angels; Shabbat Shalom and Tashe Delek; Jewish Buddhists, Buddhist Jews; JUBUs in America; Tibetan Intellectuals, Tibetan Orphans; An Interview with the Oracle; Secret Doors; Tantra and Kabbalah; Survival Strategies; One Last Question; A Buddhist Jew--The Allen Ginsberg Story; A Synagogue in Delhi; Buddha's Jews; A Last Secret; and In a Pool of Nectar. Notes and References. Glossary. Rodger Kamenetz (born 1950) is an American poet and author best known for The Jew in the Lotus (1994), an account of the historic dialogue between rabbis and the XIV Dalai Lama. His poetry explores the Jewish experience and in recent years, dream consciousness. This amazing journey through Tibetan Buddhism and Judaism leads Kamenetz to a renewed appreciation of his living Jewish roots. Since 2003 he's been instrumental in developing Natural Dreamwork, a practice that focuses on the sacred encounters in dreams. In October 1990, Kamenetz was invited to observe an historic dialogue between rabbis and the XIV Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. The Dalai Lama had asked the Jewish delegates to share with him "the secret of Jewish spiritual survival in exile." His account of this exchange, The Jew in the Lotus (1994), was a popular success and became an international best-seller. Writing in the New York Times, Verlyn Klinkenborg cited its broader relevance as a book "about the survival of esoteric traditions in a world bent on destroying them." The book was primarily potent in capturing an ongoing engagement in the US between Jews, often highly secularized, and Buddhist teachings. Kamenetz popularized the term JUBU or Jewish Buddhist, interviewing poet Allen Ginsberg, vipassana teacher Joseph Goldstein, Ram Dass and other American Jews involved with bringing Eastern traditions to the West. The book also made prominent a Jewish mystical response to Eastern spirituality in the Jewish renewal movement, led by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, and Jewish meditation as taught by Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man. The Jew in the Lotus inspired a PBS documentary of the same name produced and directed by Laurel Chiten, released theatrically in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, and subsequently on Independent Lens on September 1, 1999. Derived from a Kirkus review: A personal journey of Jewish spiritual renewal in dialogue with the Dalai Lama. Summoned by the Dalai Lama to Dharamsala, the retreat in northern India that the Tibetan exile community has inhabited since the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959, a group of eight Jewish leaders goes to India for a week of discussions in order to teach the Tibetan spiritual leader what the Jewish tradition has learned about religious self-preservation. Jewish poet and designated eyewitness Kamenetz comes along for the ride and on the way learns about the richness of his own Jewish identity by hearing about its similarities to Tibetan Buddhism. Familiar with survival in the face of exile and near-annihilation, the Jewish leaders, mostly rabbis, communicate their wisdom to the Dalai Lama. While we are prepared for a two-way exchange, Kamenetz tells us mostly about the rich, contradictory life of modern Judaism: from the Orthodox Irving and Blu Greenberg, who are concerned with maintaining the purity of religious observance, to the kabbalistic Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who, as a leader of the Reconstructionist movement, unites the esoteric traditions of Jewish mysticism with a post-1960s eclecticism. At the heart of the book is an exchange between Schachter-Shalomi and the Dalai Lama about the nature of angels and reincarnation, during which the Jews and Buddhists present realize the close parallels between their traditions. The larg.…