Last week's recommendation:
Week 2 recommendation.
Introduction to the series and first recommendation.
The Jew in the Lotus, Rodger Kamenetz.
Sometimes your own culture is best illuminated by dialogue with another. This comparative religion study, travelogue, sociological reportage, and personal journal all rolled into one, by a somewhat sardonic poet and English professor, chronicles the historic 1990 meeting between a delegation of idiosyncratic American Jewish leaders and the Dalai Lama, who - faced with exile and persecution of his people - wanted to know how the Jews had survived similar experiences.
The ensuing cultural exchange galvanized the Jewish leaders to make Jewish mysticism more accessible, an effort which has had a profound effect on American Judaism over the past 15 years. Kamanetz also writes about his conversations with notable Jewish Buddhists such as Allen Ginsberg, Ram Dass, and Pema Chodron, as they recall their negative reactions to the Judaism of their youth.
Not to give short shrift to the Tibetan struggle, but this book makes my list for its keen and affectionate portrait of contemporary liberal American Jewry and some of its leaders (especially the sui generis Rabbi Zalman Schachter).
Nearly every major religion has developed a tension between its exoteric forms -- accessible to all practitioners -- and its esoteric secrets, which are restricted to a small band of initiates, if only to prevent the misuse of that esoterica. In a series of remarkable discussions, the Dalai Lama and these two learned, ebullient cabalists, Rabbis Schachter and Omer-Man, compare notes on the character of meditation, its structures, rhythms and traditions. To read these chapters is something like walking through a mythic garden . . . .Take that, Madonna.
"The Jew in the Lotus" is the kind of book that seems, at first glance, to have been written for a carefully delimited audience: Jews, Buddhists and Jewish Buddhists. But that is an illusion. It is really a book for anyone who feels the narrowness of a wholly secular life or who wonders about the fate of esoteric spiritual traditions in a world that seems bent on destroying or vulgarizing them.
(Another diary of the meeting in Dharamsala.)
Week 5.
Week 6.
Week 7.
Week 8.
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