One God Clapping

Alan Lew

Description

From Zen Buddhist practitioner to rabbi, East meets West in this firsthand
account of a spiritual journey.

Rabbi Alan Lew is known as the Zen Rabbi, a leader in the Jewish meditation movement who works to bring two ancient religious traditions into our everyday lives. One God Clappingis the story of his roundabout yet continuously provoking spiritual odyssey. It is also the story of the meeting between East and West in America, and the ways in which the encounter has transformed how all of us understand God and ourselves.

Winner of the PEN / Joseph E. Miles Award

Like a Zen parable or a Jewish folk tale, One God Clapping unfolds as a series of stories, each containing a moment of revelation or instruction that, while often unexpected, is never simple or contrived. One God Clapping, like the life of the remarkable Alan Lew himself, is a bold experiment in the integration of Eastern and Western ways of looking at and living in the world.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Jewish meditation
• Kabbalah
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 28 septembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781580235181
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

One God Clapping:
The Spiritual Path of a Zen Rabbi
2009 Quality Paperback Edition, Third Printing
2002 Quality Paperback Edition, Second Printing
2001 Quality Paperback Edition, First Jewish Lights printing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information regarding permission to reprint material from this book, please mail or fax your request in writing to Jewish Lights Publishing, Permissions Department, at the address / fax number listed below, or e-mail your request to [e-mail] .
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lew, Alan, 1943-
One God clapping: the spiritual path of a Zen rabbi / Alan Lew with Sherril Jaffe.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Kodansha International, 1999.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58023-115-2 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 1-58023-115-2 (pbk.)
1. Lew, Alan, 1943- 2. Rabbis-United States-Biography. 3. Judaism-Relations-Buddhism. 4. Buddhism-Relations-Judaism. 5. Zen Buddhism. I. Jaffe, Sherril, 1945- II. Title.
BM755.L485 A3 2001
296 .092-cd21
[B]
00-054451
1999 by Alan Lew and Sherril Jaffe
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
Manufactured in the United States of America
Front cover photo: Stavros Panopolous for Sarah Merians Co.
Cover design: David Z. Cohen
Book text design: Michelle McMillian
For People of All Faiths, All Backgrounds
Published by Jewish Lights Publishing
A Division of LongHill Partners, Inc.
Sunset Farm Offices, Route 4, P.O. Box 237
Woodstock, VT 05091
Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone]
www.jewishlights.com
for Isaiah Lew zicharon livrachah
Contents
PART 1: To Leave Everything That Is Familiar
Prologue: The Way Things Are
1 A Vivid Dream
2 Jewish Karma
3 Please Throw Me a Rope
4 How I Learned to Look Beneath the Surface
5 Freedom Is a Spiritual State
6 Sublimating Spirituality
7 Lech Lecha
8 The War Between the Two Sides of the Brain
9 Death Recycles into Life
10 The Question Is Not Whether a Teacher Has Real Spiritual Power, but How That Power Is Used
11 Centering
12 Meditation
13 The Gateway
14 Form Is Emptiness
15 Spiritual Pyrotechnics
16 Dokusan
17 When Peace Breaks Out, the First Thing You Feel Is the Devastation of the War
18 The Need to Belong
19 Emptiness Is Form
20 Compassion
21 They Do Not Appear or Disappear
22 My Naked Heart
23 Healing Presence
24 Closure
25 Family
26 Wedding
27 Narrative
28 Hold On to Your Hat
PART II: God Was in This Place and I Didn't Know It
29 The Funnel
30 The Kaddish
31 Studying Talmud
32 The Holocaust
33 Prayer
34 Service
35 Why the Messiah Doesn t Come
36 Death
37 Teshuvah
38 The Lineaments of the Divine Encounter
39 Kabbalah
40 Taking Leave
PART III: To Struggle with God Until Your Name Changes
41 The Shem a
42 Open the Gates
43 Our Divine Name
44 What I Learned from Buddhism About How to Save Judaism
45 How to Look at Your Heart

About Jewish Lights
Copyright
PART I
To Leave
Everything
That Is
Familiar
Prologue THE WAY THINGS ARE
When does the spiritual life begin?
I can remember watching my mother sitting up in her bed, nursing my baby sister, Carol. I could not have been older than three. I was sitting opposite them in the big chaise lounge. The doorbell rang. It s time to go to bed, now, Alan, my mother said. My father was answering the door. Some people had come over to visit. There were a lot of people. It must have been a party.
I got up and started walking toward the room I shared with my sister, and my mother followed with Carol in her arms. I got into my bed carefully so none of the stuffed animals would be disturbed. My mother put Carol into her crib and strapped big metal braces onto her legs. As she did so, Carol began to cry. She has to wear these. It s for her own good, my mother said to me. They will make her legs straight. Then she tucked me in, kissed me, and turned out the light.
I could hear people laughing through the walls.
Carol continued to cry. Her cries got louder and louder. She started to scream. She was in an agony of pain, and I knew what it was-the braces were hurting her!
Finally, I got up out of bed and ran into the living room. Finding my mother, I pulled her desperately by the hand. She looked down at me. They hurt her! I said.
My mother took me by the hand and led me back to my bed. Carol has to wear the braces, she told me, tucking me in again. I watched her dark silhouette leaving the room.
Carol continued to scream; she screamed and she screamed.
Could it be that there was nothing my parents could do to make it stop? Carol s screams were filling up the world, and now even my dresser and my shelf of toys were filled with them, and they became the very stuff the world was made of.
Another evening, when I was about five, I was lying in my bed with my eyes wide open, when the night began to cascade down around me like a blue velvet curtain. Outside, a deep royal blue was filling up every corner of the universe. It was filling the world, and now it was coming into our house, and, finally, even my little room was awash in blue. My bed lifted and began to float inside of it, and blue velvet filled every cell of my being.
In the very center of the infinite blue was a small orange orb that the whole universe was funneling out of. I floated in my bed watching it vibrate, watching the vibrations going out from it in concentric circles, radiating out forever.
The head of my bed faced an open door. Across the hall, in the kitchen, my father was sitting alone at the Formica table, smoking in the dark. The glowing orange orb was the burning end of his cigarette.
Why was he sitting alone? Why was he sitting in the dark? Was he, too, transfixed by the cascading blue curtain? He stood up, then, stubbing out his cigarette. I could hear the scrape of his chair against the linoleum, and I could just make him out as he walked toward me through the inky darkness. For a moment, when he reached me, he stood absolutely still. Then he sat down on the side of my bed. Are you all right, son? he asked.
Yes, I said, inside a blue-black dream. He pulled the covers up around my chin and stroked my hair, looking into my eyes, and a great love passed between us.
1
A VIVID DREAM
The world I had become part of was completely Jewish. This was Brooklyn in the forties and everyone spoke Yiddish; there were pickle barrels out on the streets and candy stores full of penny candy on every corner. My father s father, Zayde Isaac, came to our house one day to see me. He was a rabbi, like I am now, and though he may have been no older than I am now, he was a little old man. He had thin white hair and a round white face. He was carrying a satchel.
My mother retreated down the long hall with baby Carol on her hip, leaving Zayde Isaac and me in the dining room, alone with each other. He put his satchel down on the table. It looked like a doctor s bag, and I came closer to see what was in it. These are Hebrew letters, he said, opening the bag just a little. I peered inside. They were large and beautiful, and they seemed to be moving in rows. I stood back as he took them out.
Zayde Isaac put some raisins in my hand. The letters seemed to be dancing. Yes, they are alive, he said.
This was how I was introduced to the aleph bes , the Hebrew alphabet.
I did not know Zayde Isaac very well; I did not see him very often. He came only one other time to show me the contents of his wonderful satchel. Only years later did I realize-this was not education; it was initiation.
I did not know Zayde Isaac as well as my maternal grandfather, Zayde Sam. When I think of Zayde Sam I picture him standing on the balcony of his apartment, bending over the rail to talk with people down in the park below. I have crawled out the window to join him. Zayde Sam would be arguing with Uncle Zaretsky, who was called The Red because he was a tall thin man with red hair and because he was a Communist. Old Mrs. Greenberg would stand nearby, but she never opened her mouth. No one had ever heard her speak. Sitting on a bench next to her would be Mr. and Mrs. Moran, who lived inside the Cyclone roller coaster in Coney Island. I had been in their house when the Cyclone was going. Everyone just stopped talking and everything shook. But everything in their house was nailed down, and nothing ever broke.
Molly Moran alternated as president of the local chapter of Hadassah with Bubbe Ida, my grandmother. Bubbe Ida was always very busy raising money for Israel. One day my cousin Arnie and I were playing hide-and-seek in our grandparents apartment and I ran into their bedroom to hide under the bed. But I couldn t fit because there were too many guns under there-rifles, machine guns, and pistols. A whole arsenal was under my grandparents bed, even the Samurai sword Uncle Eli brought back from the war in the Pacific! Bubbe was collecting weapons to send to Israel for the War of Independence, someone whispered to me later. But I must never tell. Now it was almost Pesach, and Bubbe Ida was turning the whole apartment upside down. There had already been days and days of chopping and cooking.
At the seder I sat by Zayde s side and asked the four questions. Later, I crawled under the long table that stretched the length of the apartment and looked at all the feet. Laughter shook the table above me. Zayde read on and never missed one single word of the Haggadah.
Zayde Sam loved words. He would sit in his chair in the evening reading the dictionary. He loved music. He led the choirs in the neighboring synagogues. When he sang or listened to music, his eyes would gloss over and begin to close. He was also in love with America. Songs began in his throat as synagogue melodies, but when he opened hi