Buddhist Reflections from a Soho Bookstore
Suzanne Tick led our community Mandala project
Dear friends,
I’ve been spending a lot of time with my brother, Tari, a Buddhism scholar from a mountain village near Jerusalem, whose been here for the last few weeks. He lives the incongruity of an inquisitive mind, a compassionate disposition, and a hippy community in the midst of a country dominated by notions of fixed identity, right wing policy and war. He has to somehow reconcile Buddhist ideas of emptiness, of the incredible power of the mind to create what we see and experience, of the tenuous nature of what we call reality, with the world around him. The Buddhist ideas guide him, and it’s been rubbing in on me, softening and loosening some of my stiff mental positioning.
When I ask myself how this coming election could possibly be so close, I am reminded that my reality is as constructed as anyone else’s in this country. Tari described entering a bookstore in Soho and immediately getting swept away by the bountiful variety of thinkers on the shelves, thinkers of a different angle than he’s used to seeing in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Of course they are not one type of thought, and offer an array of views, but the book selections reflect a certain way of seeing the world, much like any newspaper reflects its world view by the way it defines what is happening in the world. That bookstore, he felt, created a world impenetrable to other worlds of thought. In the world of the Soho bookstore, people who experience a different world and therefore think differently make no sense whatsoever. They might as well be aliens.
None of this denies the logic of the worldview created by, or perhaps reflected in this bookstore. It is very real.
Today is Simchat Torah, the day on which we celebrate the Torah, as well as the day on which, according to the Jewish calendar the horrendous massacre took place in the south of Israel one year ago. The rabbis taught that there are “Seventy faces to the Torah.” By this they meant that different people see vastly different things in it, none of which are necessarily truer than the others. The Torah is a reflection that creates reality, much like the Soho bookstore. It is a very powerful mirror.
This creative mirroring effect is expressed powerfully In the Sukkah tractate of the Talmud. In the end of days, the rabbis tell us, God will finally kill the Yetzer Hara, the evil inclination that lives in each of us. Both the righteous and the wicked will gather for the Yetzer Hara’s funeral, and both will weep.
"For the righteous the evil inclination appears to them as a high mountain, and for the wicked it appears to them as a mere strand of hair. These weep and those weep. The righteous weep and say: How could we have been able to overcome so high a mountain? And the wicked weep and say: How could we have been unable to overcome this strand of hair? "
We see different things in the same reality. This week for example, one sees a war against Hizballah terrorists in Lebanon, and another sees ethnic cleansing and murder in northern Gaza. So should this undo our convictions? Should we simply relax and let the world roll on in front of our eyes?
The Talmud gives a clear “No!”
"They said about Hillel the Elder that when he was rejoicing at the Celebration of the Sukkot he said this:
If I am here, everything is here; and if I am not here, who is here? "
If we deny the outlook that we carry, even knowing that it is only one part of a multi-faced reality, which we ourselves played a major part in creating, we essentially deny our own existence. If we’re here, with our own minds, bodies and hearts, we have no choice but to participate in this world. Otherwise we’ll be living in someone else’s world. If we can carry the awareness of other realities while we live our own deeply and fully, then we come close to the active, humble life that the both theTorah and the Buddha ask of us.
Shabbat shalom and Happy Simchat Torah,
Rabbi Misha