Every year around Yom Kippur I talk about one of Roshi Bernie’s most impactful teachings. I’d always thought about atonement as making amends. Bernie suggested that atonement meant quite literally “to be at one with.” To be at one with what? With all the ingredients of my life – all of them, not just the pleasant and the pretty. This teaching has changed my relationship to Yom Kippur and to the Gatha of Atonement, but it took many years for it to occur to me that the Gatha sh

As the Jewish high holy days approached, I found myself thinking about the future of Zen in America where religion is such a family thing. If Zen is going to engage broadly with American families, we are going to have to have something for the kids. It got me thinking about Sunday school and my experience. When Morri was little, Dee and I wondered how to support her spiritual development. Dee had found her spiritual home in the Hindu Christian world of the Self-Realization Fe

Three of Maezumi Roshi’s first successors were Jewish, including my teacher, Roshi Bernie Glassman. Accident or karma? I’m thinking now that it was karmic. I’m thinking about the importance of planting Buddhist seeds in Taoist China. Without the Taoist soil, there would have been no Zen. Maybe the American Jewish soil is important to the emergence of American Zen. Maezumi Roshi brought to America the Zen that he’d imbibed growing up in a family of Japanese Soto Sect priests