For more than a year now, Rabbi David Curiel and I have been getting together on zoom every other week or so to talk about stories from the Hasidim, as they’ve been collected and retold by Martin Buber. We don’t prepare for the discussion – David tells me this is a way of Talmudic practice – and David opens one of the collections, picks a story randomly and reads it to us. Let’s see where the story takes us. We share our stories that arise and our reactions to the arisings. It feels to me very much like Council.
Next week, David and I are going public with our conversation. The Zen Peacemakers are inviting others to join us. It’s funny that I should end up here.
I am Jewish by osmosis. I learned from my father what I later came to understand as the Talmudic way to truth. Not that he ever talked about the Talmud. He talked more about his atheism. “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” is as close as we got to a family gospel. Daddy was smart, a self-educated voracious reader, and a fierce arguer. To arrive at the truth, you argued your position as fiercely as possible, and you argued with others who were smart and wise and fierce arguers themselves. The truth emerged from the fires of debate. That was my way for many years.
It was still my way in the early years of building our charter schools. It turned out that most of our team members hadn’t grown up in a Talmudic environment, even by osmosis. A lot of them thought I was frightening. But it was my way, despite my efforts, often failing, to soften. Not infrequently, Mary would tell me that I better call someone who I’d been rough on in a meeting to apologize.
As we built our schools, however, a shift occurred in my way to truth. Much to my surprise and rather behind my back, I was finding an alternative Jewish pathway, a pathway that I had been aware of all my life but never named. I come from a long line of storytellers. My father and all of his sisters were storytellers. Their mother was a storyteller. I grew up on their bedtime stories. I grew up listening to my father telling stories. All my life, I have been retelling his stories. I am coming back to these roots. It’s been a circuitous journey. I didn’t even know it was happening.
As a latecomer to Zen practice – I didn’t begin daily sitting until I was almost 50 years old – I had a lot of catching up to do. I read to catch up. That’s when I read Martin Buber, I and Thou, although I’d heard of him in college. I appreciated it enough to browse his other books on the Barnes & Noble shelf, and there I stumbled on The Tales of the Hasidim, Buber’s retelling of the ancient stories. I was grabbed, and I kept returning to the Tales which have been on my night table now for almost 30 years, only occasionally read but almost always there to be picked up and randomly dipped into.
I wasn’t thinking of Buber or the Hasidim when I boarded a plane in July, 2000, headed for a peacemaker gathering in Santa Barbara. That weekend, on a mountain side above the Pacific, Bernie unveiled a new Upaya. The new challenge was to choose a persona, a kind of alter ego, an alternative set of eyes through which we could view whatever we were studying. I chose Martin Buber. For no conscious reason, although in the years since I have tried to explain that choice to myself.
There was something in The Tales which resonated with the Way of Council and with what I was discovering in the talks I was giving as a beginning Zen teacher. I don’t know how many of the other Santa Barbara peacemakers even remember their alter ego, but Buber has stayed with me, the Buber of the Tales.
I was gravitating to storytelling – not just in my teisho, the talks that I was giving weekly in the zendo, but also in the way I was leading in our schools. In the office, I was initially embarrassed by my storytelling. Was this a self-indulgence of an aging leader showing signs of dottiness? For years, I was apologetic when I told a story, but over time, it was becoming clearer: no principles are absolute, principles conflict, and that there is no algorithm for resolving these conflicts.
My approach had been shifting for years before I recognized what was happening. Instead of attempting to extrapolate principles from my experience, I was just sharing my stories, stories from my life and stories I have heard from others which have been sources of illumination for me. My ways of being, in the zendo, in Council, and engaged in social enterprise which had seemed so different were becoming one.
As I moved into retirement, I planned to write my stories. I had books in my head about the work that we had done in our schools and about what I was learning in my Zen practice. One of the ideas which intrigued me was the possibility of looking at the tales of the Hasidim as Zen koans. I thought it might even be a book. I had a title, Baal Shem Zen. Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov, was the founder of the Hasidic movement. The wisdom of his teaching is contained in his stories.
I loved the idea, but I needed a collaborator. I didn’t know enough Jewish. I knew I was missing nuances. My first and only thought was Don Singer, Rabbi and a Dharma successor of Bernie. Don, along with Bernie and Bob Kennedy, a Jesuit priest who is also one of Bernie’s successors, had officiated at our wedding. Don and I had become friends, and I had studied Buber’s I and Thou with him. Don was perfect, but by the time I had finally retired and could see the possibility of actually getting into the project, Don was gone.
As was so often the case when we were building our school network, when the time for a project is right, the Universe delivered the needed ingredients. I met Rabbi David Curiel through one of the Bernie Memorial zooms that we put together for the Zen Peacemakers. David has been serving as one of the rabbis at the annual Peacemaker Auschwitz Bearing Witness Retreats. At the memorial, David made a reference to the Baal Shem. A bell rang. I invited David to meet me on zoom. He accepted.
The rest as they say is history. David and I are going public with our way of reading and working with the Tales. David’s humorous intro to our conversations captures the spirit. “A rabbi and a roshi walked into a bar …” Join us in the bar (on zoom) this coming Tuesday, October 15 at noon Eastern. You need to register. Hope to see you.
Commenti