The Dalai Lama:
Helping Us Be Who We Are

IRVING GREENBERG

Special to The Jewish Times

IV

hen the invitation came
to join a group of Jewish
scholars in a dialogue
with the Dalai Lama
and Tibetan Buddhist
monks, I asked only one
question: Was this a missionary group
seeking legitimation (as the Unification
Church and Jews for Jesus do) to gain
access to go after more Jews? The answer
was no. The Dalai Lama has encouraged
Jews who approach him to deepen their
Jewishness. "The task of a true teacher,"
he has said, "is to help people become
what they are."
Ever since 1959 when the Chinese in-
vaded Tibet, I had felt an instinctive sym-
pathy for the Tibetans. The invaders
crushed Tibet's monastic orders and
destroyed its temples. Over one million
people were killed in the course of the con-
quest; the Dalai Lama and 150,000 others
went into exile near Dharmasala, India.
This is what the destruction of the
Thmple must have been like in Jewish
history.
In 1959, the Dalai Lama was a young
man being raised as a sheltered and
studious God-king. Now, he was a mature
scholar, the focus of the religious and
political hopes of his people yearning to
be free. He had become a seasoned dip-
lomat, traveling the world, pleading the
case for Tibetan survival with heads of
government.
The Dalai Lama's career summoned up
a strong Zionist association — Theodor
Herzl must have lived his life the same
way. Without an army, without official
standing or governmental recognition,
Herzl had pursued heads of state seeking
the right for his people to go back. All he
asked was to give his people a chance to
restore their own culture in their own
homeland. How often had his requests
been ignored by those who respect only
entrenched power? How many times had
the founder of my national liberation
movement been dismissed?

,

Rabbi Irving Yitz Greenberg is president
and co-founder of CLAL - The National
Jewish Center for Learning and Leader-
ship, an organization dedicated to educa-
tion for Jewish leadership and to the
building of a strong community based on
the spirit of Clal Yisrael.

showed us an extraordinary model of
humanness. Neither bitter nor shattered
by the extended grief of exile, he radiates
an inner serenity and kindness. He is a
man of peace who calls on all religions to
express themselves and to find common
ground in helping fellow human beings
and serving as agents of healing —
without denying their distinctive value
and teachings.
About Judaism:
As we reflected on Tibet's agony and
struggle for survival, we also appreciated
the wisdom of Jewish covenantal ethics.
Judaism also dreams of a Messianic age
when life and peace will triumph, when
"they shall beat their swords into
plowshares . . . and shall not learn war
anymore" (Isaiah 2:4). But the Halachah
insists that until the Messiah comes, it
is an ethical necessity to have an army.
There are wars of self-defense which are
a mitzvah to fight, others which are per-
mitted, and yet others which are wrong
and forbidden:
As long as the world is unredeemed,
one is required to meet its strategic and
security challenges. Jewry must become
involved in the morally equivocal tasks of
government and warfare, of political ac-
tion and economic life. Good people must
act until the final perfection — lest they
escape to spirituality now, but hand over
the world to the forces of evil, poverty and
degradation.
We came to see that the Tibetans had
taken a spiritually heroic step in becom-
ing pacifists but they had been guilty of
premature Messianism.
During our meeting with the Dalai
Lama, as we struggled to explain and he
to understand, I was moved by the lesson
that the Dalai Lama was teaching us.
Imagine if the spiritually seeking Jews
who came to him — both those at the re-
cent meeting and those actively involved
with Buddhism — had hidden their
Jewishness out of ignorance and aliena-
tion. He and his people would have been
denied the Jewish witness which they
needed in order to live. The deeper lesson
was that whenever the Jewish people is
faithful to its own religion, whenever it
shares its experience fully with others, it
is truly "a light unto the nations." In exile
and in weakness, in Israel and with power,
that is our calling In the words of the an-
cient promise to Abraham, the first Jew:
"Through you all the families of the earth
Encountering the Dalai Lama "opened us to the other
will
be blessed." (Genesis 12, 3).
faith's integrity."

Honestly, increased understanding be-
tween Tibetan Buddhism and Judaism
was very low on my priorities. I am preoc-
cupied by the escalating surliness be-
tween traditional and liberal Judaism and
the appalling ignorance among Jews
about each other's lives and teachings.
Nor did I expect to learn that much
religiously. But how could anyone with a
Jewish memory ignore the Tibetans?
I was wrong about the learning. The
Dalai Lama taught us a lot about
Buddhism, even more about menschlich-
keit, and most of all about Judaism.
As all true dialogue accomplishes, this
encounter with the Dalai Lama opened us
to the other faith's integrity. Equally
valuable, the encounter reminded us of
neglected aspects of ourselves, of ele-
ments in Judaism that are overlooked un-
til they are reflected back to us in the
mirror of the Other.
We need this instruction. To be faithful
to its role as an agent of universal
redemption, Judaism must synthesize
and unify East and West, not join one or
the other tradition in parochial fashion.
Only in this way can Judaism avoid the
19th-century Christian missionary error
of serving as the agent of modern
Western culture at the cost of religious in-
tegrity and the Biblical message.
About menschlichkeit: Paradoxically
enough, for someone who is revered as
divine by his own people, the Dalai Lama

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