The Jew in the Lotus

Rabbi Greenberg explained that we lost 30 percent of the Jewish people during the war, but more than 80 percent of the scholars, mystics, and teachers who could pass on ancient traditions.

The six-pointed star originated in ancient Mesopotamia as a symbol of fertility. It did not become a specifically Jewish symbol until the late Middle Ages. The same symbol came into India with the Aryans, where it represented Shakti, the Mother. It entered Tibet along with the teachings of the Hindu tantric tradition.

Ever since the Holocaust we are all like priests who have become contaminated by death.

Jews have achieved because they consider secular achievement a religious excellence.

The glory of Judaism is that there is no single voice. There’s no pope setting the key. So it’s a vast musical library.

For Jews, the journey to paradise is a journey of interpretation.

There is a beautiful Hasidic teaching, that before every human being comes a retinue of angels, announcing, “Make way for an image of the Holy One, Blessed be He.” How rarely do we listen for those angels when we encounter another human being. How rarely do we see in another human being’s eyes an image of everything we hold most dear.

The “demand for spirituality today” is “at the deepest level subjective, it’s in the nominative, not in the accusative, the dative, the genitive. In shul, I’m there because it’s genitive: my poppa belonged to the shul, I’m of it. I’m an accusative Jew because a goy calls me that way. Because I’ve been circumcised and I have this history, my dative

Marc, a San Francisco ophthalmologist, was the first person to ever describe himself to me as a JUBU—a Jewish Buddhist. I’ve since learned that he is one among many, in a long line that goes back at least one hundred years.