“The Orthodox Jewish community is third world in theology and philosophy. Having a political state of Israel now, I’m convinced the great religious challenge is going to be the pluralist issue. Each culture can no longer present itself as self-evident.”

He explained that the basic Buddhist concept of shunyata, or emptiness, which derives from Indian philosophy, was carried by a Jewish scholar into the Arabic world where it became the mathematical zero.

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

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.

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

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.

Modern science and Buddhism cannot contradict, because Buddhism is based on reality.

“There isn’t a serious Jew today, whatever denomination or affiliation, who is not still somehow traumatized that a third of our people were destroyed so viciously and in such a short period of time. It’s like the amputee who still feels the phantom pain. The leg isn’t there, but the pain is always there.”

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