When [Moshe] Waldoks
first met the Dalai Lama at the preliminary session in New Jersey, he felt
challenged by him. "He got down to
the brass tacks of what religious experience has to be. He asked us, "Isn't the role of religion
to create compassion in people?" and when religion stops creating
compassion in people and unfortunately, we've see religion as a source of
divisiveness in the world, what's wrong?"
True dialogue…must
change the speakers from you and me to we and us all.
Jews make up less
than half of the one percent of the world's population.
Tradition should
have been a vote, not a veto.
Young Tibetans
growing up in India or in Europe are not always interested in cultivating
Buddhist practice. In that sense the Dalai Lama and the rabbis share a problem:
how to keep religion relevant in a highly materialistic and secular culture;
how to renew without losing continuity.
We were seeing
firsthand that the Dalai Lama's brilliant tolerance was not practiced
universally in his community. In fact,
it has been said that were he not the Dalai Lama, he would be considered a
heretic.
"Religious life
should be a mixture of faith and analysis." Dalai Lama
"When your
karma ripens there is nothing that can protect you." Geshe Sonam Rinchen
The Dalai Lama had
offered Jews extraordinary advice -- and a challenge. Could we make Judaism more beneficial --
instead of just asking Jews to hold on out of guilt?
Seeing Judaism in
the light of Tibetan Buddhism, I realized that the religion of my birth is not
just an ethnicity or an identity, but a way of life, and a spiritual path, as
profound as any other. That path has three
parts: prayer, study, and acts of loving-kindness.
