Taking readers from the 19th century to today, the author shows how Buddhism in the U.S. has given rise to new contemplative forms within American Judaism and shaped the way Americans understand and practice Buddhism.
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Taking readers from the 19th century to today, the author shows how Buddhism in the U.S. has given rise to new contemplative forms within American Judaism and shaped the way Americans understand and practice Buddhism.
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The term "JewBu" has been coined to refer to individuals of Jewish birth who have come to practice Buddhism to varying degrees. Many Americans who come to Buddhism are, in fact, Jewish. In her book, "American JewBu: Jews Buddhists, and Religious Change" (2019) initially written as a doctoral dissertation, Emily Sigalow offers a carefully researched and reasoned study of the varied engagement of Jewish people with Buddhism.
I have personal familiarity with the subject of this book. For many years, I studied Buddhism seriously at a Theravada monastery with a gifted and committed American teacher. Here at the outset there is a difference from most of the Jewish-Buddhist relationships Sigalow studies. She points out that American Buddhists focus almost entirely on meditative practice without study of Buddhist texts and doctrines. She also points out that the focus on meditation works something of a distortion of traditional Buddhist practice. Thus my Buddhist experience differed slightly from that she describes. Still, I recognized myself in her study. Interestingly, Sigalow herself is a practicing and committed Jew who had not had any Buddhist involvement before the extent of Jewish participation in Buddhism was brought to her attention early in graduate school and piqued her interest. She did an outstanding job in familiarizing herself with Buddhism and in her detailed, extensive study.
Broadly, Sigalow understands the Jewish Buddhist relationship as one of religious syncretism. Syncretism has had a bad reputation in some quarters, but I think she is correct. Syncretism means that two widely different religious traditions are brought together. Her view should be contrasted with the attempt to find commonalities between Judaism and Buddhism (although she finds some) and also and the view that there is something of pick and choose involved in the Jewish Buddhist relationship. She is right to use a syncretistic model, and I think it, syncretism is a good thing in the circumstances.
Her book is in two parts. The first part "Four Periods of Jewish Buddhist Engagement" is historical and includes a discussion of early Jewish-Buddhist relationships in the United States going back to the late 19th Century. I was unaware of this early history and found it fascinating. The story picks up familiarity in the counterculture of the 1960s when many American seekers, discontented with American life, discovered Buddhism. Many of the leaders of the Buddhist movement were and are Jewish. Again and with exceptions they transformed Buddhism to make it palatable to Americans by focusing on meditation, which in Asia was not a widespread practice beyond monastics and scholars. I am of an age to be part of the counterculture and I recognize the description. As it happens my serious involvement in Buddhism came much later, and I was never a person of the Left or a member of the counterculture. I am rather conservative and moderate, but that fact does not vitiate Sigalow's account. At least in some cases, the attraction of Buddhism is different from what she allows.
The second part of the book is titled "Lived Experiences of Jewish Buddhists in the United States." Sigalow has done a lot of reading, interviewing, and thinking. She explores different ways of Buddhist Jewish involvement, including how Buddhist meditative practice was, in some quarters, adopted into Judaism by omitting the distinctively Buddhist trappings (such as sitting before a Buddha statue), She talks about different ways in which committed Jews (those who already had a strong Jewish identity) were able to learn from and work Buddhism into their religious lives, And in a related matter, she explores various ways that JewBus construct their own sense of personal identity that combines Judaism and what they have learned from Buddhism. Her study places a lot of emphasis on psychotherapy and on left wing American politics. In a sense I have been there and done that, but I find her emphasis somewhat overdone. I tried to keep separate from both in my experience, particularly leftist politics. Sigalow is certainly correct that Buiddhism appeals to intellectuals who have doubts about the existence of the Abrahamic God. I would be in that group, as I think most Americans would be who came to Buddhism. I don't think the attraction of Buddhism is either psychological or political leftist. Instead, as she quotes the work of scholars Rodney Stark and Robert Finke in a footnote towards the end of the book: "religion is concerned with the supernatural, everything else is secondary". I learned from the metaphysics and view of the world of Buddhism.
In the past few years, I have been religiously solitary and not active as a Jew, Buddhist or JewBu. I think about philosophical and religious questions a lot. Sigalow is broadly correct in saying that most people raised with a certain degree of Jewish exposure and identity have difficulty in giving it all up, even if they wished to do so. With that, I loved and benefitted by what I learned from Buddhism and try to adopt its teachings, not only the meditation practice, in what I do. I don't like labels and am not sure whether JewBu applies to me or not. But I was enjoyed this book and enjoyed thinking again about American Buddhism and American Judaism and about how their paths have crossed.
