An old joke tells of a Jewish woman who treks to the Himalayas to seek an audience with a guru sitting in seclusion on a mountaintop. When at last she comes before him, she implores: "Sheldon, come home!" Rosie Rosenzweig became that Jewish mother--but in real life, the story has a different ending. Instead of asking her Buddhist son, Ben, to come home, Rosie accepts his invitation to find out about Buddhism firsthand. Together they visit retreat centers in Europe and Asia and meet leading meditation masters who are Ben's ...
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An old joke tells of a Jewish woman who treks to the Himalayas to seek an audience with a guru sitting in seclusion on a mountaintop. When at last she comes before him, she implores: "Sheldon, come home!" Rosie Rosenzweig became that Jewish mother--but in real life, the story has a different ending. Instead of asking her Buddhist son, Ben, to come home, Rosie accepts his invitation to find out about Buddhism firsthand. Together they visit retreat centers in Europe and Asia and meet leading meditation masters who are Ben's gurus: Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh and Tibetan lamas Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche and Ch�kyi Nyima Rinpoche. While struggling to come to terms with Ben's choice of a spiritual path so different from everything that she cherishes, Rosie finds that she is learning more about herself than she anticipated. The adventures of Rosie recounts take her from her Boston suburb to a Zen hermitage in France, an enclave of Tibetan Buddhists in Nepal, and finally to her own spiritual home in Jerusalem. Whether she is practicing mindfulness meditation, sharing a cup of tea with a Zen master, or worrying about bowing down to idols, Rosie is intent in her quest to find common ground between two ancient traditions, to deepen her understanding of her son, and to find a way to her own authentic experience of truth. Hers is a mission of peace that seeks to build a bridge of understanding between cultures and faiths while remaining true to her own Jewish identity.
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It is a difficult experience for a parent when a child reaches adulthood and makes a fundamental life decision different from the parent's own. Possibly the most trying of such situations involves religion -- not simply lapsing from practice but rather choosing a different religion from one's parents and embracing it fully and wholeheartedly.
Rosie Resenzweig's book "A Jewish Mother in Shangri-la" (1998) tells the story of her to response to the decision of her son Ben to follow the path of Tibetan Buddhism. Her book, as it develops, is much more about her own spiritual search than that of her son. Rosenzweig and her therapist husband, Sandy, had themselves had a difficult and varied time in matters of religion, having participated themselves in various New Age and Eastern groups in the 1960s and 70s. They had disagreements in their marriage and Rosie Rosenzweig faced issues with her career and with the death, over a brief time period, of several close members of her family. The family situation improved with time and both Rosie and Sandy found their way to an increasingly observant Orthodox Judaism.
Ben Rosenzweig, from this account, was a quiet, studious child who became seriously interested in Buddhism during a college year in Nepal. Following study, and several further trips to the East, he formally took refuge (in the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha) but did not renounce his Jewish faith. Rosie Rosenzweig was hearbroken.
The story of Rosie and Ben begins in earnest when Ben takes and completes a three-year meditation retreat in upstate New York during which time mother and son correspond. Following the retreat Rosie accepts Ben's invitation to accompany him on a five-week trip to Europe and Asia to learn about Buddhism. They spend two weeks in France in the Plum Village Center of the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh and have an audience with him. They spend three weeks in Nepal and meet Ben's chief guru, an aging Tibetan monk named Tulu Urgyen Rinpoche, and Rosie receives a rare wisdom transmission from him.
The Buddhists that Rosie meets are impressed with her openness, joie de vivre and willingness to learn. Rosie is increasingly impressed with the Buddhist path and search for wisdom as she tries to find parallels in it to her Jewish experience and teachings. She struggles to maintain her Jewish practices during the trip, including observing the Sabbath and avoiding unkosher food, and, in following the Jewish prohibition against image-worship, Rosie carefully avoids bowing to idols or persons. She gives the gurus she meets copies of the "Tanya" a Jewish mystical book by the founder of Lubavitcher Hasidism. Rosie learns to respect, if not share, her son's chosen religious path and reconciliation and love come to the fore between mother and son.
But Rosie's own story and interest in Buddhism go further. When she returns from her trip (Ben stays in Nepal) she continues to study Buddhism while reflecting upon her own Jewish practice. During a pilgrimage to Israel she becomes increasingly drawn to Jewish mysticism, seeing in it parallels to what she found in Buddhism but with a Jewish content. On a bus trip through a desert (p. 156), Rosie has a dream -- she has several during the course of the book -- during which a voice tells her to "let it go through you" -- a difficult and obscure teaching that could be delivered by many religious or mystical traditions. Rosie learns to develop a deeply personalized approach to her Jewishness through a study of Jewish mysticism -- a part of Judaism that still is too little explored. She tells the reader that "[m]y belief system has been expanded to include the possibility of many approaches to Divinity" (p. 167) as she strives to accommodate what she has learned from Buddhist meditation practice and Buddhist texts (including a text called the Dantabhuni Sutta, no 126 from the mid-length discourses -- Mahjima Nikya of the Pali canons on the importance of taming the mind) with Jewish teachings and with her developing interest in Jewish mysticism. She is able to lose the guilt that she carried with her -- the feeling that the problems with her marriage and the difficulties of raising children were responsible for Ben's turn to Buddhism -- in finding and expanding her own path which includes substantial Buddhist learning.
This is a short, engagingly written book that will be of interest to those who have made a change in their own spiritual direction or who have loved ones who have made such a change.