Dharamsala, 1990 · the meeting on purpose

Eight Jewish delegates — rabbis, scholars, a Hasidic teacher, a poet — travelled to the Dalai Lama's exile seat in northern India at his own invitation, because he had a practical question for them: what is the Jewish secret of spiritual survival in exile? Two thousand years of it, and Tibet had just begun its own. The conversations that followed went both ways: Zalman Schachter-Shalomi taught kabbalah in the Dalai Lama's reception room, and the delegates found tantric visualisation and Jewish esoteric practice sitting closer together than either side had expected. Rodger Kamenetz wrote it up as The Jew in the Lotus (1994), which became the book of a whole generation of Jewish Buddhists — Kornfield, Goldstein, Salzberg, Boorstein, Ram Dass — who had gone east because nobody had told them the mystical wing at home had a door. Nine hundred years after the accidental crossing, the deliberate one: the first time these two traditions knowingly sat in the same room.