IN autumn 1990, a Jewish Buddhist, a poet and eight distinguished Jews traveled to Dharamsala, India, for a four-day exchange of views -- a reciprocal teaching -- with the Dalai Lama, the titular head of Tibetan Buddhism, who has been living in exile for more than three decades. The Jewish Buddhist (or JUBU, as some say) was Marc Lieberman, a San Francisco ophthalmologist, who, with Moshe Waldoks, a scholar and editor, organized the meeting in Dharamsala as well as a preliminary discussion between the Dalai Lama and a Jewish contingent the year before in New Jersey. The poet and chronicler on the trip to Dharamsala was Dr. Lieberman's friend Rodger Kamenetz, and the eight distinguished Jews included Mr. Waldoks and representatives from all over the Jewish doctrinal map: Orthodox and Reconstructionist rabbis, rabbis active in Jewish renewal and professors of religious studies and modern Hebrew thought.
As implausible as that meeting in the Tibetan enclave in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh sounds, the two sides -- Buddhist and Jewish -- were drawn together by what was at first an almost impalpable sense of correspondence between their traditions and by the real need for the group experiencing a new diaspora to learn something of the arts of survival from a very old diaspora.
In 1959, when the Dalai Lama left Tibet for his refuge in Dharamsala, the Chinese had already occupied his native land for nine years. In their continuing hold on Tibet, they have systematically destroyed its monasteries and temples, imprisoned and executed its people and encouraged the settlement there of ethnic Chinese. "All told," Mr. Kamenetz writes in "The Jew in the Lotus," "an estimated 1.2 million Tibetans have died as a result of the occupation." It has been the Dalai Lama's task to preserve his gentle religion not only against the predations of the Chinese Army but also against the anger of Tibetans living in exile, to prevent Tibetan resistance from becoming merely political and thereby losing the soul of his people's identity.
The Jews who traveled to Dharamsala, particularly those from the United States, were confronting a different side of the same problem. In America, the spirituality of Judaism has been depleted by the very adaptability of its people, by their increasing secularism. Mr. Kamenetz, who teaches English at Louisiana State University, speaks for many when he says: "The house of Judaism in North America has not been satisfactorily built -- it does not have a spiritual dimension for many Jews. Too many Jews are like me: our Jewishness has been an inchoate mixture of nostalgia, family feeling, group identification, a smattering of Hebrew, concern for Israel, and so forth." What he believes he witnessed in India and America was a spiritual exile, Jews becoming Buddhists in order to find something the religion of their birth had come to lack.
For many readers of "The Jew in the Lotus," the surprise will not be making the acquaintance of the Dalai Lama or his adherents in the enclave called McLeod Ganj in the Himalayan foothills. The surprise will be making the acquaintance of Rabbis Zalman Schachter and Jonathan Omer-Man, who made presentations before the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala on the cabala and Jewish meditation. "Our teachings have been kept secret even from Jews for a long time," Rabbi Schachter said. "So every day, when people get up and say their prayers, there is an exoteric order. But hidden inside the exoteric is the esoteric, the deep attunement, the deep way."
Nearly every major religion has developed a tension between its exoteric forms -- accessible to all practitioners -- and its esoteric secrets, which are restricted to a small band of initiates, if only to prevent the misuse of that esoterica. In a series of remarkable discussions, the Dalai Lama and these two learned, ebullient cabalists, Rabbis Schachter and Omer-Man, compare notes on the character of meditation, its structures, rhythms and traditions. To read these chapters is something like walking through a mythic garden, and they are cause for reflection on many subjects, not least of them the shape of human consciousness and what might be called a bending of tradition to such an extent that the richness of its resources becomes inaccessible.
"The Jew in the Lotus" is the kind of book that seems, at first glance, to have been written for a carefully delimited audience: Jews, Buddhists and Jewish Buddhists. But that is an illusion. It is really a book for anyone who feels the narrowness of a wholly secular life or who wonders about the fate of esoteric spiritual traditions in a world that seems bent on destroying or vulgarizing them. It is a narrative about an extraordinary moment in history, of course, but it is also the chronicle of Rodger Kamenetz's discovery of what he says is a more nourishing Judaism, though anyone who reads "The Jew in the Lotus" as a spiritual autobiography will quickly find that Mr. Kamenetz is uncannily revealing about his religious past and cannily uncommitted about his religious future.
Along the way the reader meets many notable people: the Dalai Lama, the profundity of whose presence Mr. Kamenetz finds hard to translate; Ram Dass, a Jewish Buddhist who was once named Richard Alpert; Richard Gere, who says in Dharamsala, "It's not a good idea to argue with poor people"; and Allen Ginsberg. Insights are here for the gathering. I have saved one that was given to Mr. Kamenetz, who is skeptical and, evidently, somewhat irascible, by a lama from Montreal: "You doubt everything else," the lama said. "Why not doubt anger?"