We know what Sodom and Gomorrah are. The story has metaphorical power. “Then the Lord caused rain upon Sodom and Gomorrah, brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven. And he overthrew those cities and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities and that which grew upon the ground. But [Lot’s] wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.” From that biblical phrase came the statement “Don’t look back.” Remember the Bob Dylan song and the movie Don’t Look Back?
I’m impressed with how much great literature is based upon biblical stories, or biblical truths, if you want to put it that way. I know it sounds suspicious, but I got weirdly teary reading about Cain and the part about east of Eden. I can’t put my finger on it. I wish I could. It moved me because of the power of the words of the Bible.
Then the LORD caused to rain upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; and He overthrow those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.
—Genesis 19:24–26
When you think about the three great religions on earth, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, they are three religions that are fundamentally tied by one common thread: monotheism, the belief in a single God. Forget about the Wahhabis who have infected Islam. Forget about the fact that Saudi Arabia has poisoned Islam, at least for the moment. If you look at the purity of Islam and you denude Islam of its hatred, of the killing and the murdering of infidels, there is so much beauty in all three religions. And they all come from the same source, which is the belief in God.
East of Eden
If you ask even the most uneducated person you know about the Garden of Eden, they know what you’re talking about. Everyone knows what the Garden of Eden is. The minute you say it, they get an image. It may mean different things to different people.
But there is another place, east of Eden, referenced in the Bible, which is the Land of Nod. That’s funny, because junkies say he nodded out. People say you want to nod off. Where does the word nod come from? How does that refer to someone nodding off or nodding out?
Well, the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible says that there’s a place east of Eden, where Cain was exiled by God after he had murdered his brother, Abel. He was sent from the Garden of Eden to a place called Nod. Genesis 4:16 says, “And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the Land of Nod, east of Eden.”
What does that mean, the Land of Nod? Nod is the Hebrew root of the verb “to wander.” So if you live in the Land of Nod, that means you are a wandering person. You are a castoff. The wandering Jew lives in Nod. Of course, the colloquial meaning of the word nod in English is to fall asleep, to nod off. If you say, “That person’s going to the Land of Nod,” that means he or she is going to sleep.
Genesis 4:17 says that “After arriving in the Land of Nod, Cain’s wife bore him a son, Enoch, in whose name he built the first city.” It’s fascinating to me. There are places named after the Land of Nod. There are popular culture references, such as John Steinbeck’s famous novel East of Eden. Two of its central themes are the betrayal of a brother and a land of sleep.
And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.
—Genesis 4:16
Genesis 2:5 and 2:8
I have some brief comments on Genesis 2:5 and 2:8. Genesis 2:5 says, “No shrub of the field was yet on the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up.” Genesis 2:8 says, “And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden and there he put the man whom he had formed.”
As I first read that, I shuddered when I thought of the great literature that has been derived from biblical statements. Of course you know that East of Eden came directly from the Bible. There are so many other literary references to the Bible by Shakespeare and other great writers over the ages, all derived from the greatest poet of all.
Genesis 2:18
And the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” It’s clear to anyone who reads it that man and woman belong together. I felt it necessary to repeat that point, given this age of ambivalence, but it seems to me that the universal truth for all mankind is man plus woman as one flesh. Period. End of story.
From Tennis to Temple’s Tempest
Lean, spare, and athletic, Barry is a sixty-year-old who looks better than most fit forty-year-olds. I would like to have met Barry on the tennis court where he taught professional players the psychology of winning. But I met him in a different setting, and as we talked, I was impressed by his being a learned rabbi and trained psychologist, not exhibiting the binds or trappings of either role, choosing instead the easy grace of master tennis instructor.
Fourteen years after I scented my first perfumed plumeria, heard the song of the dove, and was awed by great vertical rainbows in the tropical forest, I found myself in a hotel room on an island, witnessing the unshackling of my imprisoned other self.
My only son, Russell Goldencloud, was now twelve. In May of that year, he would walk to the Torah and read his portion before an assembly of his parents’ friends.
I had avoided formal Judaism in my many intermediary years of wandering far from the fold, but Jewish I was. Jewish he would be, too. A member of sisterhoods and brotherhoods, paid tickets to worship on “high” holy days? Never!
My deceased grandfather Samuel, the father of my father, Benjamin, had taught me from his grave. His daughter, Beulah, my strong-willed aunt, had told me years after his premature death that he, too, had not believed in formal religion. “If you are in the woods, a tree to your back becomes a temple.”
Pantheism? The worship of natural phenomena, such as the plumeria and rainbow? Perhaps. But who created those natural wonders?
And so it went, and so I went, and so went the religious teaching of my son, until I found myself on that tropical island in a paradisiacal corner of the universe with a free copy of The Teaching of Buddha in my hotel bedroom drawer.
Where the Gideons walked, the Buddhists now flew, placing the words of their teacher to encourage resistance against temptation, I suppose. But with a son, a daughter, and a loyal woman of fourteen years all sleeping wind-soft sleep in tropical beds adjacent to mine, where was the temptation?
The second night, unable to sleep, I drew the spare bed to the terrace and lay awake, the crashing surf both sedating and arousing me.
Here was purity, I thought. Yet visions of flooding waves running over this corner of the island disallowed the deep rest I so anxiously sought to soothe my aching lungs and heart, prematurely worn from life on the freeways of ambition.
In the sharp light by my bed, now snapped on, I restlessly pushed aside the five or six other books I had so greedily bought in the Honolulu bookstore: a biography of George Orwell and four or five English translations of modern Japanese novels.
Instead, the words of more ancient masters seemed to ring truer. I flipped through the pages of the small, colorfully jacketed book I had found in the bedroom drawer.
A man who chases after fame and wealth and love affairs is like a child who licks honey from the blade of a knife. While he is tasting the sweetness of honey, he has to risk hurting his tongue. He is like a man who carries a torch against a strong wind; the flame will surely burn his hands and face.
“The Way of Purification” was the section in The Teaching of Buddha where I found this cajoling jewel of instruction.
Without insisting on my good behavior this book immediately felt like the advice of a good friend! It suggested without telling me it “suggested.”
As the waves continued to crash a hundred yards from that room,1 I continued to read in the little portable bed out on the deck as my family slept their sleep and dreamed their dreams. Compared with my struggles with the world of books and words, the prim little volume found in the hotel room drawer seemed to answer so many needs.
Surely our diseases he did bear, and our pains he carried;
Whereas we did esteem him stricken,
Smitten of God, and afflicted.
—Isaiah 53:4
A Covenant with All the Ills of the World
The connections I saw between the two lifeways, Buddhism and Judaism, were immediate and apparent.
The “six holes” which cause the loss of wealth are desire for intoxicating drinks and behaving foolishly, staying up late at night and losing the mind in frivolity, indulging in musical and theater entertainments, gambling, associating with evil companions, and neglecting one’s duties.—BUDDHA
Rabbi Dosa,2 the son of Horkinas, said, “Morning sleep and midday wine, and children’s talk, and attending the houses of assembly of the ignorant, drive a man from the world.”—JUDAH
Of course, there was a difference in the style of teaching. Where the Asian sages vaguely cajoled, the rabbis seemed to scold. Or, as in the next set, I found the Buddhist verse more poetic and therefore more appealing.
Rain falls, winds blow, plants bloom, leaves mature and are blown away, these phenomena are all interrelated with causes and conditions, are brought about by them, and disappear as the causes and conditions change.
One is born through the conditions of parentage; his body is nourished by food; his spirit is nurtured by teaching and experience.
As a net is made up by a series of ties, so everything in this world is connected by a series of ties. If anyone thinks that the mesh of a net is an independent, isolated thing, he is mistaken.—Buddha
The Jewish teaching regarding cause and effect that I read as a child went like this. Note the similarity of meaning to the previous, Buddhist teaching. Rabbi Chananya said:
They that are born are destined to die; and the dead to be brought to life again; and the living to be judged, to know, to make known, and to be made conscious that He is God, He the Maker, He the Creator, He the Discerner, He the Judge, He the Witness, He the Complainant; He it is that will in future judge. Blessed be He, with whom there is no unrighteousness, nor forgetfulness, nor respect of persons, nor taking of bribes. Know also that everything is according to the reckoning, and let not thy imagination give thee hope that the grave will be a place of refuge for thee;… for perforce thou wilt in the future have to give account and reckoning before the Supreme King of kings, the Holy One.
I had long known God is a vengeful God, one who judged according to His laws, allowing no mercy. Nothing occurs on this earth that is not somehow related to behavior in this world or the world of our karmic past.
I had been taught that precept in two distinctly different ways by two distinctly different parents. My father, Benjamin, the son of Samuel, had given me the mechanistic view of the universe through his explanations of the natural world.
I remember Frank Buck, the animal collector, from a film shown in a cozy room one rainy summer day. I think it was in August, and my father was enjoying his intermittent summer rest from the antiques shop. The city was a hundred miles beyond the low round mountains that sheltered our precious togetherness. As the old projector flipped its filmic images of a far-off Indian jungle, with the pith-helmeted hero-collector trying to ensnare rare animals without killing them, my father whispered his running comments in that deep strong voice I still seek. He, as my first teacher, seemed to instruct me in a wisdom I immediately understood.
As an adult, I have learned that as a person I take things personally. Those proclaiming the wisdom of the East declare the opposite. They believe that the precept of “humility” requires a loss of personhood, a willingness to submit to others who may insult, even humiliate them.
Somehow, Frank Buck’s ensnarement of those poor wild beasts in the Indian jungle, in that rainy summer movie room, showed me the supremacy of man over beast, with mercy. All men seek to control others who cannot control themselves. That passion is the wild beast, and our “will” or belief in self-control is the pathway to reason, to compassion, and to God. (But what troubles I would have, still do have, in controlling my desires!)
My mother, Rachel, daughter of Rebecca, accepted man’s fate more pacifically. Her ill son, my brother Jerome, the blond-haired, blue-eyed beauty, had been born blind, deaf, and unable to move. He was the ultimate hostage in a game between God and the family.
“Why? Oh, why,” I used to ask this patient woman, “did God, who you say is good, make Jerome so broken?”
Despite her tears, her permanently handkerchiefed hand, her loyalty to her second son, my poor brother, was boundless.
“God,” she told me, “never makes a mistake. He has His reasons for everything.”
And so she accepted her imperfect son, continuing to visit him once a week for twenty-three long, cold years after he had been sent to a hospital, against her maternal instinct, at the advice of a secular physician, “for the sake of the healthy children.”
“The healthy children” were myself and my sister. As time would prove, the silent may be wiser than those capable of ensnaring with their guile; the crippled lither than the athlete.
Which is why I searched for the answers in the distant silence of the Pacific islands, seeking to find the cure for my little brother, long dead, in a covenant with all the ills of the world.
The Power of the Searcher
I am not the first Jew to walk with Buddha at my side. My son’s rabbi told me about Martin Buber’s affinity for this combination. But the great Jewish philosopher’s infatuation with the inner, self-centered orientation of that other religion came to an abrupt end. One day, a young student came to see him and asked many questions. The older man, growing impatient with the distraction, ended the interview abruptly. The boy left and soon afterward committed suicide.
Buber assumed responsibility, saying afterward that he’d answered all the boy’s questions except the one left unasked. That sad incident convinced him that the self-centered inner life of reflection suggested by the teachings of Buddha was inferior to the outward world way of active dialogue, a basic Jewish proclivity.
Rabbi Chanina used to say, “He whose deeds exceed his wisdom, his wisdom shall endure; but he whose wisdom exceeds his deeds, his wisdom will not endure.”
Passion’s Power
Of course, things are not as clear cut as “action” versus “inaction,” “inner” versus “outer,” “monologue” versus “dialogue,” and so on. Both religions seem to teach the same things: namely, control the passions, clear the mind, do good deeds.
If a man’s body and mind are under control he should give evidence of it in virtuous deeds. This is a sacred duty. Faith will then be his wealth, sincerity will give his life a sweet savor, and to accumulate virtues will be his sacred task.—BUDDHA
Ben Zoma3 said:
Who is wise? He who learns from all men.… Who is mighty? He who subdues his passions.… Who is rich? He who rejoices in his portion.… Who is worthy of honor? He who respects his fellow-man.
Hillel, one of my favorite teachers, used to say:
An empty-handed man cannot be a sin-fearing man, nor can an ignorant person be truly pious, nor can the diffident learn, nor the passionate teach, nor is everyone who excels in business wise. In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.
But life cannot be lived simply by coining or memorizing wise sayings. The trap in which I found myself was the result of inheriting a “hot” nature, for which I sought the cure and calm of an objective wisdom. Drawn to the burning flames life offered, I would obey my desires up to a point, only to step back, partly satisfied, never jumping whole-soulfully into the fire of chance.
Just as the pure and fragrant lotus flower grows out of the mud of a swamp rather than out of the clean loam of an upland field, so from the muck of worldly passions springs the pure Enlightenment.… Even the mistaken views of heretics and the delusions of worldly passions may be the seeds of Buddhahood.—BUDDHA
Was it not my “passionate” nature that led me to search for peace?
Therefore, I realized at once that, without passion, peace is meaningless. Without war, what meaning is there in the state known as peace? It is the same for “good” and “evil,” the cornerstones of my training from toilet to temple. Why try to be good when bad is just the dark side of this sphere? Can a moon always shine, or must it, too, go into its dark phases, eventually disappearing from view, still being a whole, though it is out of sight?
This is how we turn: from our light phases to our dark; from hot to mild to cold; from wise to foolish, kind to cruel, happy to unhappy.
The principal value of religious teachings, then, from a personal or happiness point of view, is to smooth the transitions, making the changes less jarring to ourselves and others, allowing us to become an integrated or unified person.
To try to eliminate passion altogether is not only impossible but ultimately criminal or against the stream of life. Which teaching, then, would give me the greater happiness, the greater gift—the ability to keep alive my fiery nature without dashing myself onto the rocks below or hurting those around me? More, would I continue to laugh and make others release their bonds as I had done since childhood, long before I ever heard of the word religion?
There are three kinds of people in the world. The first are those who are like letters carved in rock; they easily give way to anger and retain their angry thoughts for a long time. The second are those who are like letters written in sand; they give way to anger also, but their angry thoughts pass quickly away. The third is those who are like letters written in running water; they do not retain their passing thoughts; they let abuse and uncomfortable gossip pass by unnoticed; their minds are always pure and undisturbed.—DHARMA
God, Faith, and Reason Page 7
