First and foremost, please check out the brand new HARDCORE ZEN PODCAST. This was put together by John Graves of Dogen Sangha Los Angeles. Be sure and listen all the way to the end, or better yet, skip directly to the very end of the Podcast (after the closing theme & thank yous and all that) to hear the best part.The featured talk is from my tour of Finland last year. John decided it was best to go with a very basic theme for the first episode. So he chose a talk in which I pretty much give a live version of Hardcore Zen, the book whose Finnish translation I was promoting on that tour. So, yeah, you've probably already read most of these stories. But I'm surprised sometimes at how they change in front of an audience.
OK. So yesterday I arrived back from my European tour in Durham, North Carolina, where I'm now at a subterranean location known locally as "The Lady Cave" in which I hide from the heat whenever I'm here. As you may recall from previous episodes, I am currently homeless. My great friend Catie Braly has been allowing me to use her couch to sleep on and her floor to throw my suitcases all over whenever I stop moving around the world for more than 20 or 30 minutes. That's where I am until such time as I figure out where to go next.
I spent much of my long flight back to the US and many extended layovers yesterday writing a long, long description of my recent trip to Israel. But it was so overwhelming and badly written I'm not even looking at it right now, let alone posting it. Instead, here's what highlights I can recall...
THE GARDEN TOMB
In the photo above I am standing in a tourist trap known as the Garden Tomb overlooking what the owners of said tomb very weakly claim may be the site of Christ's crucifixion. But even they admit the evidence is pretty weak. Still, the rock formations do look kinda sorta like a skull and Jesus was said to have been nailed up at "the Place of the Skull," which no one is quite sure the location of. Plus there's a tomb nearby with a groove in front of it in which a rock could have rolled to seal it up, as was said to be the case of Christ's tomb. So maybe this is the spot.
More people accept the Church of the Holy Sepulcher as being a more likely location. But the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is dark and depressing and clogged with tourists, whereas the Garden Tomb is quiet and bright and has much cleaner toilets. Therefore I vote for the Garden Tomb as being more authentic.Outside the tomb a small group of Filipino guys (I think they were Filipino) were trying to make some kind of movie, probably for their church back home. The subject of the film appeared to be a bright red robe that they were alternately holding up and shouting about or else kneeling with and making big overwrought gestures while scowling a lot. The very proper British woman who took tickets at the entrance kept telling them to knock it off. They would comply, then wait for her to leave, then start all over again. Quite entertaining.
THE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM
Hint: Do not go here looking for a fun time. It is not fun.
But it's one of those places you have to see and I did. It's impossible not to be moved by such a place. But it also has a numbing effect. At least it did on me. After a while you've seen more Nazi war atrocities than you can possibly process.
I'm trying hard not to come off as cynical. I know the thing Zen people are supposed to do when they go visit places like this is write a very dry essay that details what they saw in a matter of fact way and concludes with some kind of profound thoughts. But I just don't have that in me right now.
Me, I kept looking at the little displays of famous Nazis. All along the walls you have these black boxes with a photo of a Nazi on the front. If you open them up you get to see what that Nazi did and where he ended up -- whether he was tried at Nuremburg and hanged, caught in South America in the Seventies, never found or whatever became of him.
I kept thinking, I want to hear from these people. I know you probably couldn't do that. It would be too much like allowing them to justify their actions. Still, I do not think the Holocaust was just a case of bad Germans killing innocent Jews. That's what happened, superficially. But there's also something far deeper going on.
For example, at the beginning of the museum you're led through the history of how the Jews in Europe were ghetto-ized and stripped of their basic rights. Yet I visited the museum while I was staying in East Jerusalem, where the survivors of that horror have ghetto-ized and stripped the Palestinians of their basic rights.
Which is not to say the way the Palestinians are treated comes anywhere close to how the Germans, and many others treated the Jews during and prior to WWII. Yet I think it shows that what happened in the 1930s and 1940s is not something that can be attributed to one particular race or culture. It is a human problem.
I think hearing what the Nazis had to say for themselves would be very instructive. I once saw a documentary in which a very old Japanese man who had been a soldier during the Rape of Nanking told his story of what happened. It was chilling. He was so matter-of-fact about the whole thing. It's important to understand these atrocities are committed by human beings like ourselves, not by monsters, and not even by what most of us would recognize as insane people.
I understand you could probably never allow such a thing in the Holocaust Museum. But without it visitors are left with the impression these horrible acts were performed by creatures from another world. They were not.
EAST JERUSALEM
Most of my time in Israel was spent on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem. This is not part of the Palestinian Territories. But it is an area of Israel in which the population is almost entirely Palestinian. You rarely see any Jews up there unless they're on some kind of a tour, in which case they want to get in and get the Hell out as quickly as possible. There appear to be a few Jewish... I don't know if they're exactly settlements... but they seem to be exclusively Jewish buildings up on the mountain with gigundous Israeli flags on top. I never did figure out what these were. My host while I was on the Mount of Olives was Ibrahim Ahmad Abu El-Hawa, a 60-something year old Palestinian who travels the world talking about peace. He opens his home to visitors to whom he preaches his message of unity and understanding. He's a truly amazing guy. The article I've linked to tells his story better than I can. It's too bad the photo of Richard Gere visiting his house doesn't seem to be there anymore. I wonder how Richard Gere felt about the lack of hot water in the showers, though. Or about being woken up every morning at 4 by the prayer call from the nearby mosque. "Prayer is better than sleep," the call said in Arabic. Says you! Even at Zen monasteries they let you have another half hour in the sack!
TEL AVIV
The last place I visited in Israel was Tel Aviv. The contrast between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is so sharp you can hardly believe they're part of the same country. Where Jerusalem is a hotbed of religious tension, Tel Aviv seems to be as secular a city as Los Angeles. In fact, I'll bet there were more observant Jews in the area I lived in, in West Hollywood than there are in Tel Aviv.Just about the only evidence of anything religious I saw during my two days in Tel Aviv was this crazy Hassidic guy who drove around in a van blasting loud rave type music. Every time he got to a stoplight, he'd open his door, jump out, and dance around the street. When the light changed, he'd jump back in his van and drive to the next light to dance some more. My host, Yuval Ido Tal, told me this was part of a new movement that's gaining some popularity in the city.
It was Yuval who set up a talk for me at the Psycho Dharma institute. In spite of its name, which conjures up images of Tony Perkins slashing meditators with a kitchen knife, it is, in fact, a really interesting organization set up to teach Buddhism in an academic setting but incorporating real practice into the curriculum. I recorded the talk and hopefully one of these days we'll get the Q&A segment up on the podcast.
OK. That's all I got to say about Israel for now.
But I have to get a couple more plugs in before I go. One is for this article by one of this blog's regular readers W. Blake Wilson of Kansas City. It's pretty funny.
Also, the 2010 Great Sky Zen Sesshin is still short of full capacity. This is one of the best Zen sesshins offered in this country. You really should check it out if you want to do a very simple, but extremely powerful week of practice. I'm there, but it's not a Brad Warner sesshin. I'm one of five Zen teachers, the others of whom are far more traditional and orthodox in their ways. It's an amazing sesshin that I would go to myself even if I were not teaching it. It's not too easy but it's not too hard.
Be there! Sign up today!
ADDENDUM:
Here is a video I found about Ibrahim Abu El-Hawa. I don't know anything about Enlightening Entertainment or Supreme Master TV, who put this video up. Their graphics and their name make me feel a tad bit icky. But the video really gives you a good look at Ibrahim and where and how he lives.
