Jews, Nazis, Buddhists, and Religious One-Upmanship

Today was a hard day at the Chabad house in Woodstock, N.Y. I stayed to interview the rabbi today before heading down to Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic community with tens of thousands of residents. I wanted to experience Shabbat in a town where the street signs are in Yiddish and political candidates have to be approved by the head rabbi.

But I never got to interview the rabbi. He’s been going through a tough time, as he needs more donations to meet his financial obligations, and is having family issues. But on top of that, he is in a confrontation with the landlord of the space he is using as a synagogue down the road.

As the rabbi told me, he is currently locked out of the room he uses, and his mezuzas, pieces of the Torah affixed to door frames in Jewish houses, had been thrown out. The landlord is Buddhist, which isn’t helping things.

The rabbi has a sore spot for Buddhists.

We went to a stream today to bathe for the mikvah, a tradition involving full immersion in water to regain ritual purity. In the car, of course we talked about religion.

The rabbi talked about being on the front lines of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. Lubavitch Hasidim believe that the messiah is on Earth, but has yet to show himself. To speed the process, Orthodox Jews must educate non-Orthodox Jews and bring them back to old practices. “It’s up the Jews, there’s nothing that anyone else can do,” said the rabbi. By being in a town like Woodstock, where there are tons of Jews, but few active in the faith, the rabbi says he has his work cut out for him.

That’s part of the reason he doesn’t like the Tibetan Buddhists up the road. Just north of Woodstock is the Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, the seat of the Gyalwa Karmapa, a leader in a form of Tibetan Buddhism.

Woodstock, while it has a sizable Jewish population, you wouldn’t know it just on arrival. From the Dharma Store to the Sufi Meditation Center, there’s not much Jewish visible to the naked eye. But, the rabbi says that these organizations, including the Zen Mountain Monastery, are run by Jews, and that bothers him. It runs contrary to his mission, and he feels like other faiths, especially the Tibetan Buddhists, are actively trying to separate Jews from their history. He hates that a lot of people in Woodstock are increasingly showing interest in the Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, worshipping “false idols.”

It gets so much more complicated.

Later, at the house, I came upstairs to see what he was watching on his computer (he seems to like Youtube.) He was researching Tibetan history, but very selectively. His videos included one about Hitler’s connections to the Dalai Lama and a criticism of the Dalai Lama by Penn and Teller. Warning: the second video has explicit language.

While both videos may raise some valid points (I’m not an expert), the rabbi concluded that the Tibetan Buddhists down the street were actively anti-Semitic, and that was an undercurrent to spreading their faith. I have a huge problem with this. Even though Tibet was friendly to the Nazis before World War II, that doesn’t mean Tibetan Buddhists today are continuing the Nazi mission.

And it didn’t end there.

In the kitchen, I asked the rabbi why he thought I was Jewish. “Do you actively try to hurt Jews?” he asked.

I said no, of course not.

“Do yo do good things?”

I said I thought so.

“Then you’re Jewish,” he said. He added that only Jews are capable of altruism, and that all good things that anyone else does has a selfish reason behind it. “I assume everyone is Jewish until they prove otherwise by hurting Jews,” he said, finishing the conversation.

So essentially, you’re either a Jew or a Nazi. I try not to laugh when people speak of faith, but I couldn’t help it. Creating such dichotomies never leads to truth, and to believe that only one small portion of the world (Jews are .23 percent of the world’s population) are capable of truly good deeds seems egotistic and irrational.

I understand that many religions believe that only they have the truth, but to paint other as not only misguided, but lacking the ability to be full children of God seems excessive. And, to me, laughable.

So I didn’t end up going to Kiryas Joel, and at sunset, it’ll be Shabbat. That means no turning on lights, no smoking, no driving, and no blogging. Oy gevalt.