The Jew in the Lotus

In our "Books Change" series, historians of religion consider books that have changed us or have themselves been changed.

In August 1994, I was an introspective, brainy 16-year-old, fresh from a summer in Israel with a busload of other 16-year-olds. On my last morning in Jerusalem, I had watched the sun rise: cool breezes over ancient golden stones. I heard church bells ring and the Muslim call to prayer, whispering my own Hebrew dreams into fuzzy pink air. As a Jewish teen who went (reluctantly) to Israel for the Roman ruins but stayed for the prayers, when we chanted under desert stars I was suspended somewhere in between Reform Jewish teenagerhood and a future as a religious studies professor—plus my always evolving, complex relationship with Jewish adulthood.

This was when I first encountered Rodger Kamenetz’s The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India. It was published in that same year: 1994. I sat in the black recliner in my bedroom, learning about a different spiritual pilgrimage: a delegation of Jewish leaders going to visit the Dalai Lama in India. They wanted to learn more about Buddhism and its strong appeal to so many American Jews. He wanted to learn more about survival in diaspora. Kamenetz, a poet and professor at Louisiana State University, came along for the ride, and wrote a deeply meditative book about an extraordinary moment in Jewish and Buddhist history.