IN 1969, AT THE AGE OF 20, Nathan Katz followed hippie friendsto Nepal. Blazing a trail for genera-tions of Jewish spiritual seekers tofollow, the freewheeling youth,

already a fledgling religious scholar,fetched up in Kathmandu, where, herecalls, “people stopped in the street topray at tiny shrines or to relieve themselveswith equal abandon.” In a sparsely fur-nished budget hotel room, Katz says heencountered his dakini, a Hindu sky god-dess akin to a Greek daemon and CarlJung’s concept of the anima.

She appeared suddenly at night, Katzreports, manifested as a haggard crone beg-ging for loose change. As he tried to shove

her away, his hands sailed right through theapparition before she vanished with ascowl on her face. No hallucinogenic sub-stances, apparently, were involved in theepiphany, which set Katz off on a decades-long exploration of the mysteries of easternspirituality. As the title of his “SpiritualJourney Home” suggests, with the picturesof the Dalai Lama and the LubavitcherRebbe juxtaposed on the cover, Katz’smystical questing eventually led him backto his religious roots.

What should intrigue us isn’t his ulti-mate destination, which follows the well-trodden path of back-to-the-senderodysseys of self-discovery, but rather hissojourns en route. In the 1970s and 1980s,Katz, whose book’s contemporary picturesshow him resembling a hirsute hasid, with

his large grandpa spectacles and flowingbeard, dressed in paisley shirts and lovebeads, traversed the length and breadth ofIndia and Southeast Asia. He immersedhimself in Vipassana meditation at ashramsand learned Sanskrit, Pali and Tibetan so hecould study Vedic Hindu scriptures,Buddhist texts and the Tibetan Book of theDead in their original languages.

Along the way he fraternized with emi-nent JuBus (Jewish Buddhists), such as thepoet Allen Ginsberg and Richard Alpert,the Harvard professor who worked with1960s counterculture icon Timothy Learyon laboratory experiments involving LSDbefore metamorphosing into the guru BabaRam Dass. Though embracing the ethos ofthe “Age of Aquarius” era, Katz wasn’t, itseems, unduly star-struck by self-anointedholy men. He found A.C. BhaktivedantaSwami Prabhupada, the Calcutta-bornfounder of the Hare Krishna movement, tobe a petty, self-righteous narcissist. Dr.Leary, in Katz’s eyes, “never ceased beinga horny barroom jokester.”

Autobiographies frequently stretch areader’s endurance with loving recollec-tions of such essentials as what the authorhad for breakfast one fine day in 1972. At amere 138 pages, “Spiritual Journey Home”suffers instead from a detail deficit. Katzoften mentions tantalizing encounters enpassant – during a search for Sufi traditionsin hidebound Jalalabad in Afghanistan healights on transvestite barbers – beforerushing on to another briefly treatedepisode, at times a continent away.Ginsberg, Elie Wiesel, and other heavy-weights Katz befriends, make promisingcameos then disappear without a trace.

Such omissions are baffling since thisaccount of a prodigal son’s return to thefold was clearly written for a Jewish audi-ence. Indeed, it’s in the account of Katz’srole as a mediator between the Hindu-Buddhist and Jewish traditions that hisbook comes into its own. Today a practic-ing Orthodox Jew, or “neo-hasid” as heputs it, Katz is a leading Jewish authorityon Hinduism and Buddhism, holding vari-ous positions as professor of comparativereligions at Florida InternationalUniversity, Hindu University of America,and an Orthodox rabbinical college inFlorida. A preeminent expert on IndianJews, he edits The Journal of Indo-JudaicStudies.

It was while doing research in Cochin, aport town in southwestern India, in the late

THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 8, 2009 43

BOOKS

Rites Of PassageTibor Krausz

A memoir of a voyage through cultures and faiths

AVI KATZ

THE JERUSALEM REPORT JUNE 8, 200944

1980s for what would become a seminalstudy of Cochin Jews that Judaism “creptinto my bones,” Katz reports. During hisyear-long sabbatical, the scholar stayed onSynagogue Lane in Jew Town with the lastremnants of the ancient Jewish community.Largely by osmosis from living in the tra-ditional milieu, he became more observant.

HAILING FROM A FAMILY OFblue-collar Jews of Ukrainian/Hungarian stock in Camden (the

New Jersey hometown of Walt Whitman),Katz, now 61, got swept up in the VietnamWar-era counterculture rebellion, whichsaw traditional identity markers as stultify-ing and déclassé. “Despite some nostalgiafor the synagogues of my youth,” he writes,“I found Judaism rather dreary, especiallycompared with the elegant, direct spiritualteachings of eastern religions.”

He wasn’t much of a Zionist, either. Asubscriber to the pro-PLO journalPalestinian Perspectives, he mailed a letterfrom the U.S. to a Franciscan pilgrims’hospice in Jerusalem’s Old City addressedas “Jerusalem, Occupied Territories, viaIsrael.” After his first visit in 1976 to theJewish state, which he fashionably regard-ed as a colonialist implant in the MiddleEast, Katz says he was “relieved to boardan El Al plane to Tehran.”

Ironically, the leftist Jewish professorcomes to identify with Israelis living undera constant barrage of terrorism while he’sin Sri Lanka. During a sabbatical there inthe 1980s, Katz witnessed up close theTamil Tigers’ indiscriminate brutality. “Asa child of the 1960s,” he recalls, “I roman-ticized militants, or ‘freedom fighters,’...and staunchly believed that their violencehad ‘underlying causes’ in oppression, andwas therefore excusable if not heroic. Butnow my ideological beliefs began to crum-ble.”

Later, confronted by the strident anti-Zionist milieu across liberal U.S. colleges,this onetime advocate of students’ “pro-divestment activities” against Israelbecomes a vocal supporter of the Jewishstate. Once writing off Muslim calls for theelimination of Israel “as mere rhetoric,” henow urges us to take Islamist firebrands attheir word.

AMONG TIBETANS, KATZ FINDSa reverse attitude toward Jews andIsraelis. In 1990, on the Dalai

Lama’s invitation, a group of rabbis and

Jewish scholars, Katz among them, made ahistoric visit to Dharamsala, the seat of theexiled Tibetan government in the IndianHimalayas. His Holiness wanted to learnthe “Jewish secret” of surviving exile. Thatsecret, the Jewish delegates told him at theinterfaith symposium first documented in1995 in “The Jew in the Lotus” by the poetRodger Kamenetz, lay in household-basedlearning. They recommended that Tibetansmake traditional education available out-side their monasteries, an approach thatTibetan exile communities have more orless embraced.

Beyond the shared experience of exile,Katz explains, Tibetans share an affinitywith Jews because Tibetans don’t encour-age conversion to their faith and also con-sider themselves a “chosen people” – as thechoice nation of Avalokiteshvara, theEnlightened Being of Compassion. “InChristian and Muslim cultures,” Katzwrites, “we Jews have seen condescensionif not outright hostility. But in Tibetaneyes, we saw reflected affection, respectand even a bit of awe.”

Together with the lure of eastern mysti-cism and spiritual esoterica, such accep-tance, untarnished by religiously inspiredanti-Semitism, draws hordes of Jews andIsraelis to Buddhist havens likeDharamsala. When I made a trip there afew years ago for an article about Jewishseekers for this magazine, Hebrew could beheard as commonly as lilting Tibetan, withyoung Israelis outnumbering locals in sev-eral parts of town. Parochial traditions innormative Judaism, Katz contends, haveput off spiritually thirsting Jews, especiallywomen, many of whom gravitate towardBuddhism.

In Judaism’s defense it must be added

that Buddhism’s romanticized image in theWest notwithstanding, it too remains large-ly closed to female clergy outside a fewmore egalitarian places, such as Sri Lanka.It’s at a retreat on a Sri Lankan island forBuddhist nuns that Katz met the VenerableAyya (“Sister”) Khema, a respectedBuddhist teacher. Sister Khema, née IlseLedermann, was born in 1923 into awealthy Jewish family in Berlin and res-cued from Nazi Germany in 1938. Whenliving in California she was inspired byGershom Scholem’s books on kabbala, butfound that as a woman she was barred frompracticing traditional Jewish mysticism:Scholem himself rebuffed her.

So she turned to Buddhism. In 1979Ledermann, by then a grandmother, wasordained as a nun in Sri Lanka and beforeher death in 1997 she set up Buddhist cen-ters in Australia and Germany, authored twodozen popular books on spirituality, andspearheaded an international movement forthe rights of Buddhist nuns and women. “Ofcourse I’m still Jewish,” the nun insisted toKatz in English peppered with both Yiddishand Pali words. “What else could I be?Jewish is something you are.”

Katz clearly shares that sentiment andhis conversion to Orthodox Judaism seemsto have been fostered as much by spiritualneeds as by a desire to finally embrace “mybeleaguered, demeaned people.” Ironically,while an Orthodox Jew familiar with east-ern spirituality advises Katz to do moreBuddhist meditation, a Tibetan lamaadmonishes him for not keeping theShabbat strictly enough.

Katz claims to have seen his dakiniagain, in a shul in Safed, the bastion of kabbala in the Galilee, this time mani-fested as a vision of the Shabbat Queenstanding next to his wife up in thewomen’s balcony. He’s clearly come fullcircle spiritually if his dakini, too, has con-verted to Judaism. •

SpiritualJourney Home:EasternMysticism to the Western WallNathan KatzKTAV PublishingHouse168 pages$27.50

‘Ironically, while anOrthodox Jew familiarwith eastern spiritualityadvises Katz to do moreBuddhist meditation, a

Tibetan lama admonisheshim for not keeping theShabbat strictly enough’