I am Jewish. Not as a costume, not as a mood, not as a vague ancestry note on a family tree. I’m Jewish in the way many of us are Jewish: culturally, historically, emotionally, and in the marrow. Jewish humor formed my ears. Jewish memory formed my conscience. Jewish sorrow and survival shaped how I understand the modern world. I don’t “try on” Jewishness. I carry it.
And I am also a Buddhist—specifically, a Zen practitioner, and a priest-trainee in the Zen tradition.
Some people hear that and assume conflict. They imagine I must be split, or secretly ashamed, or quietly replacing one identity with another. But the truth is simpler: I’m not confused. I’m not running away. I’m not trying to be edgy. I’m trying to be honest about what has actually saved my life and formed my practice.
Zen became the ground where I learned to sit still long enough to tell the truth.
What my Jewishness means to me
When I say I maintain my Jewish identity, I don’t mean I keep a few recipes, a couple of Yiddish phrases, and a nostalgic affection for deli food. I mean:
- I feel responsible to a people and a history.
- I recognize the Jewish moral reflex: the insistence that ethics matter, that the vulnerable matter, that memory matters.
- I am shaped by Jewish ways of arguing with God, wrestling with fate, questioning easy answers, refusing spiritual bypassing.
- I understand identity not only as belief, but as belonging: family, story, trauma, resilience, community.
Judaism, for me, isn’t primarily a set of propositions I must recite to prove I’m “in.” It’s a lived inheritance, a way I stand in the world. It is my native language of meaning—even when I critique it, even when I struggle with it.
I don’t stop being Jewish because I learned to sit zazen. If anything, sitting made me more honest about what Jewishness already was in me.
Why I’m a Buddhist
I am a Buddhist because the Dharma describes the human heart with astonishing precision.
I don’t say that as a comparative religion claim. I say it as someone who has watched craving and aversion shape my thoughts, my relationships, my fear, my anger, my grasping—sometimes in subtle forms that hid behind “good reasons.” Buddhism gave me a vocabulary for what I was already living, and a path for practicing with it directly. Not as theory. As medicine.
Zen in particular drew me because it refuses to let me hide behind ideas. It returns me, again and again, to this very moment—this breath, this posture, this sensation, this thought arising and passing away. Zen teaches me that I can stop feeding the stories that keep suffering alive.
I’m not a Buddhist because I collected “Eastern wisdom.” I’m a Buddhist because this path actually trains the mind and heart in the direction of freedom, compassion, and reality. And I am a priest-trainee because practice deepened into vow.
At some point, Zen stopped being something I did and became something I belonged to—not as a tribe, but as a discipline of awakening and service. Priest training, for me, is not about status. It’s about responsibility: learning to embody the practice, to be shaped by it, to serve others with it, and to be continually humbled by it.
“But isn’t that a contradiction?”
Only if you assume that religion is always a zero-sum contest of exclusive claims.
A lot of modern religious conflict comes from the idea that identity must be singular, clean, and absolute—that one label cancels the other. But my lived experience isn’t that neat, and neither is the human world. I don’t experience Zen as a competing “god” trying to replace Judaism’s God. Zen doesn’t demand that I swear loyalty to a rival deity. It demands something more intimate and more difficult: that I meet my life without lying.
Zen doesn’t ask me to stop being Jewish. It asks me to stop clinging—to self-images, to certainty, to the compulsion to be “right,” to the frantic need for control. It asks me to see directly what arises in the mind and not be owned by it.
If anything, that makes me more capable of being Jewish in the best sense: less reactive, more ethical, more present, more compassionate, less possessed by fear.
How I hold both without blending them into a mush
I’m not interested in forcing Judaism and Zen into a fake harmony where every concept has a one-to-one match. I don’t need “emptiness” to be secretly the same as a Jewish mystical idea. I don’t need to translate everything across traditions until the differences disappear.
I hold them like I hold two languages:
- Judaism is my peoplehood and moral inheritance.
- Zen is my path of practice and training.
They touch, they influence each other, they sometimes challenge each other—but they remain distinct. And I’ve learned that distinction is not a problem. It’s integrity.
In practical terms, that means:
- I let Jewish identity be Jewish identity: history, belonging, solidarity, memory, ethical urgency.
- I let Zen practice be Zen practice: zazen, precepts, liturgy, sangha, teacher-student relationship, vow.
I don’t need to collapse one into the other to be real.
What about the parts that really do create tension?
I don’t pretend there are no hard questions. There are.
For some Jews—especially those with strict halakhic commitments—certain Buddhist ritual forms can feel too close to forbidden worship. I respect that concern. And as a priest-trainee, I also respect the forms of Zen. So I navigate it carefully and consciously.
I ask: What is this act, actually?
Is a bow worship? Or is it gratitude, humility, reverence for awakening, reverence for the practice? Is a statue an idol? Or is it a symbol—a teaching image, a mirror for the mind? Different communities answer differently, and I don’t try to bulldoze that complexity.
What I can say is this: my Zen practice is not about worshipping an object. It is about training the heart.
And my Jewish identity is not threatened by reverence for practice. Jewish life itself knows reverence: for Torah, for life, for justice, for the Holy. So I walk with awareness. I keep my conscience awake. I don’t outsource my integrity to slogans, whether they come from the Jewish side or the Buddhist side.
What Zen gave me that I couldn’t get anywhere else
Zen gave me a direct method. It gave me a way to work with mind that isn’t merely conceptual—because I’m very good at concepts. Many Jews are. We can argue with God, argue with each other, argue with ourselves. We can live in commentary and never arrive at silence.
Zen gave me the discipline of silence. Not emptiness as a philosophy, but stillness as a practice. A way to sit down inside my own nervous system and stop negotiating with reality for a while. A way to see the machinery of selfing—the constant “me, me, me” that hides inside righteousness, anxiety, ambition, and even love.
Zen gave me the experience of being held by something larger than my stories—without requiring me to name that “something” in a way that collapses mystery. In that sense, Zen didn’t erase my Jewishness. It stripped away some of the noise that kept me from meeting my life clearly.
What Jewishness gives me that I refuse to lose
Judaism gives me a fierce, grounded ethical inheritance. It gives me peoplehood, not just personal salvation. It gives me memory and responsibility—especially in a world that forgets quickly and repeats its crimes.
It gives me a way of loving my ancestors without idealizing them. It gives me grief that has become wisdom. It gives me a moral spine.
Zen can sometimes be misunderstood as purely inward—peaceful, private, detached. But my Jewishness won’t let me turn awakening into a luxury product. It reminds me: if your practice doesn’t touch how you treat people, it isn’t finished.
So Judaism helps keep my Zen honest. Zen helps keep my Judaism spacious.
That’s not conflict. That’s mutual correction.
The simplest way I can say it
I am a Buddhist because I have taken refuge in the path of awakening—because I trust the Dharma as a true description of mind and suffering, and because I practice a way that reduces harm and increases compassion.
I am Jewish because that is my people, my inheritance, my memory, my moral formation—because Jewishness is not something I can or want to amputate.
I do not experience those truths as enemies.
I experience them as two realities living in one human life: a life shaped by Jewish history and ethics, and trained by Zen practice into presence, clarity, and vow.
And if anyone asks me to choose, I understand what they’re really asking:
They’re asking for a cleaner story.
But my life isn’t a clean story. It’s a practiced one.