"Nhat Hanh: Returning to the Israeli professor-well, he also asked me about my loyalty to Vietnam as a nation and to Buddhism as a religion, because in our discussions I always put peace and human life above everything. So he asked, "What if Buddhism cannot survive in Vietnam? Will you accept that in order to have peace in Vietnam?" I said "Yes, I think if Vietnam has real peace-cooperation between North and South-and if it can ban war for a long time, I would be ready to sacrifice Buddhism." He was very shocked. But I thought it was quite plain that if you have to choose between Buddhism and peace, then you must choose peace. Because if you choose BUddhism you sacrifice peace, and Buddhism does not accept that. Furthermore, Buddhism is not a number of temples and organizations. Buddhism is in your heart. Even if you don't have any temple or any monks, you can still be a Buddhist in your heart and life.
The rabbi asked also, "how about your loyalty to Vietnam as a nation?" I think that question touched the very core of the problem of the MIddle East. I said that if I had to choose between the survival of the Vietnamese people and the survival of Vietnam as a nation, I would choose the survival of the people. He said, "Well, we cannot agree on that. That is why we cannot agree on other things." So that was the ened of the dialogue."
[The Rabbi is a Jewish Rabbi, and the "problems of the Middle East" refers to Israel and Pakistan]
Thich Nhat Hanh also gave this example to the same Rabbi earlier in the book:
"For instance, in India in the ninth century, Hindus and Muslims undertook a great persecution fo Buddhism. They burned down Buddhist temples and killed monks and destroyed scriptures. What the Buddhist monks did in those days was to flee to Nepal, where they preserved their manuscripts. They couldn't carry the Buddha statues, which were magnificent, with them. But they did carry the scriptures. After that, Buddhism flourished in Asia-in Tibet and China and Japan. Theirs was a kind of negative resistance.
But if they had organized violent resistance and killed Muslims and Hindus, I don't think that would have been real Buddhist behaviour. By organizing violent resistance, they might have preserved something that is called Buddhism, but might not be Buddhist at all in substance. By acting in the way they did, they preserved the identity of Buddhism.
I also asked him whether he though Israel as a nation is the most important condition for the existence of the Jewish people, even when in order to protect that nation it is necessary to bomb people, to destroy life in order to protect life. A contradiction in itself. I suggested that there may be ways other than the killing of people to protect life."
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Hi Ryan!
My eloquence is not up to the task of answering this passage adequately, but it certainly is a good one, and compelling to the point that I must make an attempt at an answer.
I think that it beautifully illustrates some misconceptions about the point of having Israel at all, and misconceptions about the identity of The Jew (as conceived within Judaism). As well, it offers itself a loophole to the sacrifice of Buddhism that is not possible for Jews, and undermines the claim early in the passage to a willingness to sacrifice.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The Jewish people were a tribe before a religion. Which is not to say that there was a time when no conceptual bond linked Jews, but rather, that the threshold of membership to the tribe was not ritual, it was a matter of whom you were born to and/or whom you married, and the collective life that you therefore led. It was a way of life, and that has been preserved in the religion by the fact that there are no creed commandments to being a Jew, the way there are behavioural commandments. It is a Jew's right, as a Jew, to decide whether or not to believe in G-d, whether or not to think the Torah is a sacred document, etc, and whatever one's conclusions, they can not be counted as a flaw in one's jewishness.
To give up Judaism, individually or collectively, is therefore a complicated matter. You must somehow contrive to give up the way you eat, the way you have sex, the way you mark time, the way you mourn the dead, you must dissociate from your mother and father, every aspect of community culture would have to be obliterated-- and to those who think that eradicating Judaism would accomplish something positive, no less than total eradication would be required.
It is hard to see how one can have peace and human life without some kind of culture, and harder still to see how a person can deliberately live without his/her identity.
But even if it were possible for a person or group to choose to give up that identity, in favour of some other, in order to bring about peace, the possibility of being a Jew in one's heart does not exist for a Jew as it exists for a Buddhist. In fact, the writer of the passage may be suspected of sidestepping the point, when he says that one can be a Buddhist in one's heart, because that means that no real sacrifice of Buddhism is being contemplated here-- only its secrecy. To sacrifice Buddhism would mean to cease to be a Buddhist in one's heart, and it is unlikely that a hostile army would care one way or another about that. It is specious to argue that an invading force could eradicate Buddhism the way it could, and nearly has in the past, eradicated Judaism.
In the particular case of Israel, any human rights organisation can verify that, in giving up a Jewish Identity, Israel would have to accept a host of devaluations of peace and human life that are culturally normative in the surrounding countries. So it is specious to argue that giving up Jewish identity would further the values of peace and human life.
Being a Jew is being a part of a collective identity that finds its fulfillment in a number of collective activities, the smallest of which happen in the home between members of a family, the apex of which is national identity in the State of Israel.
Now, the end of the passage is actually quite offensive. Of all of the wars that Israel has had to endure (I count eight), it has struck the first blow only once, and that in response to massive arms buildup along its borders. Israeli military strategy has always been to put the lives of civilians first-- all civilians, "enemy" or not, even when the lives of civilians were put in harm's way deliberately by the hostile forces, and even when protecting civilians meant greater losses of Israeli lives. I realise you don't hear that in the mainstream Canadian media, but it is policy and it has been carried out, as any Israeli paper (which tend to be hyper-critical of every aspect of the Israeli government) will report. Other sources tell the same story, but it is notable that the western understanding of middle-eastern culture, which is so obviously flawed in many other cases, is no different in this one.
I guess this begs the question, though: Is it then possible to come up with a universal code of human ethics, or should we always first base our ethics on our nationalities and religions?
I know it's a touchy subject. I don't mean to offend. I guess it's just my own quest to understand people and the world a little better.
Well said.
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