Whirling Through Crisis

By Ngawang Lhamo

In 1976, two Tibetan Buddhist monks arrived in New York where they dwelt for sometime in the Sufi House on 14^th Street.  While they came to raise money for their exiled communities in Nepal, they were also among the first emissaries from the 14^th Dalai Lama, who at that time, was not yet allowed into the United States for fear of offending the Red Chinese.  The more charismatic of the two lamas, Nechung Rinpoche, had not only spent time in Beijing during the negotiations that were to determine the fate of Tibet, but trained its esoterically famous Oracle.  Gomang Khen, the more scholarly and head abbot of the Gelupa Sect, poured over his clothbound texts in a backroom in the Sufi House, where he was a welcome guest of Islam’s mystical and most universal sect.

As this was the monks’ first trip to America, they asked to walk around the neighborhood.  Pedestrians were uplifted to see monks in purple robes and yellow tunics walking through the ruins and debris of the then impoverished Lower East Side.  But the monks found the violent games of children in the neighborhood playgrounds, (not to mention local shootouts), deeply disturbing.  Americans seemed to have no understanding of the causes and effects of suffering, particularly the consequences of violence.  “Americans are mad!” Nechung Rinpoche grumbled to a friend of mine.  Gomang Khen Rinpoche said his beads and looked profoundly sad.

It wasn’t only the violence, which they found troubling.  As word of their presence leaked out through the spiritual seeker grapevine, many of the would-be students they encountered from the New Age crowd of hippies, self-styled gurus, CIA agents studying the esoteric and those seeking salvation in whatever form seemed to confuse true consciousness with power magic or escape.  Enlightenment, the monks protested, is not a “high” or self-centered state of bliss.  Rather, one must become “grounded in reality” both in one’s daily life (experience) and in one’s meditations – at least if one truly wishes to cut through the ignorance and delusions which obstruct the path to  enlightenment.   In short, one must transform suffering, not avenge or run away from it.      

I was among those who came in long skirts to sit at the monks’ feet, after failing twice to reach India. I came as a mother. My attraction to the Tibetan teachings was not toward their more powerful tantric initiations, but the noble and yet very basic precepts Gomang Khen and Nechung Rinpoche offered us in the Lam Rim teachings. The very first step toward enlightenment, they said, was to realize the preciousness of a human birth.  As Deshung Rinpoche of the Sakya Order, one of my later teachers in a loft on 125^th Street, explained: “Being born is likened to a tortoise who has been sleeping at the bottom of the ocean for thousands of years.  Suddenly, it opens its eyes and begins to swim toward the surface, breaking out of the waters at that one place where its head will emerge through a garland of lotus blossoms. Human rebirth is not only rare, but extremely valuable.  Only as a human may one become liberated from the negative aspects of existence. Non-violence, born of compassion, is essential to protecting, nourishing and prolonging that precious form of rebirth.    

Reincarnation aside, these words resonated strongly with my own personal experience.  In 1973, I had given birth to my son in Jerusalem during the first cease-fire of the Yom Kippur War. All three men in the hospital room that morning were crying: the son because he had just been born; the to-be father witnessing birth for the first time, and the doctor, because my son was the first child he had delivered since his only son was killed the first night of the war. I too began to cry when it was announced on the radio that Israeli prisoners of war, held in Egypt since 1967, had just been freed and were stepping onto Israeli soil for the first time in six years. 

Besides my motherly response and those of many peaceniks attending the monks’ teachings, the veterans in the meditation room of the Sufi house also resonated with the Tibetans teachings of non-violence.  But when the lamas declared that one is responsible for inflicting harm, even when following military orders from those higher in command, a number of the Viet Nam vets in the back row began to protest.   They had been drafted.  What other choice did they have, except to run away to Canada or Sweden, which they considered an act of cowardice?  An even larger group of civilians protested the ruling on suicide, which the monks taught was more damaging to one’s spiritual rebirth even than murder. Weren’t these ancient ways hypocritical or out-of-date?  Buddhist monks were setting fire to themselves in South East Asia!  Tibetan monks and nuns had taken up a resistance against the Chinese!  What was their karma to be?   But the monks were relentless even under criticism.  There was no easy way out of suffering – and no excuse for wrong deeds.  Or, as the Dalai Lama said when he finally reached America, “there is no short-cut back to Tibet.”    

Around the same time that the monks visited the Sufi House, another guest – Sheik Murshid Hassan, a Palestinian Sufi teacher – arrived in New York.  The Murshid was rumored to be quite old.  He smoked Camel cigarettes and “told it like it was” – another form of reality-teaching.  Legend had it that after his first wife died, the Murshid spent fifteen years wandering the hills of Samaria eating nettles, cave dwelling, in a state of “God-intoxication.”  The Sheik was a dervish; he whirled with my son – then three – in the nave of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I was so moved by the experience of watching their slow trusting movements, I later taught myself to whirl alone.  Thus I experienced that opening which knows no isolation.  I learned to turn not only out of love of God, for those who believe in God, but because the universe turns and we with it. 

Philosophically there are many analogies to “turning” in other religions – turning the Wheel of Dharma or, in the Jewish faith, doing tsuvah, which means, re-turning to the right path, another name for redemption.  But for me this experience was beyond any philosophy or image-making.   It was the act of surrendering control so that higher unseen hands could emerge to sustain us and move us into faster, impossible spins.  Going until one disappears in and out of oneself, until you forget everything.  And when you return from this healing empty space, not only have you changed, but so has the world you thought you had left so far behind.  For me this was an act of centering – and making peace with everything – a conscious affirmation of my own invisibility. I used to whirl in the pine groves of Moshav Modiin, an old Israeli settlement, revived by Shlomo Carlebach, the “Singing Rabbi” and his hippie flock from San Francisco’s House of Love and Prayer.  It was here as a guest, in 1977, that I lived through a thwarted terrorist attack.  I was one of five people on the settlement – the rest were at a wedding in Jerusalem – when the radio message came through that armed men had crossed the Green Line which separated the 1948 Israel, where we were, from the West Bank.  Another mother and I took our children, barricaded them in a room, and sat outside on our steps waiting – with nothing separating us from danger but a thin strip of old and rusting barbed wire.  At the last minute, the Army intervened in tanks, shooting into a grove of trees.   The terrorists who escaped attempted a bombing the next morning in the crowded Tel Aviv marketplace.  Swerving to avoid a car, their van hit a lamp post and blew up, killing no one but themselves. Those who experienced the full story regarded it as a “miracle.”   The rest claimed I had made it up.  

Six years later, I went to visit Sheik Hassan in his modest dwelling in a Palestinian camp south of Nablus.  About a half century before, after his period of “God-intoxication” had subsided, the Murshid settled in this small Sufi village. In 1948, with the partitioning of Palestine, many refugees came to dwell in Balata and the camp sprang up around him.   It was not easy to reach the camp – I had to be guided by Zvika, one of the Sheik’s disciples, an Israeli whose parents had suffered the traumas of the Holocaust.  Zvika and his family – his German wife Imka and their children – supported themselves as a clown troupe, spreading peace, joy, insight through their universal art.  I admired Zvika and his family a great deal, as they were living the dream I myself had as a child of bringing life, or at least joy, to those who were physically or spiritually impoverished, independent of national or ethnic boundaries.

Before starting out for Balata, Zvika first led me into the marketplace of Jerusalem’s walled Old City to buy fresh olive oil as a gift for the Murshid.  He chose his bottles very carefully – holding them up to whatever light shafts penetrated the dark, vaulted marketplace. The oil had to be a perfect shade of green.  When I commented that this was a lot of oil for one family, Zvika explained that it wasn’t only for cooking.  The Sheik used it to heal.  From Damascus Gate, we then took an Arab cab through the hills of Samaria, across a beautiful valley I had never seen as it wasn’t part of the normal tourist route, to Balata where we were let out on the narrow highway.  Walking the dusty road into the camp was like going to a Native American pueblo dwelling or Hopi mesa for a ceremonial dance.  All the men were up on the flat adobe roofs, shouting back and forth to each other.  There were a few dogs, a chicken walking about on the empty street, pecking in the dust looking for food – but no tribesmen in ritual dress assembled below.  The camp was, once again, under curfew.

Since his return to Balata from New York, the Murshid had married a young American woman with a son whom he adopted.  He and his new family lived in two rooms.  They slept on the carpeted floor, using cushions that bordered the walls.  We sat in one room while the Sheik finished praying in the other.  I looked around – one entire wall was covered with daggers, the color of bronze.  Zvika continued to talk about the Sheik’s miraculous cures. “In the old days, when the dervishes used to whirl, they would stab themselves in ecstasy.  Then the Sheik would come along, pass his hand over them and their wounds would vanish.”  The Sheik didn’t do this anymore; we never discussed why.  Now the Murshid stayed home, hidden in the labyrinth of the  camp, playing his drums and singing to Allah – and helping those who knew to find their way to his carefully locked door.

Because of the Murshid’s extraordinary powers, the older residents of the camp honored him.   They relied on his spiritual presence and protection. As a result, he had a kind of immunity from the strictly political factions gaining momentum, especially among the younger generations in the camp.   I had come to invite the Sheik to the Sinai Gathering, a host of spiritual figures who agreed to dwell together in the Sinai desert for a week to pray together for peace.  In addition to Jewish and Christian leaders, Tibetan and Zen monks, and the Native American medicine men who were planning to come, there was Egyptian Muslim representation.  The most difficult task had been to find Palestinians to attend. The Sheik said “No” immediately, pausing only to find the right way to make certain that I understood what I was really asking of him.  Matters were already quite grave, even then. The Sheik, who was not only a holy man but a realist, knew he would endanger his family if he left the camp for a well-intentioned gathering of the faiths.  “Don’t be fooled. There are politics to everything,” he said.

Just as Zvika and I left the Murshid’s house to return to Jerusalem that day, the curfew ended.  We mingled with the crowd of refugees pouring into the streets, who had been locked in their homes for days.  Friends were running to be with each other again.  Their exhilaration brought tears to my eyes.  I believe in Israel, in our right to a Jewish State.  Precisely for this reason, my heart opened to the people milling around me: “Oh God, please!  Let these people be free!  Give them a home of their own!”  (At that time, one could utter such prayers without being overwhelmed by the contradiction or punished by one’s own.)

Between the Sinai Gathering of 1984 and the Sheik’s death in 1987, I had cause to return to Balata once more.  The journey seemed all the more perilous because of the pressures that had built up in the Land during the intervening years.  Not only had the political factions in the refugee camps becoming more aggressive, but the more religious Jews who advocated Israel’s  exclusive right to the Land as defined in the Torah, were gaining in physical and political power.  As the tensions heated up, not only did the number of settlements increase but paranoia and instability took hold in Jerusalem.  In my absence, an old friend, a Sephardi Jew who, until the Yom Kippur War, mourned the departure of Arab families and friends in 1948, lost faith in the prospects of peace.  He had reached such a point of despair over the irreconcilable conflict he saw coming into the world he decided to “bring down Messiah.”  Translated this meant he was arrested for attempting to blow up the Mosque of Omar, an event which – had he succeeded – could have brought down full jihad on Israel in 1984.

The sharp contrast between these two clashing but coincidental events – the Sinai Gathering and the attack on Har ha Bayit -- made me examine the seeds that had kept me moving along the path of peace while my Israeli friend turned toward destruction.   The decisive factor was the teachings I had received from the Tibetan monks. Not only had my own rinpoche given me specific instructions on how I could avoid “stirring up conflict”, but the Dalai Lama, whom I interviewed after he was invited to America by former President Jimmy Carter, enabled me to recognize the flaws in my own ‘apocalyptic thinking’.  When I had last seen my Israeli friend in 1981, I had been able to warn him of the “danger of extremes”.  I tried to show him how his “either/or” thinking (either it is the Land of Israel or of Palestine) was becoming so increasingly obsessive that it was narrowing his choices and his vision.  “If you’re not careful, you could end up bringing everything you fear down upon yourself.”

My words were rudely rejected by my Israeli friend.  I was a sweet woman, a mother, but I knew nothing about “the reality of the Middle East.” Yet something must have reverberated because, three years later, when he climbed the Temple Mount with five other men, armed with dynamite and guns, he experienced that cause and effect.  He saw – not the cataclysm he would bring down upon his own people – but the desecration his violence would bring down upon the Holy of Holies.  When the Muslim guard came around, he deliberately stepped into the spotlight, setting off the alarm.  The others fled.

I told the Sheik about my friend – both to stress the psychological factors, which had led toward his terrifying act of madness, and to determine how gravely this hostile act had affected the chances for peace.  I also wanted to know if the Sheik preferred that I not come to Balata anymore.  After all I was “tainted” by my contact in previous years with a man who had become a Jewish terrorist. The Sheik said nothing to dissuade my future visits, but did ask a favor.  Until the Israelis occupied the West Bank, the Murshid used to go every Thursday night with his drums to the Tomb of Joseph to pray.  Historically, the Muslims had guarded all the holy sites in Israel for centuries.  In Hebron (the tomb of Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Esau and some of their wives) this stewardship is ongoing.  But in Balata, Israeli soldiers and settlers from the West Bank were keeping watch.  Arabs were no longer allowed into the sanctuary.  The Murshid asked me if I would take Mohammed, his adopted son, to this holy place, which he had never seen although barely a quarter of a mile from his house.  This I did in the spirit of interfaith.

Clapping a kippa on Mohammed’s head, I took him – with my own son -- to the Tomb of Joseph.  Those in military uniform guarding the tomb looked up when I appeared with a boy in either hand, but seeing that my head was covered and I in “modest’ attire said nothing.  I don’t know what prayers young Mohammed uttered – or my son -- but I meditated upon the phrase that Joseph’s brothers mockingly said to each other the day they betrayed him, when he came out to join them in these very fields, wearing his coat of many colors: “Behold, the Dreamer Cometh.  Let us see what will come of his dreams.”  At that point, I did not fully understand the challenges faced by the Dreamer trying to realize his vision in a political/economic sphere that profits from war, a realpolitik obsessed with oil, arms and strategic materiel.  But I did grasp the cruel intolerance of those blessed souls whose values lead them to believe in a fruitful and peaceful future.    

On this last trip to Balata in 1985, I was again caught in a curfew, this time for days.  This time I was more than a guest.  I spent time counting the dates and grains of rice with Miriam, the Murshid’s wife, as we were worried about having enough food for everyone until the curfew was lifted again.  My son, I noticed, kept hovering near the door to the Murshid’s room where he watched and listened to the sheik play his drums. When one of the Murshid’s students, a cab driver, appeared at the door; the Murshid asked him to take us safely back to Jerusalem.  We walked to the road where Israeli jeeps and trucks were stationed, blocking off the entrance to the camp. The few refugees I saw in their windows or on the roof along the way expressed no joy, only grim determination. 

Shortly thereafter, my son’s godmother who had introduced me to the Tibetan monks at the Sufi House, a Jew who also became a student of the Murshid, went voluntarily to stay with the Sheik and his family in the camp.  Later, she spoke of the lives of the other children there.  “They lived in a vacuum – with nothing, no books, films, or t.v.   No education.  When the voice of the Intifada made itself heard, they embraced its message wholeheartedly, because there was nothing else. The Israelis missed a golden opportunity by not educating them.” By the time she left, many months later, the leaders had shot a man in front of his family, for being an informant.  Later it turned out to be a mistake.  “Did anyone apologize?” I asked.  “No. They were already at war.  In war you have casualties.  In war you make mistakes.”

In December of 1987 the Murshid died.  The politicos in the camp surrounded the house – pressuring Miriam to marry one of them, presumably as a way to lay claim to his holiness. She  and her children were evacuated by U.S. Marines from the American Embassy, barely days before the first Intifada began.   Without knowing all this, my son and I – sensing the eruption that was to follow – also left Israel at that time.  In the years that followed, I devoted myself to determining the fate of Raoul Wallenberg, a young ‘dreamer’ who saved 100,000 Jews in Budapest during World War II, only to be arrested by the Soviets and taken into the Soviet Gulag.

In early 2001, returning from the international press conference in Stockholm where years of work were presented, I received word from an old friend that Zvika the clown disappeared into the forest of Northern Israel on Tu B’Shvat, the New Year of the Trees.  He was later found, tied to an almond tree with his Arab head dress.  In non-mystical parlance, this means he “hung himself.”  While he had been battling poverty and personal depression for some time, it would seem that Isaac and Ishmael’s battle for legitimacy, day after day bruising his soul, had brought him to a narrow place for which there was neither liberation nor cure. 

Soon thereafter, when the Israelis pulled out of Balata, the Palestinians of the camp – with no memory that Muslims had guarded this site for centuries  – razed the tomb of Joseph as an expression of their hatred against the Jews.  My friend said it was the first time they realized the efficacy of their rage – and they were stunned.  A few months later, the same crowd danced in ecstasy upon receiving news of the collapse of the Twin Trade Towers, September 11^th, just down the street from my house in New York.  Later that day, standing with strangers on a corner of Hudson Street as survivors and rescue workers, covered with dust, made their way north, one old man couldn’t help saying:  “For all the horror, there is great beauty in this.”  I completed his thought.  “The realization that this is who we are.”   We were celebrating the goodness that was surfacing in the face of such a disaster on the part of a people who accepted that we were all in this together. 

Epilogue:  September 16^th , Yom Kippur 2002, I woke up re-experiencing the pain and the shock of 9/11 – not the memories as conjured by film, but the actual reliving of bodies in flames leaping from buildings; an air that was a mixture of asbestos and the equivalent of Auschwitz – souls we breathed in consciously knowing this was what they were.  For all my work over the past decade in Russia related to the Disappeared, I was ill-prepared for the haunted eyes of those who walked around downtown seeking word of their missing, whose photographs they clutched to their chests.  A friend, walking toward the grocery store, witnessed the suicidal leap of a professional woman whose partner had died in the World Trade Center the day before.  Civilians of every nation and ethnic background who never expected to experience such nightmares in any given lifetime were traumatized for months to come – to this day.  A new bardo had opened up in our midst, and for those who knew what this meant – we sought ways to make that crossing as clear and free from pain as possible. 

My mind moved in reverse, through every holocaust of every description born of intolerance and ethnic cleansing, the mad schemes and/or “best laid plans of mice and men.” And I sat up, asking – not God, but my fellow human being:  “How can anyone who has experienced such suffering wish it on another – any where in any world?”   With the prospect of my country waging a unilateral strike against Iraq, the monks’ message from 1976 had finally been received.

As the drive toward destruction takes hold, the voice of those who believe in a fruitful and peaceful future – will be drowned out by more planes shattering the heavens, destroying what has been built to lift up our lives spiritually and physically.  As it is, our dreams have already been eclipsed.  In this phase of mounting darkness, my spiritual teachers have become the young.  Adrien Ahmed, a Palestinian woman of 20, setting out on a suicide mission, describes the epiphany that occurred when she began walking toward her target.  “I look at the sky….I look at the people…( remembers then a childhood belief that) ‘nobody has the right to stop anybody’s life’.  She had the courage to turn herself into her enemy rather than complete a wrong act.  And yet those of us who follow the precepts of non-violence must somehow find the “right voice” to say what we know from experience: 1) that violence by its very nature turns against those who inflict it, even as it drowns out all signals not to crush one’s victims; 2) that there exists a threshold of violence beyond which there can be no healing for the masses, and no bomb shelter deep enough to protect the elite; 3) that the great universal traditions, when they stray from their precepts of mercy and wisdom in their haste for world rule, will bring down – not the Divine manifestation and purity of spirit which has been their refuge for so long  – but their own worst nightmare.   

Even as I describe the apocalypse inherent in a violation of these gentle precepts, I sound too much like all I oppose. Such sermonizing lacks the silence, the ‘still small voice’ that knows no enemy, the peaceful oneness that comes from turning and surrendering to all that is good. Or the living, non-militaristic rhythms of my son’s drum who, now a composer and musician, opens the way to unseen worlds -- guided by nothing more than a childhood encounter with Tibetan monks whose blessings were given with the terrifying clang of cymbals and the strange lament of long horns; the voice of a singing rabbi who took the psalms of David and brought Holocaust survivors, overjoyed, to their feet; and the drum of one lone sheik, who once miraculously healed his disciples from their self-inflicted wounds, but toward the end of his days prayed alone with his family behind heavily locked doors.

On September 12, 2002, the President of the United States invited the American people to respond to his proposed pre-emptive strike against Iraq by calling the White House.  I did and, to my surprise, registered my protest with a real person – not a robot. I spared her the precepts of non-violence that would link me to the naïve, idealistic believers in peace – pointing instead to political, economic and strategic concerns not yet mentioned in the public debate.  I then asked: “Would you like my name?” “No, only where you are from.”  “New York!”  She seemed confused.  “But you have vested interests in this!”  “What possible interest could I have in an attack on Iraq?”  “You experienced the attack on our nation first hand.”  “Yes, I did – I really did.    But I can tell you now that I, and every New Yorker I know, can distinguish between going after the perpetrators of a terrorist attack, and a strike against a sovereign nation that ignores all the laws, interests and sensibilities of the civilized world.”  Strong language?  Perhaps not strong enough.  Later, I read in Time Magazine the President’s response to the Chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee’s mention of ‘containment’ as an alternative to war: “After 9/11 this is no longer an option.”  In my work on the Wallenberg case, I have protested over the years, the failure to connect the dots between eye witness reports.  Here I am horrified by the speed and insistence with which my President, and his group, adeptly but perhaps erroneously connect the wrong dots – threatening to hurl us into the abyss.

Ngawang Lhamo lives in New York City.