Jubus - eating their cake and having it too

Is everyone familiar with that phrase that denotes the doing of two mutually exclusive things 'To have one's cake and eat it too'? I don't know about anyone else but this phrase always bugged me - what was mutually exclusive about it? There is nothing in the expression to prevent and from functioning in terms of sequentiality, as in 'Go down the shop and get me a packet of Rothmans'. Surely one could have one's cake, and then one could eat it. Curious, I asked my English teacher. "Aha!", she said, "Everyone gets that wrong. The correct phrase is actually to eat one's cake and have it too." Lightbulb goes bink! Thanks Mrs. Smith, you're brilliant!

Now that we've sorted that out, and since we're on the subject of mutually exclusive things, how about them Jewish Buddhists? They're called 'Jubus' and allegedly they comprise twenty percent of American Buddhists. Who knew? Not me. Perhaps I should get out more. Or perhaps not. And for those who want to know what someone eating their cake and having it too looks like, it doesn't get any better than Jubus. If you look up oxymoron in the dictionary sure enough there's a picture of a Jubu.


For mine it is perfectly unsurprising that great swathes of the Jewish people are disenchanted with their religion. Well of course! The monstrous falsity of the idea that a perverse bloodline-obsessed God would play favourites (once removed, ha!) (And yes Ashkenazis, I'm talking to you) is just so obvious that any dimwit could figure it out. Sure enough, insane amounts of time and energy are spent turning Jews into self-obsessed gits whose genius can't travel beyond their own greatness. And following this travel analogy, part of the duty of those who herd the Jews is to perpetually scrawl the words 'Here be Monsters' on every uncharted bit of the map to make sure that no one strays.

But sure enough, Jews do stray. Perhaps they discover that the monsters are self-created chimeras and are unhappy with the Craig Murray-esque response, 'Yes, but that doesn't mean that real monsters don't exist'. Or perhaps they have trouble reconciling the blood-spattered irony of Jews as vicious inhuman exterminators running rampant on a turkey-shoot genocide in the world's largest ghetto? Or... perhaps they just want an experience that's more all about me than traditional Judaism is, ha ha ha. Who knows? Perhaps they're not unhappy at all. Perhaps they just function like the Borg from Star Trek so that everything not-them must be destroyed, owned, or subverted. That's been the lot of Christianity - why not Buddhism too?


What the fuck is this guy's problem? Why shouldn't Jews be Buddhists? Isn't that a good thing? Thank you Mr Google Drop-in, that was just the question I was hoping someone would ask. The thing is you see, is that Buddhists and Jews are polar opposites. Selflessness versus selfishness. One-with-the-universe versus us-and-them. The only certainty is change versus the only certainty is God and his special love of the Jews. Anyone who imagines that they can somehow embrace both of these propositions is a fool, or a hypocrite, or both. Never mind me, let's hear from the fools and hypocrites -

Some observers also note that Judaism and Buddhism share an understanding of the nature of suffering. For Jews, suffering has been an unfortunate constant throughout their history, culminating in the Holocaust and infusing contemporary Jewish culture with a theology of suffering to the extent that even alienated Jews have imbibed it... The Jerusalem Report quoted one Israeli living in Dharamsala... as saying: "It's so Jewish, you see, to always talk about suffering as Buddhists do."

Are Jewish people able to look at anything without tripping over themselves? What Buddhists posit as the single most fundamental and universal truth for all, Jews look at and declare, 'That's so Jewish!'. God spare me. And again -

In The Jew in the Lotus, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi says he would like to request the Dalai Lama: "Give me a dharma talk addressed to Jews."

What? Like they're not regular people? And what the fuck does this Rabbi want to hear? That there is no self unless it's Jewish? That all is delusion but some delusions are better than others? Or perhaps all is delusion except for the voice of your grandmother -

Lew soon found himself surrounded by fellow Jews who had also sought enlightenment through Buddhism but who could not deny their Jewishness... both authors heard an inner voice of their grandmothers which returned them to their birth faiths

This from Alan Lew who spent ten years in Zen meditation only to fall at the hurdle of his grandmother. All that time and he couldn't wrap his brain around the fact that whatever his grandmother wanted to tell him was bullshit, another delusion amongst an uncountable many, simply one more thing to be dispassionately observed and let go of like a handful of smoke. His book by the way, he rather unsubtly titled One God Clapping which is a bit of pissweak, sub-editor wordplay attempting to disguise the otherwise unambiguous image of God applauding Lew. (Presumably for having quit the monastery and become a rabbi). And don't think that that image didn't occur to him. It did and that's why he went with the title.


Oh, and birth faith? We all roll our eyes. There is no such thing as a 'birth faith'. Right there in that pat two word expression (say it three times quickly - it even sounds stupid) is precisely the kind of complete nonsense required to explain the rightness of a God re-imagined as a father who madly singles out one of his children and awards them a privileged status.

Ultimately, any Buddhist Jew who is true to his Buddhism must engage his Judaism, for the simple reason that Buddhism subscribes to the Law of Karma... Ram Das replied that he had to face the karmic reality that he had been born as a Jew.

There's no end to the bullshit non-logic is there? Once more - no one is born a Jew and certainly not any as-caucasian-as-I-am Ashkenazi Johnny-come-lately. Whilst it's true that some genetics are inescapable and one need only look in the mirror to be reminded of them, when an Ashkenazi Jew looks in the mirror there's only one stark message they should be paying attention to, and that is - Stay Out Of The Sun. With white skin like that you're on a hiding to nothing for skin cancer. Everything else is bullshit. The above-quoted Mr Das (otherwise known as Dick Alpert) was not born a Jew.

That he was born is most certainly true
and of course he was told, 'You're a Jew'
But instead of great reverence
he should've met it with severence
by way of a loud 'Whoopty Doo!'

Is that poor of me? To deal with a fellow's oh-so-important self identification with a limerick? I don't see why. A tuppence for the limerick and a tuppence for any 'Buddhist' who can't let go of some story their parents told them. That story, earnestness in the telling or otherwise, is just a string of words - a contrivance, a construction, a clever meme. The fact that a meme has overcome environmental depredations and successfully replicated itself for a thousand years doesn't mean it's true. Nor that it's laudible. Do we laud lichen? It's been around for ages.


Not that I'm big on Karma (one can be a Buddhist without it you know) but let's concede that it exists. That being the case, Das's 'karmic reality' was to be told he was a Jew by his parents who were told the same thing by theirs. Let's imagine a fellow is told he is a thief - his father was a thief and his father before him, a long line of thieves going back a thousand generations. The whole point of karma is that such a thing should not be embraced. To embrace it is to invite more bad karma.

'Jews aren't thieves!' says our thin-skinned drop-in tripping over himself and missing the point as usual. Mind you they ain't no pumpkin pie neither but the purpose of the analogy was to knock down the idea that one must adopt the identity one is given by one's parents. But forget karma, all a Jubu needs to know is that all is delusion. And 'all' here includes any cherished self-definition. Hell, especially that. If an individual can't deal with a self-definition then everything that follows must and will be corrupt and no truth can be arrived at.

Taking another tack now, perhaps the Jubus might like to look to the fellow they profess to revere and whose name they cut in half to make their catchy moniker, ha ha. (Psst, Jubus, stop scratching your heads, I'm talking about the Buddha). The Buddha was Kshatriya, the highest level caste within a vicious Brahminist system. Did he ever embrace or otherwise espouse the rightness of Brahminism? Where was his so-called karmic reality? And what did his grandmother have to say on the subject? But then, Buddha's gran is one thing and whether he would have listened is another. I've never heard of Granny Ghautama but I do know that the Buddha left his palace, his father, and his wife and child. All of it - he left it all behind. According to legend when he returned to Kapilavastu after his enlightenment, his wife and child followed him in abandoning all that they had been before too. And not as some half-baked 'Brahbus' neither.


To all those Jubu heavies who've clocked up time in temples and been told all sorts of nice things by Buddhist priests who know precisely as much about Jews as Jews have told them... a Jew should and must make a false oath when the goyim asks if our books contain anything against them... well, that ain't me. A fig for the big names you know and a tuppence for your wall of starfucker photos. I ain't here to pat you on the back when you pull out a faith-based plum and say, 'What a good boy am I!' What would that achieve apart from furthering you in your perverse delusion of chosen-by-God, us-and-them specialness? What if the best I could do for you was to throw a bucket of cold water in your face and try to awaken you to the hard ugly truth that your 'Jewishness' is a delusion and an ugly one at that?

Hey Jubu - you want to wake up in this world of delusion? Well that ain't ever going to happen unless you wake up to yourself first.

Wake the fuck up!




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This is the first part of a meandering effort I broke into three. The other two parts follow below.