Rodger Kamenetz met H.H. the Dalai Lama in 1990 in Dharamsala together with a group of esteemed visiting rabbis. He has told that story before, in a 1994 international bestseller, The Jew in the Lotus. It would be difficult to overstate the impact that book had on Buddhist-Jewish understanding.
Now Kamenetz takes it a step further, picking up where he left off. Seeing Into the Life of Things addresses the problem of reactivity in our lives today by setting out to answer an unanswered question the Dalai Lama asked those rabbis 35 years ago: “How does your spiritual practice purify afflictive emotions?”
“Afflictive emotions” include anger, envy, resentment, and anxiety. These lead to suffering in most everyone, and they’ve been with us long before the pandemic made them worse. They’re also encouraged by social media’s algorithms, today’s politics of insult and intentional division, and the comfort we seem to find in communities of common outrage.
Kamenetz sets the scene very well and then offers help with tools related to better thinking, enhancing imagination, and paying attention to what’s happening around us in the moment. “Cultivating imagination” summarizes all these tools as Kamenetz (also an award-winning poet and professor) teaches readers to “savor perceptions, dwell on memories, and contemplate dreams,” showing “how these practices lead to greater connectivity.” He means what we’re missing in our atmosphere of afflictive states: connectivity to others, to communities, to the ground beneath our feet.
This is a book with so much thinking and practicing, you’ll probably want to read it more than once. There is much to learn, and also exercises to practice. Be sure not to miss the “Blessing Practice with Dreams” near the end. The book also includes extended teachings derived from sources that include poets William Wordsworth and Elizabeth Bishop, physicist Albert Einstein, biologist Edward O. Wilson, St. Ignatius of Loyola and his Spiritual Exercises, and rabbi and interfaith pioneer Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi — who was there that day in 1990 with the Dalai Lama.
