A Buddhist and a Jew Walk into a Bar…

By Rev. Janet Onnie July 20, 2025

            Well, my friends, life in this not-so-United States has not gotten better for those of us who center our values in love.  I admit I am suffering with the realization that it’s likely that we’re not who I thought we were.  I imagine I’m not alone in this disillusionment no matter where you fit on the political spectrum.  For the past five months or so we have been whip-lashed from one catastrophe to another. Chaos and uncertainty is the order of the day.  In our religious communities we are all in liminal space whenever we are in the process of making decisions about our future.  Today I thought we could learn how to cope from the Jews and the Buddhists. There are many, many books written on both the teachings of the Buddha and the Hebrew bible’s book of Job.  But I haven’t found much that marries the two.  So today is going to be a shotgun wedding; a meditation about suffering.

As a generalization we in the Western cultures are creatures who expect answers.  Much of our discomfort – our suffering – is our intolerance of ambiguity. From the time we are born we are being tested – is our height, weight, sight, hearing, speech, motor skills within ‘normal’ range of other infants.  It is presumed that if we’re outside the ‘normal’ range, action will be taken to fix us.  We enter school and progress through the educational system through tests of all sorts.  If we are not deemed ready to advance to the next level steps are taken to remedy our deficiencies.  I still remember the shame associated with having to take high school algebra a second time – and the best I could muster even then was a D-plus. 

The answers get a little more subjective in the arts, but there are still tests to be passed.  For musicians, it’s one thing to hit all the right notes in the right order at the right time for the right length.  That can be measured:  It’s either what the composer wrote or it isn’t.  But it’s something else entirely to make music.  An actor can deliver all the lines perfectly, but it takes something else to move an audience. 

The area that begs for answers is religion.  Religion asks What is the meaning of my life?  Why am I here?  Who/what is God?  What does the Eternal ask of me?   Why do bad things happen to good people?  Who is responsible for good and evil?  

The barroom conversation between the Buddhist and the Jew was a discussion of “retributive justice” a term found in moral theology that addresses the issue of suffering.  The Jew explained that we expect retribution from God and from one another:  We do this or that good and expect this much back; we do this much bad and expect that much punishment.  This theological stance portrays God as a sort of bi-polar scorekeeper:  because we keep score we assume that God is Scorekeeper writ large.   The most successful religious communities subscribe to this theology and have ready answers. The Catholics with their confession and system of absolution, the Jews with their Day of Atonement, and the Protestants with their good works all have ordered systems of balancing the books.  Even the Buddhists and the concept of Karma speaks to balancing.  The thinking that formulated the concept of retributive justice represents a sense that everything has to balance out.  Because we keep score, we assume God is doing the same..  

Nowhere is this theology of retributive justice more thoroughly unpacked than in the Book of Job found in the Hebrew Bible.

The book of Job has been included in lists of the greatest books in world literature. Biblical historians refer to Job as a poem, composed by several authors over the course of a few centuries, beginning about 3, 500 years ago, probably in Samaria. The latest edition of the book of Job is a happy ending, having been added only about 2, 500 years ago.  The story of Job is an attempt to justify the ways of God to man – and those ways of God include God’s allowing the innocent to suffer.  No, not just allows the innocent to suffer, but in the Job story God causes an innocent man – God calls him ‘an upright and faithful man’—to suffer.  And he causes him to suffer as a means of putting him to a test.  The test is to see if Job will remain faithful to God when un-deserved suffering is brought upon him, or whether he will curse his life, and by implication curse God.

The story starts with Satan being taunted by God – God and Satan are having a kind of casual conversation and God holds Job up as a perfect person, a prime example of ‘a good man.’

Satan takes the bait. In response to God holding Job up as a great guy, Satan taunts God by telling him that Job is a good, blameless man because God has heaped such good fortune onto him. Satan suggests that Job, who is an extremely wealthy man with a large, loving family and good health is why Job loves God.  (This, by the way, is the prosperity gospel writ large.)  But take all this good fortune away from Job and then see how he responds. Satan suggests a wager – he bets that Job will crumble under the weight of some suffering, which Satan will provide but God will allow.  God takes the bait and the bet – together they put Job to the test. 

The plan is to cause Job to suffer, to do whatever it takes to see if he will break, but just short of causing Job to die, since Job’s death would put an end to their little game.  So the game commences with Job losing his children, his fortune, and his health.  He sits on a heap of ashes with boils all over his body.  His wife counsels, “Curse God and die”.  The friends who sit with Job throughout the story are the exemplars of perfect theologians. They are practical, righteous, and religious.  They believe in the traditional Hebrew God that is omnipotent – He created the world and continues to rule the world…and to ‘set the rules.  Those who break God’s rules will suffer for their sins.  So his friends  look for sins in the “upright and blameless Job” and offer the glib, pious platitudes of stereotypical clergy.  They’re all theologically correct, yet entirely inadequate..  They are not able to endure the mystery of his suffering, so they jump to conclusions about its source. What they do, in effect is try to take away the mystery.  They try to solve the problem.  They try to fix it.

This theology of retributive justice was exactly what our Universalist forebears rejected with their doctrine of universal salvation. The description of God in the book of Job is the perfect portrait of the God that has made so many thinking people atheists.  Or Buddhists.

The Buddhist, having listened to this explanation of retributive justice, told a different story.  Buddhism is a practice, not a religion. Buddhists ignore the anthropological image of God and even the idea of a creator and accept that suffering is a part of life.  Unlike Job’s theologian friends, they don’t try to explain it away or fix it.  Instead, they strive for Nirvana, cultivating what is called the Divine Abodes: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. The development of positive behaviors and minimizing harmful ones, are crucial for spiritual development and ultimately, liberation. Job, in refusing to accept blame or explanation for his condition, was practicing equanimity.  That is, the freedom or balance we experience when we’re not grasping after or pushing away something.  When we stop trying to fix it. The act of resting in what is is what brings us to a sense of connection and belonging to that some sort of something somewhere.

            Tara Brach is an American psychologist, author, and proponent of Buddhist meditation. As a guiding teacher she explains that Life is changing currents – we can either fight it or manage it or we can sit down in it and live it.  The duck resting in the ocean swells is the example she uses.  Let’s hear it again:

Now we are ready to look at something pretty specialIt is a duck/ Riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf/ As he cuddles in the swells.There’s a big heaving in the Atlantic/And he is part of it.He can rest while the Atlantic heaves/Because he rests in the Atlantic.Probably he doesn't know how large the ocean is/ And neither do you/ But he realizes it somewhere and what does he do, I ask you?/ He sits down in it.Duck Meditation.He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity/ Which it is.That is religion, and the duck has it.How about you?

This is all very nice, you say, but what about activism?  What about trying to solve the problems of the world?  Do we need to sit back and just accept injustice and oppression?  No, we do not.  To be clear, the practice of equanimity does NOT propose we be resigned, disengaged, apathetic, or indifferent.  Nor does equanimity sanction responses from a stance of hatred or fear.  Tara Brach tells a story of Nelson Mandala when he was imprisoned.  After a number of years he fell into a depression, realizing he had no one to love.  So he decided to love his jailer; the jailer who humiliated and tortured him. The impact on the jailer was such that he could no longer do his job.  He was replaced by another jailer, who again was rendered incapable of doing the job of humiliating and torturing in the influence of Mandala’s love.  Eventually Mandala was freed.

When I was a ministerial intern my supervisor shared something I’ve never forgotten.  She said that whatever it is, it’s not about you.  It’s maybe about what you represent.  It’s probably something in their lives that you’ve triggered.  But it’s ultimately not about you. 

It’s not about me.  This has become my mantra when something happens that interferes with my placid life.  Stuff happens to us all the time.  But the currents and swells of life are simply stuff that happens and we can choose to respond with fear or with love.  We can respond without blaming the ocean, the wind, the tides, or the occasional school of stinging jellyfish.

This is where the Buddhist and the Jew converge.  Suffering is a fact of life.  There’s no way to avoid it.  But both wish for a transformation:  Job wants to be in relationship with God even if it means his ‘littlement’. The Buddhist wants to achieve Nirvana.  Is there a difference between what one calls God and another calls Nirvana?  I don’t think so.  Both are greater than the individual.  The practitioners of Buddhism and the worshipers of God all want the same thing:  to be free from fear and suffering and desire:  To be held in the strong, tender embrace of infinite love.  Duck Meditation.  He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity/ Which it is.  That is religion, and the duck has it.  How about you?  Amen.