Visiting Berlin on a Europe trip, I’m confronted head-on with many of the topics I’ve been grappling with for months.

Meeting Germans, some of the nicest and most open-minded people I’ve met, in a city steeped with culture. Knowing that they had a similar reputation before they started two World Wars and killed tens of millions of people.

Coming off a leg of the trip that involved spending time with my close-minded and supremacist parents, surrounded by similarly-minded Israelis, all steeped in their own versions of propaganda, misinformation, and fundamentalist beliefs.

As a child, I was raised to believe that there was Good and there was Evil. Esau hates Jacob. Germany is biblically ordained to hate Jews. We don’t visit Germany. We don’t buy German products. Boycott, divest, sanction.

I have since learned that Jews can create their own genocides, their own mass-murders, and their own propaganda. That they can build their own walls. That they can justify their actions with the need for more living space.

I have since learned that nobody sets out to fight against evil that is not at their doorstep. America did not join the war to liberate the camps or fight Nazis. I know this because they stayed neutral for as long as possible and because they seem quite comfortable harboring both Nazis and their own deeply entrenched racist beliefs.

I also recognize that no one would come to save the Jews if they were being oppressed in another country, just as no one is coming to save the Palestinians and no one is coming to save the Ukrainians.

***

I met a woman in Berlin, Sofiya. Originally from Russia, she fled to Berlin with her husband after Russia invaded Ukraine, so he could avoid the draft. She told me she actually had Israeli citizenship as well – automatically granted by the Israeli government because her father was Jewish. She joked that she was collecting shitty citizenships.

I shared with her how I am ashamed of telling people I’m from Israel. She commiserated. She feels the same about telling people she’s Russian, she said, especially since Germany has many Ukrainian refugees. Shitty citizenships indeed.

***

Evil, points out Hannah Arendt, is not a complex or deep-rooted thing.

It is not spiritually predestined, as my father would have us all believe.

It is quite easy to foster, as can be seen in America’s devolution into totalitarianism in a matter of months.

Arendt was simultaneously supportive of the need for Jewish self-defense, and critical of partitioning Israel and the dangers of creating a nation-sate.

***

I was reading about Eli Wiesel and his outspoken advocacy for human rights (and for illegal settlements in Jerusalem, citing the bible as justification). How, when Israel was going to host a forum about the Armenian Genocide, Turkey got angry, threatened Turkish Jews, and Israel did everything in its power to shut down the conference.

Wiesel withdrew his participation and encouraged others to do the same because, as he said, “One life is more important than anything we can say about life.” I hear his point. I only wonder what would his, and the state of Israel’s, stance be if the conference they were pressured to cancel was one about the Holocaust.

All I ask is for consistency.

The more civilized Berlin presents itself as, and the more unhinged my family, Jewish friends, and conservative Americans become, the more the ground upon which my mind tries to establish a basic sense of equilibrium and safety, crumbles.

I tried visiting the Holocaust Museum in Berlin, but it was closed for renovations.

Sometimes when I wake up from a particularly deep sleep, my subconscious comes online before my conscious mind has a chance to.

I forget the context of my life (what time is it? What bed/room/house am I in?) and I’m hit in the face with a felt sense reality.

A deep sense of dread, a punch in the face.

How did I get here?

What is the point of it all?

Why am I even alive?

Some details begin to crystalize, unpleasant.

Linking a raw feeling into realities that might explain it, retroactively.

37 years old.

Living in a random city.

Few friends.

Shouldered by the responsibilities of feeding three mouths.

The monotony.

Of putting one foot in front of the other.

The unfulfilled dreams.

I was supposed to be somebody by now.

Wasn’t I just eight years old?

Wasn’t I just lying on the couch, listening to Enya and reading Richard Scary’s Cars and Trucks and Things That Go?

The dread is often followed by a rush of anger.

Here’s how I got here.

I was raised religious.

I was married off to the first woman I dated.

I was taught that birth control was a sin, that sex was a sin, that free time was a sin.

Slowly my logical brain comes back online, and I piece together my identity, my context, my self-regulation resources, step-by-step.

You are ok.

You have much to look forward to.

Here’s a specific exciting thing you’re doing, working on, learning.

Here are the ways the future will be even better.

Tune into your body. Tune into your breath. Everything is transient, this will pass.

And slowly the ton of bricks weighing down my stomach begins to lighten as I claw my wayward mind back into submission.

I find it insightful though, to observe what comes up in the time between when I wake up and and when I gather my wits.

A glimpse into all the shit that is still there, despite all the healing I’ve done, in the space between lost -and self-consciousness.

Mind the gap.

I am not above criticism any religion or social institution.

I spend most of my time calling out Orthodox Judaism because I am intimately familiar with its fuckeries and am haunted by its residues in my psyche.

But I think it’s important on occasion to criticize some other sacred cows, to balance things out and show that I hate everyone equally. Islam? Fuck that shit. ‘Religion of peace’, my ass. Christianity? Has millions of deaths to account for in the name of love.

This time I want to talk about Buddhism. And what’s interesting here is that I’m generally into Buddhism.

When I left Judaism, I encountered key Buddhist ideas that were much more aligned with how I experienced the world, and techniques for self-regulation that I had been missing my whole life.

At the same time, as I have explored Buddhism further, several things have become apparent.

Firstly, the entire brand of Buddhism that I’ve encountered is actually a watered-down, westernized version with some of the worst parts of the religious aspects of it removed. It is similar to Reform Judaism, the flavor that most non-Jews are able to say ‘oh, Judaism is so quaint and friendly and accepting’ about. And the same type that I, raised Orthodox, would call out for being inauthentic and not rooted in tradition. I have a friend who was raised religious Buddhist and was deeply traumatized by many aspects of it. In addition to the emotional scars, she bears physical scars on her arm from when she was branded as a child as part of an affirmation of faith ritual. This is not the Buddhism most of us are exposed to, but it is out there in force.

Second, the constant talking about enlightenment, as though that’s some sort of measurable state that can actually be achieved. Instead of viewing personal growth as a continuous spectrum for improvement with no discernible end, which I believe is more aligned with reality, Buddhist teachers – even the western ones – often refer to this goal as a milestone to strive for. Not only is this not realistic, it actually introduces a whole new set of cravings and striving to one’s practice, which is the antitheses of what the entire practice aims to achieve. It’s hard enough to remove one’s ego from the practice even with just our human condition to account for. There is no need to introduce additional layers of dogma to the mix.

Finally, there is the human component. No matter how ideal the raw premise might be, by the time it comes around to people actually implementing it, things start to break down. First we have a rich tradition, starting with Buddha himself and continuing with prominent teachers like Tejaniya, who were deadbeat dads who left their children behind to seek the aforementioned enlightenment. It’s a lot easier to be enlightened when you’re not dealing with your fucking kids.

Then there are the more western teachers I have encountered on the few meditation retreats I have been on. Similar to the amount of fucked up therapists out there, the majority of them seem to be engaged in some sort of complex form of spiritually bypassing – immersing in a practice that is supposed to refine them as people while presenting with glaring personality flaws that they seem to not be aware of. I am allergic to this kind of shit from my decades of experiencing Kiruv rabbis with agendas, and often the parallels are striking. Techniques like posturing, deflection, and false humility abound, and they seem no more equipped than anyone else to answer a question that veers from the scripts they have been taught to address.

My favorite story that speaks to this last point is an experience from the last day of the last meditation retreat I was on. A fundraiser presented to us, about our opportunity to become monthly supporters. Anyone who pledged over $10 a month would be entitled to a much-coveted meditation retreat-branded tote bag.

The room erupted in a flurry of inquiries. People who had been meditating in silence for a week on the principles of non-attachment broke their silence to inquire how they, too, might be able to acquire said tote despite not perfectly fitting the previously stated criteria. The presenter appeared flustered – they had not been prepared for an onslaught of questions about tote bag availability. She pledged to escalate the matter to those with the Power to Distribute Tote Bags. She had to promise this multiple times, to the multiple people who took issue with the current toteless state of the world. Suffering abounded.

Still, the one advantage that Buddhism seems to posses over most other religious is that when you strip things back to the very original teachings, looking past the flawed personalities and before the addition of endless traditions and laws added over millennia, the core ideas hold an amount of philosophical truth to them, with practical application and benefits. This already steps it above the core teachings of Judaism or Islam, which are just a bunch of violent bullshit in a box.

So I guess I’ll take what I can get.

(It’s a pretty nice tote)