Welcome to the first issue of TLBR for 2023! Please note these changes to the previous format. Beginning with this issue, the newsletter will be structured into the following three sections:
The first section continues to feature a political commentary on some current issue of concern. This is no change from the original format.
The second section is composed of a new feature - a personal reflection about either an incident that’s happened to me or an idea that’s been on my mind during the past few weeks.
The third section, titled “Postscript”, features the list of links to additional reading that previously comprised the second section of TLBR. The original third section, “Closing notes”, has been discontinued.
I hope that you’ll find this revised format useful and enjoyable!
(1) Swimming Upstream
Some seven or eight years ago (before the pandemic, even before Trump’s electoral college victory in the 2016 presidential race - so actually, it feels more like a lifetime ago!), I asked my meditation teacher for his thoughts as to how the world could be in such a bad state when we humans have had the wisdom of the Buddhist teachings on generosity, compassion, and interconnectedness available to us for over 2,500 years. He responded that, even though these teachings had indeed been with us for all these centuries, their lessons had ever only been embraced by such a tiny segment of humanity that their impact upon world affairs has always been all but nonexistent.
Dispiriting as his response was, there was no arguing with that the facts upon which he based it. Buddhists, and those who subscribe to Buddhism’s teachings without identifying as Buddhists, have indeed never accounted for more than a small percentage of the world’s population; so naturally, those ethical values have never been adopted by nearly enough individuals and institutions to make any significant historical impact.
While not contesting the facts behind my teacher’s answer, I’ve continued to ponder its implications. In the past half-dozen years or so since I first posed the question, at least three separate global events - the re-emergence of authoritarianism, the outbreak of war in Ukraine, and the increasing number of natural catastrophes induced by our changing climate - are all edging the world closer and closer to the brink of breakdown. My question feels more urgent than ever.
Since this country’s close encounter with political disaster in last November’s midterm elections, I’ve written several times about the need to find some way of communicating effectively with the extremists who are responding to the current state of affairs both here and abroad with anger, hatred, delusion, and sometimes - as in Washington DC two years ago, and in Brazil just a few days ago - with armed violence.
This would seem to be an impossible undertaking. The very nature of that way of responding all but precludes meaningful communication.
And yet, what other option is there but to attempt such communication? The path toward bridging the cavernous gorge that divides us must surely involve some sort of huge collective effort to communicate. And what the liberal Buddhist side of this divide most needs to communicate, I would suggest, are the personal and societal benefits that could accrue from the practice of generosity, compassion, and selflessness, as well as from the wisdom of understanding the interconnectedness of all things.
I wonder what such an effort would look like. At the moment, I really have no idea. One thing I’m pretty sure of, however, is that this effort, if it were to happen, would require the participation of a great many more people than the small number of people currently participating in the various insular communities where these virtues are aspired to. There are countless Buddhist sanghas, meditation groups, and mindfulness programs all across this country and throughout the world, but their outreach beyond their own walls is negligible.
What has to happen to change this state of affairs? In a world marked by so much fear, anger, and misinformation, how can we possibly make the ideas of generosity, compassion, and wisdom “go viral”?
And how can we sustain such an effort, in the face of 2,500 years of history arguing that only a handful will embrace these ideas?
Whatever such an effort will look like, those who undertake it will, without a doubt, be swimming upstream, against the tidal forces not only of extremism, but of history itself.
(2) Naomi
I didn’t intend for my initial “personal reflections” essay to be a eulogy, but my dear friend Naomi Replansky died this past weekend, at the fine ripe age of 104, and I couldn’t neglect writing a few words in her memory. Both the link above to the homepage of Naomi’s blog, and this thoughtful obituary in The New York Times, contain significant details about her life and generous samples of her poetry. What I want to add to these print sources is a brief account of my personal connection to this wonderful woman.
I met Naomi nearly ten years ago, shortly after becoming a regular attendee at the Sunday morning meditation sessions held by The Community Meditation Center on Manhattan’s upper west side. Naomi, then in her mid-nineties, and her spouse Eva Kollisch, then in her mid-eighties, had their “reserved seats” in the front row which was traditionally held vacant for the older members of the community, to facilitate both their ease of finding a seat in the crowded room and their ability to hear the dharma talk with their increasingly diminished hearing. At the end of every session, no matter where I had been sitting in the room, I could easily determine whether Naomi and Eva had been in attendance that morning - I simply had to look over to the front row, and the crowd of well-wishers standing around the two of them was the only evidence needed for me to know that yes, they were indeed both there.
Naomi was not, as far as I could ever tell, a deep practitioner of Buddhist meditation, in the sense of having a daily sitting practice, reading books on Buddhism, or listening to any of the countless recorded dharma talks available online. But she completely embodied the Buddhist ethical virtues in every aspect of her daily life. She was a generous, kind, warm-hearted, and gentle person, and she met the challenges of growing old with a determined honesty and a delightful sense of humor. In her own inimitable way, she was an excellent teacher of the dharma.
Traditional Buddhists believe in reincarnation, a return to life in some new form, based upon what you have already learned in your past life/lives, and what you still need to learn in your future one(s). I do not subscribe to such a belief, but if I did, I would have to believe that Naomi would return in much the same form as I knew her. There was so little left to improve upon.
Here is one of my many favorite selections from her Collected Poems. She wrote “The Visitor” in 1945, decades before she started attending the Sunday morning meditation sessions, and yet it so perfectly reflects a remarkably Buddhist-like approach to everyday living …
The Visitor
This day a simple day that comes for a visit that comes to sit quiet. Yet I in such small grace receive my visitor. I watch it narrowly and wonder, Friend or foe? I ransack it for weapons then question it with passion: What message? What message? But this is a mute and unassuming day. And is a good guest and brings small gifts. I must learn again to give it welcome.
(3) Postscript
Interesting reading from the past few weeks:
The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick commented upon the final report of the January 6th Committee … “What has kept Trump afloat for so long, what has helped him evade ruin and prosecution, is perhaps his most salient quality: he is shameless. That is the never-apologize-never-explain core of him. Trump is hardly the first dishonest President, the first incurious President, the first liar. But he is the most shameless. His contrition is impossible to conceive. He is insensible to disgrace. He will not repent. He will not change. But the importance of the committee’s report has far less to do with the spectacle of Trump’s unravelling. Its importance resides in the establishment of a historical record, the depth of its evidence, the story it tells of a deliberate, coördinated assault on American democracy that could easily have ended with the kidnapping or assassination of senior elected officials, the emboldenment of extremist groups and militias, and, above all, a stolen election, a coup.” { …} “January 6th was a phenomenon rooted both in the degraded era of Trump and in the radicalization of a major political party during the past generation. The very power of these developments explains why many people may approach this congressional report with a sense of fatigue, even denial. Part of Trump’s dark achievement has been to bludgeon the political attention of the country into submission. When a nation has been subjected to that degree of cynicism, it can lose its ability to experience outrage. As a result, the prospect of engaging with this congressional inquiry into Trump’s attempt to delegitimatize the machinery of electoral democracy is sometimes a challenge to the spirit. That is both understandable and a public danger. And yet a citizenry that can no longer bring itself to pay attention to such an investigation or to absorb its astonishing findings risks moving even farther toward a disturbing ‘new normal’: a post-truth, post-democratic America.”
In his newsletter “The Third Rail”, David French of The Atlantic interpreted the harsh conservative criticism of Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Washington as a manifestation of the extreme anger of the far right … “Partisan polarization doesn’t just explain the fact of right-wing opposition to Ukraine; it also explains its raw intensity. Simply put, it’s not about Ukraine. It’s about you. A key reason why the new right hates Zelensky is that the new right hates you. You are the real enemy, and anything or anyone you like, they will hate.” {…} “It’s important to identify the sheer amount of hatred that animates new-right discourse. You don’t compare foreign leaders to strip-club owners, call them leeches or welfare queens, or fantasize about punching them if you’re simply holding a different opinion about a complex and difficult point of policy. The new right’s objections to supporting Ukraine, or taking a vaccine, or accepting the results of an election are largely born out of hatred—the conviction that the evil ‘they’ are out to destroy ‘us’.”
In his lead essay for the year-end edition of The Atlantic’s Daily newsletter, Tom Nichols made this guarded, yet hopeful, argument on behalf of optimism about the coming year … “The single most important story of the year is the resilience of democracy. Two great events (or, more accurately, non-events) reassured me as part of that heartening narrative: The Russians failed to win a war in Europe, and antidemocratic candidates failed to rebound in America.” {…} “In 2022, the West chose to help Ukraine defend itself, and the voters chose to protect democracy. In fact, the American system is now engaged in a certain amount of healing, even if it doesn’t feel that way. Election deniers, led by Kari Lake in Arizona, are regularly being told by the judicial system to go pound sand. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is, so far, a shambolic and pitiful mess. Congress, with something that these days looks like a smidge of bipartisanship, has sent a bill with the Electoral Count Reform Act to President Joe Biden’s desk, adding some insurance against any further attempts at electoral-vote chicanery.”
And finally, The New Yorker’s Robin Wright offered a more guarded and more somber assessment of the prospects for 2023, and yet still held out a small portion of hope and optimism … “The wars and crises of 2022 will shape the challenges of the New Year. Among them, ruthless autocrats are exerting their might in ways that strain the diplomatic bandwidth, financial resources, and arms stockpiles of democracies. None of the world’s most troubling crises—Vladimir Putin’s gruesome invasion of Ukraine, Xi Jinping’s unprecedented military drills around Taiwan, Iran’s nuclear advances and arms sales to Russia, Kim Jong Un’s record missile provocations, the Taliban’s increasingly draconian rule in Afghanistan, the takeover of Haiti by hundreds of gangs, and the spread of isis franchises across Africa—seem likely to abate anytime soon.” {…} “‘2022 was not all bad though,’ Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said. America’s main rivals faced internal troubles at the same time that many of the worst democracy deniers were defeated in the U.S. midterm elections. The West demonstrated resilience and a reinvigorated unity, he noted. So did protesters across continents. For all the extraordinary crises that the U.S. and other democracies will have to navigate in 2023, the thugocrats are likely to face their own challenges, too.”
Thanks for reading this issue of TLBR. Look for the next issue in two weeks, posting on Wednesday, January 25th.