Am I a Buddhist?
When the question is posed like that, it seems like the kind of thing that ought to have a clean answer. A binary, that could be encoded as zero or one in a database. The question often comes from concerned friends or family, who might have noticed that I’ve spent two years gaining certification as a meditation teacher, or that I like to spend days at a time — sometimes a week or more — on self-imposed silent retreats. When the questioner is, like me, Jewish, there’s often a subtext of fear that being Buddhist might mean ceasing to be Jewish, so that the question is less about an identity I might have gained than about a different one they fear I might have lost, or be on the cusp of losing.
The messy truth is that meditation — really Buddhist meditation — works for me, and also that the world will see me as Jewish, even though I can honestly affirm the supernatural beliefs at the heart of neither faith.
I sometimes imagine, when unpacking this, that the questioner will be tempted to reply with an unsatisfied repetition: “Well, that’s fine, but are you?” And people do do need simple answers: a demographic survey has checkboxes, not free response sections. The U.S. Census is barred from asking anyone about religion, but Gallup (which has been surveying U.S. religious affiliations for decades) makes respondents pick a single answer. It doesn’t even ask about Buddhism.
Alongside the presumption that each person belongs to a single religious category, these surveys also make a different — and in some ways opposite — assumption, namely that religions are matters of personal belief. By asking individuals what they are, these data-driven approaches tacitly imply that we each choose what religion to be part of, and that each person gets the last word on what their own religious affiliation is.
That doesn’t seem true to me. Jews who try to part ways with their Jewishness been reminded over the centuries — from the Christian “conversos” in 15th century Spain to secular Germans of the 1940s — that their Judaism may persist in the eye of the beholder, down generations, even after they cease to see it in the mirror. In 1981, when my wife was born in the Soviet Union, the nationality noted on her passport was not Ukrainian or Russian, as it might have been for her neighbors, but Jewish.
So while the surveys imagine that we each have one religion, which we choose, I find myself entangled with two religions, neither of which I’ve chosen. I’m part of the intergenerational torch relay of Jewishness, holding a spark I didn’t choose yet intending to carry it into my future. And I’m connected to Buddhism because the practice of mindfulness, adapted from it, has become an anchor in my life.
This doesn’t feel exceptional; we all have complex identities. And seeing each other that way means stepping away from tidy statistical categories. We gain something valuable in so doing — a fuller sense of one another’s texture — but also give up something valuable, a world that is cleanly organized and easy to navigate.
How would the world look different, if categories were less important? At an individual level, more stories and fewer categories feels better. But is it practical? Can it be made more so? I’m not sure.