[Buddha-l] Tovanna: Insight meditation in Israel

[Richard Hayes]

Our friendly neighborhood vipassana group meets in a Thai temple once a week. 
Typically about 50-60 people show up, the vast majority of whom seem to be in 
their 50s and 60s, with a few younger people and a few people a bit older. 
They are strong meditators and really nice folks. For some reason they seem 
to like to invite teachers to speak to them after 45 minutes or so of 
meditation, some of them Theravadin monks and some of them lay teachers 
trained at Insight Meditation Society or Spirit Rock. Most of the teachers 
are, frankly, not nearly as good as the silence that preceded them, but every 
now and then there is a real treasure. Last night was one such night. The 
speaker was an Israeli insight meditation teacher named Dr. Stephen Fulder.

Fulder is a British academic who moved to Israel 25 years ago. Like a lot of 
folks around the world, he started a small meditation group with a Theravadin 
focus that met regularly in his living room, and eventually the group reached 
a critical mass and needed more space. As far as I can tell, they have no 
buildings of their own, but they have made arrangements to hold about 15 
one-week retreats every year on various kibbutzim. Fulder himself lives on a 
small farm near Mount Tabor and has retreats there.

What Fulder spoke about last night was the work that his group has been doing 
for about fifteen years. They have been organizing workshops at which 
Israelis and Palestinians meet to learn about one another and to talk frankly 
about their dukkha. They have borrowed all kinds of "deep listening" 
techniques from Quakers, from psychologists, from negotiators, and from 
Buddhists such as Joanna Macy and Thich Nhat Hanh. What they have learned to 
do is to create an atmosphere in which people feel comfortable just talking 
about their suffering and thinking creatively of practical things they might 
do to reduce the amount of pain in their lives. Fulder spoke quite frankly 
about the successes and the failures of this process. 

The biggest failure, not surprisingly, is that such workshops cannot attract 
extremists from either side to participate; indeed, the workshops have been 
severely criticized both militant Palestinians and by Israeli settlers in the 
occupied territories. In discussing this, Dr Fulder related a sutta in which 
the Buddha says there are four kinds of people. People with no anger and no 
strong views are very easy to reason with. People with strong anger but no 
strong views are difficult to reason with, but eventually one can reach 
through to them. People with strong views but no anger are also difficult but 
possible to reason with. People with strong anger and strong views, however, 
are impossible to reason with. (Does anyone know this sutta? I recall reading 
something like that many years ago, but I can't recall where.) 

Another failure, of sorts, has been that the Palestinian Authority no longer 
allows the workshops to continue, because they have not led to tangible 
political results, such as the Israelis withdrawing from the occupied 
territories and tearing down the walls that impede the free movement of 
Palestinians. So the workshops no longer continue. They have been replaced by 
clinics in which Israeli doctors and other volunteers give free medical 
attention to Palestinians.

One of the points that impressed me was Dr Fulder's observation that the 
meditators have learned that it is counterproductive to give anything at all 
like traditional dhamma talks or to try to teach people to meditate in 
traditional Buddhist ways. Trying to teach people to meditate, he said, is 
the sort of thing that New Age enthusiasts or Protestants or cultural 
imperialists might try to do, and the results are rarely satisfactory. What 
his organization does instead is to ask people about their own traditions, 
their own metaphors and images, and their own experiences with coping with 
pain and with healing and with being silent. They then invite people to 
engage in various exercises of the imagination in which those symbols and 
metaphors and images are used. This seems to work much better. (I think the 
Buddhist word for this technique of teaching dharma by stealth is upaya. 
Quakers might be inclined to call it friendly persuasion.)

Stephen Fulder says that anyone interested in attending one of these retreats 
in Israel is welcome; instruction is given in English to those who don't 
speak Hebrew. He says the Israeli meditators welcome making contact with 
dharma centers in other parts of the world. Anyone interested in learning 
more can go to their website: http://www.middleway.org/ (a bilingual website) 
or to http://www.tovana.org . (I was unable to get this website to open, but 
I found a working website at http://www.tovana.co.il . The website name uses 
the spelling tovana, but the literature on the site spells the Hebrew word 
tovanna. For those of us who know no Hebrew, can someone tell us what this 
word means?)

Richard

P.S. I guess it's only fair to warn our friend Curt that one of the people who 
appears regularly at these Israeli insight meditation society functions is 
Stephen Batchelor. Just goes to show how insidious the agnostic Protestant 
Buddhist influence has become, eh?