[Buddha-l] Anti-semitism and Self-reflection

[Franz Metcalf]

Gang,

Dan wrote,

> Where is Jung's "confession"? Where his contrition? He is not in the
> sangha, but perhaps this is grounds for his expulsion from the
> honorary luminary list.

I found this suggestion quite provocative. Not so much applying it to  
Jung himself (who I consider to have had plenty of other faults that  
already expel him from my personal list of luminaries), but to  
ourselves.

If we want to remain on our own lists of luminaries, or if we aspire  
to places there, we need to confess our own anti-semitism. Shocking? I  
hope not. Well, okay, I do, but just a little. Just enough to jog us  
into considering the lingering presence in ourselves of a kind of  
passive anti-semitism. I imagine that on buddha-l the presence of  
active anti-semitism is nil, but there is a pernicious kind of passive  
anti-semitism that still exists in the form of denial. This passive  
denial of our propensity to demonize the Other is, of course not  
confined to demonizing Jews; we do it all the time and on many levels.  
But there's something crystalizing (perhaps I should spell it  
"Kristalizing") about anti-semitism that turns on the defensiveness  
and denial in otherwise pretty self-reflective people. I think we see  
this in the Jung debate, but it goes on all the time. For example, in  
the contemporary Buddhist context we see this lack of reflection in  
our denial of the misdeeds of Buddhist leaders. And, when confronted  
with this, we see it in the denial of our own denial and ad hominem  
attack on those confronting us. I am not speaking merely as a  
distanced scholar here; I lived through this at Zen Center of Los  
Angeles.

The work we do to perpetuate this blindness needs to be compensated by  
work on removing it. I do not think we can ever fully remove it,  
merely see through it. This marks me as a Mahayanist of the basest  
sort, I suppose (either that or a Unitarian Universalist, but that  
goes without saying). But I think this issue is fundamental: if we are  
not perfectible (or if perfection is precisely imperfection, and  
imperfection perfections), then we had damn well better be contrite.

Yours in imperfection,

Franz Metcalf