‘Doikayt’ is not a word in Pali
IT’S A WORD IN YIDDISH
by Ramsey Margolis
Dharma books generally present their most important concepts in an Asian language, sometimes more than one. While this tends to give the text more of a scholarly feel, to a newbie, though, these terms can be off-putting.
Here’s a word from Yiddish (a language that was spoken around me when I was growing up) which you may find useful: doikayt. It really resonates with me as a meditator. Doikayt means ‘here-ness’, and was a core concept for the Jewish Labour Bund, a transnational socialist Jewish organisation that was founded at the end of the 19th century.
From Lithuania, Russia and Poland, the Bund spread across Europe to the UK, and over to the USA, reaching as far away as Australia, where it still thrives today in Melbourne.
Rather than assimilating into the culture of the countries they lived in, or fleeing growing antisemitism to the then-Turkish colony of Ottoman Syria to build a nation state of their own, the organisers of the Bund created and developed a new vision of Jewish life.
Their core aim was to promote cultural autonomy for Jews without the need to set up their own state. This insistence on staying proposes that here, where we live, is our country, and we have a right to be here.
A guiding principle of bundism, the organisation’s primary focus was seeking alliances with people in other distinct and sometimes hostile cultures, customs and religions in multicultural societies. After all, if there’s no easy escape route from the principal contradiction – capitalism – why go anywhere?
Doikayt lost out, though, to the escapist zionist ideal of ‘somewhere-other-ness’ (but a somewhere ‘we’ once were), that the Bund referred to as dortikayt or ‘there-ness’.
So how, as 21st century secular dharma practitioners, can we make good use of the notion of doikayt? In the Italian Journal of Polish Studies, the German historian Frank Wolff wrote that:
Doikayt was a double-edged concept. On the one hand, the Bund neither opposed nor favoured emigration … On the other hand, carried forward by thousands of activists, Bundism and a Bundist presence unfolded ‘in other streets’. This means that doikayt was possible everywhere. The diaspora had its centres of gravity, but was not spatially confined. By practice rather than by design, Bundists developed a transatlantic (and later global) Jewish socialist network.
Secular dharma practitioners can be found now in all parts of the world. Bringing the notion of doikayt, hereness, into daily meditation practice is a creative way to reminder ourselves of the intention to become fully present, wherever we are, and whatever is happening. This helps us respond to what arises with care.
People who meditate will affirm that paying attention is an art form. Do you have any thoughts on doikayt, and how we might creatively relate it to our dharma practice? Do please share them.
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Starting at the end of this month, a reading group will go through Mindful Solidarity together on Sundays from 27 April. These meetings will be followed by a Q+A session with author Mike Slott. Meetings will start at these times:
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REBIRTH
So what do YOU believe?
Recently, during a discussion of a manuscript, we were asked: ‘Do secular Buddhists believe in rebirth, that we come back in another life?’ Our response was: ‘To be honest, we have no idea. But we very much doubt it.’
The author responded with, ‘Oh, well, in my lineage we think we’ll be coming back again, and if there is an afterlife I’d like to come back as a ghost writer.’
Back in 2010, Winton Higgins gave a dharma talk on rebirth as part of a series of study sessions around Stephen Batchelor’s book Buddhism without beliefs to Golden Wattle Sangha in Sydney, Australia. Here’s a brief excerpt:
For almost all ancestral Buddhists, rebirth is a core belief, i.e. for them it makes no sense to call yourself a Buddhist while questioning this belief.
Arguably, though, a majority of western dharma practitioners do question or reject rebirth, often while acknowledging its value as a metaphor for how we tend to reinforce and reproduce unexamined reflexes in daily life, rebirthing our habitual selves.
… What is the hook in the idea of an afterlife? Dharma practitioners seeking deeper awareness certainly need to look into this question in their own experience.
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In a *Guardian* article, 'The rise of end times fascism', Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor write:
‘Molly Crabapple, who has written a forthcoming book about [the Jewish Labor Bund], defines Doikayt as the right to ‘fight for freedom and safety in the places where they lived, in defiance of everyone who wanted them dead’ – and rather than be forced to flee to safety in Palestine or the USA.
Perhaps what is needed is a modern-day universalisation of that concept: a commitment to the right to the ‘hereness’ of this particular ailing planet, to these frail bodies, to the right to live in dignity wherever on the planet we are, even when the inevitable shocks forces us to move. ‘Hereness’ can be portable, free of nationalism, rooted in solidarity, respectful of indigenous rights and unbounded by borders.’
Does ‘doikayt’ resonate with you, too? How?
I love the concept of ‘hereness’. My great grandfather and mother brought their children to the UK to flee unrest for the Jewish community in Eastern Europe. But way back since Biblical times, the Jewish community has repeatedly had to flee unrest.
I admire the resilience of repeatedly setting down new roots in unfamiliar countries- trying to find a stable home.
Unfortunately all 7 of my grandfathers siblings died of TB in childhood- such was the poverty that they needed to endure in the Strangeways ghetto in Manchester.
Reflecting now on how my great grandparents moved their whole lives and their children to an unknown safety. Only to watch all their children die (bar one) must have been a bitter agony.
And to reflect on how my lone surviving grandfather built a life in a strange land to establish his ‘hereness’ is quite sobering. I didn’t appreciate that when I knew him as a child.