During the pandemic isolation, Roshis Paco Lugovina, Chris Panos, and I kept busy by putting together The Bernie Koans. We reached out to all of Bernie’s successors as well as the others he’d given Inka to. These were Bernie’s family. After Bernie and Eve returned to Montague, the family had gathered at least once a year at the farm. We asked each to contribute a story about Bernie which they used in teaching.
In a number of instances, the successor was already gone. In those cases, we asked that person’s first successor to tell the best Bernie story they’d heard from their teacher. Jishu was one of Bernie’s successors who was gone, but she had no successors. I was her senior student, so I wrote “Jishu’s story.”
I reread it this spring. Under the auspices of the Zen Peacemakers, I was facilitating a bi-weekly group koan study using The Bernie Koans. I was embarrassed. My story was very little about Bernie and not much about Jishu. It was a good story about me, a very simple story.
“Do you have the courage to be Bernie’s teacher?”
When Jishu asked me that during dokusan at Auschwitz, I knew the answer immediately. “No.” There was no way that I had the courage to be Bernie’s teacher. But I worked with that koan for years and learned a lot about courage and a lot about what it meant to be a student and a teacher.
Rereading I saw more clearly than I ever had that “Do you have the courage to be Bernie’s teacher?” really was Jishu’s koan. She was sharing her koan with me, and I had never realized it. I should have.
When I met Bernie and Jishu, they were already married, and Bernie was still “Sensei.” In the zendo and in the Greyston offices, Jishu always called him “Sensei.” I appreciated her respect for form. I appreciated that she wasn’t flouting her personal relationship. When I got to know Bernie and Jishu better, spending time with them in their home and informally in restaurants, I got a kick out of Jishu calling Bernie, “Sensei Honey.”
It took me longer to appreciate the double-edge that Jishu was living with. Receiving Dharma transmission from your husband is not uncomplicated. Although she already had her doctorate and was doing cancer research at a high-profile New York research center when she got into Zen, she struggled to find her sea legs as a Zen teacher. Dharma talks were a struggle for her. She avoided them if she could, and when she couldn’t, she put so much effort into preparation and so much anxiety. After a while, I thought I understood her doubt. Was she really a teacher? Would Bernie have given her transmission if he wasn’t married to her? Was she worthy?
When I look back at the Auschwitz interview, I can see that Jishu had been working for a while with, “Do you have the courage to be Bernie’s teacher?” For Jishu, it wasn’t a funny question. It was much more life and death.
But Jishu was Bernie’s teacher. She just didn’t know it, and while she was alive, Bernie didn’t know it either.
Bernie was not an easy boss to work for, for Jishu or for anybody else. Jishu often felt undermined. Bernie would give her a challenging assignment, potentially a real learning experience. Jishu would jump into it, and then Bernie would pull back the assignment, would do it himself. There were other tensions for Jishu at Greyston. Some of them had to be rooted in the complications of being the boss’s wife.
When Jishu finally quit, her decision was not primarily about Bernie, but he was horrified. He wanted Jishu to rescind her resignation. Almost immediately, Bernie and Jishu went off to Hawaii to rest and relax and get some dental work done. Bernie would take advantage of their time away from Greyston to convince Jishu to stay. I was sure he would. He could be very persuasive, but when they returned from Hawaii, Bernie announced that he would be leaving Greyston too. They would devote themselves to co-founding the Zen Peacemaker Order.
It soon became apparent that Bernie couldn’t stay in Yonkers. As long as he was there, people, inside and outside of Greyston, would see him as the boss. But where would they go? It took some figuring out. After a lot of thought and discussion, Bernie wanted Santa Barbara. Jishu wanted Santa Fe.
Jishu stayed over at our house after officiating at my Shuso-Entering Ceremony. I would drive her to the airport the next morning. She would fly to Santa Fe. Jishu was sure this was a perfunctory gesture. They would look at a place in Santa Fe, and then they would move to Santa Barbara.
When they returned, it was settled. They were moving to Santa Fe. Jishu had more power than she realized. By the end of her life, she was finding her way. “There is no perfect teacher outside; I have a perfect teacher inside” became her mantra.
Jishu died too soon, shortly after the move to Santa Fe, before she had even finished unpacking. Only then did Bernie realize how much he’d learned from Jishu.
For years, I continued to work with Jishu’s koan, often without quite realizing it. I was inspired by Bernie’s Greyston social entrepreneurship practice, but the ingredients of my peacemaking were different from Bernie’s. Our network of charter schools was bringing different people to the societal table. We followed a different pathway to growth. My experience in mental health drove the mission and shaped my leadership. Bernie and I had so much in common, including the Jewish leftist family background, but we were also different in so many ways. I had his Dharma teaching, but I had my other ingredients too.
“Do you have the courage to be Bernie’s teacher?” I did have the courage to do something different. Was Bernie learning from me? I don’t know. He never said so. He was never big on complements although I heard from Eve over the years that he was proud of what we were doing in our schools. I never stopped telling people that, if it hadn’t been for Bernie’s teaching and his example, our network of schools would never have been built.
“Do you have the courage to be Bernie’s teacher?” may be a koan for us all, not just for Jishu, not just for me, not just for those of us who knew Bernie. We all need to find a way beyond “Sensei Honey.”
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