Unless dogs are involved.

When I witnessed Michael Vick return to professional football last year after a 19-month prison sentence for running a dog-fighting organization and personally ending the lives of several animals, I experienced the sort of rage I rarely feel, a thick, deep, and bubbling anger. The man, I said, should never be allowed back on the gridiron. He shouldn’t even be allowed his freedom.

A number of my friends took me to task. How, they asked, could I be so quick to forgive my worst enemies but reluctant to pardon a man whose crime, as heinous as it was, hurt no human beings? Did I value the lives of dogs more than the lives of people? One acquaintance, a serious and faithful student of Christian theology, said that my inability to accept Vick’s statements of repentance was not so much my own personal fault as it was a glitch in Jewish ethics as a whole; lacking a Christ figure who commands and offers forgiveness, my acquaintance said, Jews were left to judge on a case-by-case basis, a far more difficult proposition, and one that often allowed for personal and irrelevant criteria to enter into the equation.

I took this criticism to heart. As I watched Vick go on to have a stellar season, I struggled mightily with myself, trying my best to find some merit in the voices of those calling on us fans to give the man a second chance. But no matter how hard I tried, I always failed.

This week’s parasha helped me understand why. There is, to be sure, little in it about being kind to our four-legged friends. On the contrary: The entire text deals with the ritualistic sacrifice of beasts as part of the complicated process designed to relieve human beings of the burden of their sins. But reading the parasha, I was once again awe-struck by Judaism’s meticulous approach to animals.

According to most historical accounts, we first encounter serious concern for animals’ rights in the work of Pythagoras, who believed that both humans and animals shared the same sort of indestructible soul and that the transmigration of these shared souls could often cause a human being to be reincarnated as an animal and vice versa. Around the same time the Greek philosopher was busy with these thoughts, a prince, Siddhārtha Gautama, was born in Lumbini, which today is located in Nepal; when he was 29, he left his palace to meet his subjects, saw the world’s sorrows firsthand, became the Buddha, and inspired a host of teachings, the most prominent of which, perhaps, commands refraining from taking another living creature’s life.

But the laws of the Hebrew Bible precede these events by nearly 700 years, and they do not share the same logic as Buddha and Pythagoras. For the most part, Judaism doesn’t necessarily believe that animals possess the same spiritual endowment as do humans. Maimonides, for example, wrote that “my view is that Divine Providence in this world applies to human beings” and not to animals or plants, as both most Buddhists and some ancient Greek thinkers believed. All the Bible’s many laws demanding kindness to animals—from the command to allow one’s beasts to rest on the Sabbath to the prohibition on muzzling an animal while it plowed the field—stem not from a sense of interspecies egalitarianism but rather from a strong sense of duty: Man is elevated above the beasts, and therefore has an obligation to show them the same quality of mercy he’d expect the Lord himself to show mankind.

Therefore, even as we read about animal sacrifice, we are constantly aware that the greatest care has been taken to guarantee the elimination of needless bloodshed and suffering. The occasions for sacrifice are exhaustively detailed, lest anyone get a bit too knife-happy.

Which brings me back to Michael Vick. Reading about the great care with which God describes the minutia of animal sacrifice, I realized that my disdain for Vick is a result not only of his horrific actions but also of the imperious cruelty required in anyone running an underground organization dedicated solely to the infliction of pain on other living creatures. This, I think, is a specifically Jewish kind of rage: Not believing, like the Buddhists, that all creatures are equally sacred, and not believing, like the Christians, that forgiveness is always de rigeur, Jews considering the case of Michael Vick are angry with the athlete for having betrayed that most sacred of edicts, the one compelling us to show animals the care and consideration the Lord himself had instructed us to bestow.

This, alas, leaves us in a very tight spot. “For Jews, forgiveness is a much more difficult achievement, especially since most of the beings that would need to forgive Michael Vick, being dogs, may not communicate in the same level as human beings or may not be alive,” Rabbi Joshua Hammerman of Temple Beth El in Stamford, Conn., told me. That being the case, all we have to go on isn’t intent—who, after all, knows if Vick’s numerous declarations of remorse are truly sincere?—but action. Vick, said Hammerman, is “getting a lot of accolades and money and positive attention; let’s see if he falls again.” Until then, all we can do is wait, obliged to overcome our fury and disgust and give Vick not the firm handshake of absolution but the tentative nod of allowing him another shot at redeeming himself.

It’s a message that this week’s parasha communicates as well, however softly. The concern for the animals being offered on the altar is there in every tortured sentence, in every tiny detail that God takes care to communicate to Moses. And while the theme of God’s speech is sin and forgiveness—that, after all, is the purpose of all those offerings—not a word is said about the stirrings of the heart. God doesn’t care how we feel, or whether or not we’re truly sorry. When it comes to forgiveness, he is all about actions, about having things done the proper way, about tangible proof. We should adhere to the same standard when it comes to Michael Vick.

I didn’t, however, think about the beliefs of these disciplines, but about their similar writings—their literatures. Indeed, while the theological differences between Zen and Hasidism appear irresolvably stark—Hasidism believes that the self is effaced by approaching God, whereas Zen holds that a denial of self also must mean a denial of God; Hasidism’s belief in Messianism appears to nullify Zen’s transmigration—the literary relationship between the two seems undeniable.

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“The essence of wisdom is silence. If a word is worth a sela, silence is worth two. When I speak I regret, and if I do not speak I am not regretful. Until I have spoken I am ruler and master over my speech, but after I have spoken, the words master me.”

The above transgression of silence was not transcribed on a scroll by a monk, or delivered to an acolyte by a Zen Master from atop a Himalaya. It is, instead, the 86th section of the Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pious), attributed to Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg, known as Judah the Pious, founder of Ashkenazi Hasidism in the late 12th and 13th centuries. That collection of folk wisdom is also responsible for instructing its readers not to write notes in the margins of books—a proscription that covers, one would think, the margins of the Sefer Hasidim—and for forbidding the killing of lice at a table where meals are to be served.

Not just style and subject, however. Zen and Hasidic stories also share a handful of forms: a question-and-answer format reaching its highest expression in the Zen koan, which is a senseful question given an answer whose seemingly nonsensical aptitude confirms the student’s capacity to apprehend a Zen principle; a type of anecdote pertaining to a famous personage—in Zen a Master, in Hasidism a rabbi, known in Yiddish as a rebbe—often related after that person’s death by a student, or relative-disciple; and, most literarily, the miniature tale whose miracles can be taken either at face value, or in a spirit of allegory.

A monk asked, “What is the depth of the deep?” The master said, “What depth of the deep should I talk about, the seven or seven or the eight of eight?”—attributed to Zen Master Zhaozhou, 778-897, China

The Baal Shem said: “What does it mean, when people say that Truth goes all over the world? It means that Truth is driven out of one place after another, and must wander on and on.”—attributed to Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Russian Hasidism, 1698-1760, Polish Russia

Tellingly, in Zen, most questions are asked by one person to another, by Master to disciple or the other way around, whereas in Hasidism the rebbe tends to ask his own questions to and of himself; this rhetoric should give a sense of the explicit didacticism of Hasidic literature. This is absent from the writing of Zen, which, neither poetry nor prose or catechism, reads as rawer, more naturalistic, or less mediated—and this despite the linguistic distance between Chinese and Japanese and the translations read by the rest of the world.

Another attribute uniting these literatures might be called authority: literature gains authority from its authors, and from the publishing houses and outlets that publish them. But in an oral tradition, authority derives directly from the Master or rebbe. The text is what the text is because the Master or rebbe said it was that; it is up to the disciple to interpret the meaning. Then, when the disciple himself becomes the Master or rebbe, those interpretations will become simplified into primary texts whose meanings must be decrypted by subsequent disciples, and this is the way a tradition works—a tradition, which is continual, as opposed to a culture, which is reactionary.

A disciple told: whenever we rode to our teacher — the moment we were within the limits of the town — all our desires were fulfilled. And if anyone happened to have a wish left, this was satisfied as soon as he entered the house of the maggid [Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezeritch, 1710-1772, Poland]. But if there was one among us whose soul was still churned up with wanting — he was at peace when he looked into the face of the maggid.

The Master [Ryōkan Daigu, 1758-1831, Japan] never displayed excessive joy or anger. One never heard him speaking in a hurried manner, and in all his daily activities, in the way he would eat and drink, rise and retire, his movements were slow and easy, as if he were an idiot.

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While noting aesthetic affinities between the two literatures, it should be remembered that the two languages of Zen’s codification, Chinese and Japanese, have no relation to Hasidism’s Yiddish and Hebrew; and, as if to disorient with obviousness, between them confounds the entire continent of Asia. However, Zen and Hasidic writings were separated not only linguistically and geographically, but also by centuries, nearly a millennium: Zen distinguished itself as a separate Buddhist school in sixth century China, before disseminating to Japan five hundred years later, just as European Jewry was afflicted with the first of the Crusades; while Eastern Hasidism arose in pogrom-ridden Polish Russia in the early part of the 18th century, by which time Zen literature had been widely anthologized.

But their origins bear many similarities. They both began as oral literatures of the peasantry, of the village and town as opposed to the city; they are literatures of the poor and uneducated (Hasidism’s founder, the Baal Shem Tov, was an indifferent Talmudist; Zen’s Sixth and last Patriarch, Huineng, was an illiterate woodcutter when he began studying under the Fifth Patriarch, Hungjen); they both grew out of a revolt against intellectualism, Zen as a meditative response to the increasingly elaborate tenets of Mahayana Buddhism, Hasidism as an ecstatic rejoinder to the rote primacy of scriptural interpretation; they are the oral musings of wandering peoples, or of peoples whose leaderships developed a habit of itinerancy, in order not just to attract adherents but also for the sheer sake of experience. They are both literatures of functional hierarchies: transmitted to novices from teachers serving as intermediaries between a public and the ineffable; and, they are both literatures of peoples politically compelled to withdraw from the world or, better, to create an ideally ascetic world within their own communities, in monasteries and rabbinic courts, and then, failing that, within private cenacles — within their own selves.

About their codifications. The Blue Cliff Record and The Book of Equanimity (also known as The Book of Serenity) were collated in 12th-century China, while The Gateless Gate was compiled a century later toward the decline of the empire’s hyperliterate Song Dynasty—at the time of the fragments of Kalonymos ben Isaac the Elder, Samuel the Pious, his son Judah the Pious, and the latter’s apostle Eliezer ben Judah of Worms, whose Ashkenazi Hasidism, centuries before that of the Russian Pale, was a consequence of the destruction of the Crusades, and the tragic conduct, commerce, and sumptuary laws that followed.

Hasidism’s canonical stories were assembled from their diverse sects for translation only at the turn of the 20th century, however, when the German-speaking Jews of Berlin and the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s three cities, Vienna, Budapest, and Prague, became involved with, because more alienated from, the ethnicities of their ancestors, and were negotiating their returns to the wilds of a modernized Hebrew, and Yiddish. Coincidentally, perhaps, this Jewish dream of a comprehensible patrimony emerged just at the apex of Europe’s interest in the Orient—in the folkways, literature, and esoteric philosophies of that other East.

European artistic penchant for the Orientalistik grew out of the design style known as “chinoiserie,” whose motifs were brought to the continent by emissaries of the Dutch East India Companies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its manifestations included the decoration of porcelain vases with ostensibly Asian tableaux, and the erection, on British and French and German noble estates, of pagodas of a theoretically Buddhist architecture. In literature, this vogue culminated with Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, the bildungsroman of a boy’s spiritual progress in India during the reign of the Buddha, though its elements resound throughout all of the arts and are evident in the background patterning of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt, and in the use of that imported percussion instrument, the gong, in the First Symphony of Gustav Mahler.

At the same time, Jews of the great European cities who’d become changed by what they considered to be the more authentic lives lived by their Pale coreligionists included not only Buber, amassing his landmark Die Erzählungen der Chassidim (Tales of the Hasidim, from which the selections in this essay are excerpted), but also friends Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, who immersed themselves in the contradictory doctrines of Messianic redemption (which early Hasidism was fascinated with) and Zionism (with which later Hasidism has maintained a skeptical relationship).

Foremost among those artistically converted by experience with Judaism’s East was Franz Kafka, who befriended Yitzchak Löwy, an actor of the traveling Yiddish theater, and the writer and dilettante Hasid Jiří Langer, an assimilated Jew but an occasional disciple of the third and fourth rebbeim of the dynasty of Belz. Kafka recounts in his diaries numerous tales told to him by both Löwy and Langer, Talmudic anecdotes and folk midrashim—and he manages to get many wrong, or confused—but aphorizes in a letter: “Langer tries to find or thinks he finds a deeper meaning in all this; I think that the deeper meaning is that there is none and in my opinion this is quite enough.” (Kafka also admixed the Oriental. His The Great Wall of China is a kabbalistic parable in Asian guise—its wall could just as well be Jerusalem’s Kotel, with each reader sharding together the meaning of the text made his own reduced Herod.)

By the time a warring Europe had become thoroughly existentialist – which is a philosophy that complicates the tenets of Zen with nihilism – West’s codification of East was so influential that it itself had become a kind of original: not an authentic thing to be sanctified, but a quality of hybridism to be emulated. Writers, after all, are readers, too, and though they might be cut off from an oral tradition, they do have recourse to regretting that estate by misrepresenting the oral in books. After Kafka there derives a host of Jewish, and especially Israeli, writers occupied with such conscious rewrites and blunt manipulations, with the free excavation of the overtly antiquarian in the hopes of finding whatever style next—and style has always stood as a proxy for life; the search for it being, at depth, the search for a meaningful future.

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Which brings us back to Yoel Hoffmann and his Curriculum Vitae, gracefully translated by the American-born poet Peter Cole. Hoffmann’s story begins at the end of Jewish Europe with its twilit escapes into other forms of being an Other; his is the tale of a life lived globally not in imagination but in actuality, his globalism a product of both historical circumstance and his own affinity and will.

Born in 1937 in Hungarian Romania, an infant immigrant to Palestine, Hoffmann is considered Israel’s most accomplished Nipponist, having translated a score of works from the Japanese: scholarly texts, and collections of poetry, including an important anthology of Zen Buddhist Death Poetry, or jisei, comprising the tanka and haiku Zen Masters write before dying naturally, or committing ritual suicide. Already in his forties, evidently obsessed with his family—who’d been dispersed if not murdered in the very fields and thickets in which Hasidism arose—Hofmann began writing a kind of poetic novel that is sentimentally affecting by way of memoir or confessional verse, yet recklessly fragmented in structure.

No such interpretations or even facts are to be found in this memoir-as-résumé, however—this Life of Hoffmann as Hoffmannesque fiction.

Instead, in Curriculum Vitae we find only quicksilver, gnomic glimpses of the author’s studenthood, love, and marriage; of his growth as an Israeli son, husband, and father whose nostalgia for a Judaism lost is satisfied only outside the borders of Israel—in an irresistible attraction to the foreign, and to the foreign’s conversion into intimate terms: “We’re reading Buddhist texts with master Hirano,” he writes. “The sound of one hand (he says) when there is nothing to strike. Everything strikes itself. If you see a flower—you don’t think of eyes. If you hear a sound—you don’t think of ears. It’s like a man who comes to Kiev and at the train station has his wallet stolen. Now he’s in Kiev and has no wallet. He wants to call the police, but there is no phone.”

This is the style of all Hoffmann’s books: They are composed of brief, joking remembrances that take the sorrows of origins’ Judaism, and offer them, in reparation, as hope, the detachment of Zen. The result is a fusion that doesn’t even need to take the Buddhistic as its deliberate subject to attain a sort of trancelike transcendence—a zazen whose silence still speaks with the accent of the shtetl.

Take this, from the novel The Shunra and the Schmetterling (Shunra is Aramaic for “cat,” Schmetterling German for “butterfly”; in this book, each vignette stands lonely on the page, as if in contemplation of the white that surrounds):

“At night the moon stands over the head of Andreas my father. He wants to depart from what he is and meanwhile writes “Y-H-V-H” on the display windows of a store for electric appliances.”

While Hoffmann’s father graffities the Tetragrammaton—a name of God that Hasidim spell in their minds in order to address the presence of God and so, to forget their own names—he does so not in any sacred context, but on the dingy plateglass of a Tel-Aviv shop. In Kyoto we still long for Kyoto; while in Israel, we are in Zion and yet still we crave Zion, and will for as ever long as Israeli literature is written.

Hoffmann’s is an exile literature in exile from itself: self-conscious, and humorously historicized, yet with none of its homage preserved obviously. In his pages, the oldest of folkish tropes are wryly revivified into a third literature, that of a new and Third East—an undiscovered continent of exotically compelling fictions.

In 1990, Rodger Kamenetz traveled to Tibet with a group of American Jews to meet the Dalai Lama. On that trip, which he describes in The Jew in the Lotus, he happened to learn that some Buddhists meditate within their dreams. He began to wonder how dreams had been understood in Jewish texts and found that, while they had once been considered a source of revelation, dreams had been all but exiled from the tradition because they were deemed too disturbing or difficult to understand. As Kamenetz went deeper into his own dreams, which he calls “the oldest spiritual technology on the planet,” he found that they did not have any explicitly Jewish content. But in their own strange way—as he recounts in his new book A History of Last Night’s Dream—they did, over the years, begin to lead him back to something like God.

You say that dreams have been exiled from Judaism since Genesis.

There is a twin tradition. One is of the dream as direct revelation that requires no interpretation. That’s embodied in the dreams of Joseph as a boy, and in Jacob’s dream of a ladder between earth and heaven. And then there is the whole tradition of interpretation which actually begins with Joseph’s brothers, who have been quite correctly identified as the first dream interpreters. Their interpretation is full of anxiety and rage.

And you see that same mistrust reflected in the Talmud?

To give them credit, I think the rabbis were concerned for the average person who may not want to take a mystical venture into dreams, or who may not be equipped, or who may be fearful. They also wanted to assert that the Torah is the primary spiritual guide. They limit the scope of the dream very severely based on a passage in Deuteronomy essentially saying that no dream can contradict the Torah.

How has this affected the way we understand dreams now?

Our own response to dreams is often that they’re painful or that they are difficult. They bring up feelings we don’t want to face and we call out for an interpreter who will remove the sting of the dream and soothe us. One can find this not only in the rabbinic project but in the Freudian project, which says that the real meaning of the dream is hidden. But in my view the real meaning of the dream is right on the surface.

You once dreamed of an enormous book that was keeping you from writing.

I walk into my study and I have this feeling I’m going to write something. But in front of the computer monitor is this very large blue book with the letters “K de G” on the cover. The author is the Rabbi K de G, which seems to stand for “Kamenetz on Genesis.” The book reads from back to front and it appears to be a commentary on Genesis. As the dream ends, I’m thumbing through the pages from back to front and have completely missed the fact that behind the book, at a distance, was my father who had given it to me.

So the problem wasn’t so much that this holy book was keeping you from writing, but that it was standing between you and your father?

The book was a gift from my father that could have brought me closer to him. A few years ago I had a dream where my house is falling down and I just call my dad and ask for help. And he comes with a bunch of painters and carpenters and suddenly the house is repaired. It was just the first in a series of dreams that helped to lead me closer to him. One of the great gifts for me was to have this different relationship with my father in the last years of his life.

And what was coming between you and your father in waking life?

My pride. There’s another dream where we’re sitting at a kind of Talmud study. My father knows what a certain word means and I don’t. But I don’t ask him; I think I can figure it all out for myself. I don’t want to be the vulnerable son who needs help. But at a deeper level, this was not just about my relationship to my father, but about my relationship to the Father.

You hear people talk that way in church, but not as often in synagogue.

My answer would be two words: Avinu Malkeinu. Our Father, our King. Obviously Jesus said stuff like that because he also went to Rosh Hashanah services. There’s a whole Yiddish tradition of referring to God as tateynu, as “dear Father.” Our ancestors were very comfortable with the idea that God was a father and a king and a shepherd. But now if we have an emotional relationship to God, that’s immediately seen as goyish. We have drained the feeling level out of our liturgy and then we wonder why people can’t connect. They’re not just words. If God is a father, then I must be like a child.

So how does God appear to you in your dreams?

At the end of the book, I describe a dream where an orphan boy is being visited by his father. The father shows him his hand and says, “My hand is the same as yours.” Then the father leaves and the boy starts sobbing and looks in the mirror. And he’s me: I see my face. That sadness of having lost the Father, in this case not my father but the Father, that yearning to reconnect, not to be an orphan but to be his son—that’s the quest. It’s rather like what Rabbi Nachman said: You have to connect to God from your broken heart. The dream reawakened the feeling of loss, the pain of the separation from God. It’s a tremendous gift to feel that.

You’ve been studying under Marc Bregman, a self-styled “dreamworker” in Vermont.

Marc Bregman grew up as a Jewish kid in Philadelphia in a kind of anti-Semitic environment. He had a strict Jewish father and he rebelled in the 1960s. After he moved to Vermont he was working in the post office by day and seeing clients about their dreams at night. He’s certainly not a traditional Jew or even a nontraditional one. But I know that he is a man of God.

And you have your own clients now. How do you work with their dreams?

We meet once a week for an hour. We try to find the feelings in the dream, the belly button, as Marc calls it. Then we have homework, which is to visualize a moment from one of the dreams that needs change. There’s a rhythm back and forth from night dream to daydream and from daydream to actual life. Usually people come with a problem they’re trying to wrestle with but the dreams often point to some underlying predicament. It could be other people’s expectations. It could be family obligations, guilt, or a sense of duty. We just keep going deeper and over time there’s a shift. The dream becomes a live rehearsal. The changes you make in dreams can change how you behave.

In what sense is this approach to dreams Jewish?

When you’re taking a dream seriously it becomes a spiritual practice. How does that connect to what’s offered by this tradition we belong to where we have Torah and commentary and rabbinic authority and services and holidays and all of that? We struggle with a feeling of loss of connection to God. Religion tries to give us intellectual or ritual answers. People often outsource their spiritual struggles to the experts. Hence the tremendous pressure on rabbinic figures in our community. If we don’t have a personal feeling of a quest, at least if some of us don’t, then it makes the rabbi’s job very, very hard.

Could you have understood your dreams without coming to them from a Jewish angle?

It seemed necessary for me to go through the books, to go through Genesis, to go through the rabbis. And yet it’s true that having done that, it no longer seems quite as relevant. You can find the gift of the dream without Genesis. But it’s promised there.

/lost/lost/lost/lost/lost/lost/lost by monkeyinfez / Paul Hockett; some rights reserved.

You had a series of dreams in which men kept trying to feed you meat.

I had alternated between various dietary restrictions from semi-kosher to vegetarian and wasn’t too faithful to any of them. And all of a sudden these guys are showing up in my dreams serving meat. It started as hors d’oeuvres and ended with giant hunks of beef thrown on a grill by bare-chested Mexican chefs. It was obvious that these were good guys and that they were challenging me with a kind of a male generosity of spirit.

What did you dream last night?

Recently I dreamed I woke up and went to the window. I looked outside and the ground was covered with snow and I felt such joy. It took me back to being a kid in Baltimore thinking, I’m going to spend the whole day playing and I won’t have to go to school. You worry and you plan, you try to make yourself happy, you try to make other people happy and then the snow just falls, you know? It falls on its own.