SPIRITUAL JOURNEY HOME: Eastern Mysticism to the Western Wall. Ktav; 192 pages; $27.50
It is no fluke that the Dalai Lama visited South Florida twice in the past 10 years, when his itinerary is usually packed with world capitals.
The man behind those two visits is Nathan Katz, director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality at Florida International University. Katz’s memoir, Spiritual Journey Home, is the story of how a classic Baby-Boom spiritual seeker found his way to Orthodox Judaism via Eastern religions.
Though he emerged from a family of Conservative Jews in Camden, N.J., Katz was soon attracted to the mystical side of religion. Right on schedule, as a teenager in the 1960s, Katz headed east, to Kathmandu, New Delhi, then back to Temple University in Philadelphia, off to Kabul, Benares, Sri Lanka and other sacred places in Asia.

But he met his first Tibetan Buddhist teacher not in Asia but in Boulder, Colo., at the Naropa Institute, founded by poet and fellow seeker Allen Ginsburg.
Over the years, more than one guru told him not to convert, but instead to blend what he learned from them into his own religion. But, as all seekers know, one does not hear until the time is right.
By 1978, he wrote a book on a tiny Jewish community in Cochin, India, the first of 13 books, many on Eastern religions. One might say that Katz’s path was fated to cross that of the Dalai Lama, and it happened in Katz’s home state, which he had left behind so many years earlier.
His Holiness, on a visit to a Buddhist monastery in New Jersey, requested a meeting with Jewish leaders. The meeting, which took place a year later at the Dalai Lama’s exile home of Dharamsala, India, was to discover “the Jewish secret” of maintaining a faith over millennia of exile. The Dalai Lama hoped this secret would help Budd-hists preserve their faith and culture. And, since spiritual journeys are filled with ironies, Katz finally found the essence of Judaism’s resilience for himself as he explained it to the Buddhist leader.
He is now an Orthodox Jew and head of an institute that knits the common threads of East and West.
“I discovered Jewish spirituality by way of Hinduism and Buddhism, and … my experiences with these ‘alien’ paths gave me the eyes to see my own religion anew. Meditation enabled me to see what was always in front of my face. … The vast system of rituals of Orthodox Judaism points me directly toward the sanctity of the everyday, the sacredness of the mundane. The table in my dining room is now sacred: it is the altar of the Temple. Again and again, the swamis and lamas I so deeply admired pointed me in this unexpected direction: back home.”
Is it a spoiler to give away this ending? Of course not. Like all great “secrets,” it can only be realized by individuals in their own good time.
For those who are seeking their own answers, Katz’s memoir will bring a smile of recognition.

–By Lona O’Connor