I haven't checked the weather yet, but I know it is the perfect day to chat about adult Jewish literature. I'm Sheryl Stahl, thanks for joining me here at nice Jewish books. A little over a year ago, I spoke with Fabrice Sapolsky about his graphic novel, The Last Jewish daughter of Kaifeng. I would never have guessed that I would have another opportunity to speak about the Jewish Chinese connection. So I am thrilled to welcome Joel Bigman to speak about his book, The Second Journey. Welcome, Joel, please tell me about your book.
Hello, Sheryl. First of all, thank you for having me here, and my book's called the "Second" journey. And in order to understand what this book is about, need to give a little bit of historical background. What I've done is I combined Chinese legends and Jewish legends. Many of your listeners are probably familiar with the Jewish legends that appear in the Talmud or the different collections of Midrashim. The Chinese side of this is a little bit different. The Chinese side actually starts with a Buddhist monk in the seventh century Xuanzang, who actually went on a journey to the west. That's my book. Is a second journey. He went to the west. The western was India to get the Buddhist scriptures. And he was a real person, sort of a scholarly hero. He came back with to a heroes, welcome in China. They built a great, the great Wild Goose pagoda, which exists to this day in Xian. And that was that, until about 800 years later, somebody wrote a fantasy novel in which this same monk goes, but he goes to it goes out on his own, but with a magic monkey and a magic pig and a dragon that turned into a horse. And another character is called Sandy. And these are magic superheroes, or like that was superheroes. And they go and they defeat a whole bunch of monsters, and they go through all sorts of trouble, and they finally reach the Buddha and bring home the true Buddhist scriptures. It's a very long, complicated text. However, it's very, very popular in China and Asia in general. To this day, they make video games and TV series based on this novel. So I've become very interested in Chinese culture, and I got into my head, well, what would happen if they went on a second journey and visited Babel (Babylonia,) which is actually Persia at the time, and what's now Israel, and met the Talmudic scholars and participated in their legendary activities. I've will admit to a little bit of a chronological free-for-all here, because the events that they actually the rabbis that they meet and so on, are all lived several centuries before the historic Xuanzang was born. But it's a fantasy novel, and so they go on this trip and participate in Jewish legends, but also in a very Chinese way. And there's a mix of some of the Chinese mythology in the way these stories develop. That's basically it in a nutshell.
Yeah, I thought it was wonderful, as they encountered each of the rabbis. And they also picked up a guide along the way, a Jewish man who went by Bear, who could explain to them and to the reader what was going on.
Yeah, I had to invent Bear. I have to admit to being a little bit lazy as an author, author in the sense that I've used existing characters, right? The rabbis exist. The Chinese characters exist. Of course, I've used them a little bit different way of woven something else out of them, but I needed a character who would, who'd be the go between would explain the Jewish culture to the Chinese characters. And change characters. Could ask, you know, he could ask them questions, and then they would explain about their culture. And in the meantime, of course, there was a means of explain to the reader what's going on, because it's a rare reader who will be familiar with both cultures, right? So I. I had to put in Bear, who's very strong, which is very important, because he has to deal with with monkey, who's a superhero. The idea for for a character named Bear, who's the second Samson, well, actually came to me, this will be a bit of a surprise from a real person. We had a distant relative who was a strong man in the circus in Poland and escaped to South America, escaped from the Nazis back in the 30s, and was a strong man in the circus and went by El Segundo Samson. I apparently met him as a small child, but I have no recollection of whatsoever. But he's been immortalized in my fantasy.
What a great tribute. So actually, you forgot one detail of the the reason the monk decided to go on this trip, was that okay? So do you want to go ahead with that?
Yeah, right. The reason, actually, you mentioned another book about the Jews of Kaifeng. So when I, when I dreamed up this story, I wasn't really thinking of why they went. But it does need a motivation. People do not go on these long trips without some motivation. And what happens is our monk Xuanzan, who's, who's a national hero. He's not a young man, and he's dealing with translating to Buddhist Scriptures. He runs into a small bit of leaf with some Hebrew words on it, and he's led to the Jews of Kaifeng. And the Jews of Kaifeng have started losing their connection to Judaism. This actually happened, but much, much later in history, and they're looking for a teacher, somebody who could come back and teach them the Jewish heritage, which had been losing over the generations. Like I said, I played fast and easy with the chronology, but I use this as his motivation for going to the west. Being a Chinese book, he's, he doesn't make this choice by himself. But there's a Bucha Guan Yin who, anybody who's Chinese knows who this is. Was a sort of a the patron saint of of mercy and compassion. She's very common in Asian, Asian cultures and in Indian culture originally. So she encourages them to help these Jewish people get their teacher, and she sends them on this trip. And his buddies from the previous trip, monkey and pig were the most important characters in the original book. Join him, and off they go with less monsters on the way, I must admit, not a very monster oriented book. So the that that's the the motivation, there's interesting question of when the Jewish community in Kaifeng actually started, and there were other Jewish communities in China that are less well known. I'm far from an expert in that, but there definitely were Jewish traders going back and forth. And in the Talmud, some of the rabbis are reported as being silk traders. They talk about that as a as a profession that people would would do. So that's, that's the Kaifeng connection. It's, it appears at the beginning the book, and at the end, when they come back successfully.
Yeah, I've known about, I don't know a lot about the community, but I've known of it for a long time. Much of my professional career was as a librarian at Hebrew Union College, and they have some of the the documents from that community, you know.
So I know they have some old Torah scrolls there and this kind of thing.
And I don't remember if it was marriage documents or maybe bris. There was some list of names where they had the Chinese name and the Hebrew names side by side.
Yes, as many of us have two names, right? I was born in the United States. I currently live in Israel, but you asked me before you started, right? I go by Joel, but I also go by Yoel because I'm my Hebrew name, and some of us have much more, you know, Western names, you know, somebody could be called Nancy, and then might be called Nahama or something, right? So, if you're Chinese, it would be the same parallel kind of setup.
So the your book is told very episodically. So each chapter is sort of a complete small adventure, and there's just like a delightful tidbit in every single one. So, you know, rather than kind of an overall theme to focus on. So I have, like, a whole page of little quotes that I copied out, and I'm having a hard time putting them into general questions. But one thing, let's start with a big one. Okay, is God? So as Jews, we worship one God, but in the book, we worship one God who's one of many choices in the world, and each has their own heaven, and we've just chosen the one that that works for us.
I had to do something funny here. I became aware as I was writing this book, there's a lot of parallels between Chinese culture and Jewish culture. I'll start with that, including respect for ancient literature, which is very blatant, but there's also a huge difference, because we have one God and the Chinese Heaven is very, very crowded, to put it mildly. And I had to think of some way of having these two worlds coexist. So I basically divided the world in half. And there's a like a western part of the world, which is mostly monotheistic. In our case, we're looking at the Jews, but Jews, Muslims, Christians, possibly at the time, Zoroastrians, but I don't really want to go into that. So into that. And there's the Chinese heaven, which is crowded, really crowded, and the way I did is by dividing it. And actually really, really important. I want to mention two things here. One is just like I've seen talking to, I talked to my, my friend in Taiwan, who's Chinese. Met her in person, and she was bewildered at the idea there could be only one God. Just as to us, it's like, you have how many gods? Like, how do they manage? Like, what it seems strange to us, like we're totally bewildered by this concept of having hundreds 1000s of gods. But she was equally bewildered by the idea that calling me one so that one of the main points of my book is to sort of accept other people's viewpoints. That doesn't mean that you have to suddenly believe in a million different Chinese gods, but to understand and sort of accept that other people have such such a worldview. This is like a really critical point in my book. I wasn't trying to prove that one side's better than the other, or anything like that. It's more a question of understanding, which is part of, I guess, the journey that I made when reading the Chinese classics. I read a lot of them,
and I think that's a really important message for our time right now.
It is definitely
so one of my my day jobs at this point is teaching Sunday school and teaching Hebrew. So I kind of laughed out loud when I read your description of Hebrew. So from the Chinese point of view, so I'll just read your quote. "The alphabet of their language is brief and simple, having only 20 odd rudimentary letters with which a vast vocabulary is formed by a methodical spelling system. How these people managed to have a complete civilization with so few characters was a mystery to him."
I actually have to point out something that most of that quote isn't really me. This is I mentioned that the Chinese have respect for ancient literature. This monk, Xuanzang, in the seventh century, he wrote a report of his travel to India, and he ran into cultures that had alphabets and the report that he wrote in 640 CE exists today. And he had this description. I probably paraphrased it, but he has this description of of how strange it looked to him to see an alphabet. Again, it's the same thing, you know, I look at the Chinese language. And how do these people develop a civilization when you have to learn so many characters? You know, well, depends how you look at it, right? There's there's the opposite side.
So as I mentioned, each chapter is sort of its own little adventure. And in one of them, they meet up with Joshua/Yeshua. And who argues with God? And Joshua stood up and said, and I forgot to put down what they were arguing about. So he said, "it's not in heaven then a slow benevolent smile spread across God's face, my sons have defeated me. He turned to our dear monkey. I gave the Law and the way to my people many generations ago as written scriptures, when the sages heard the voice from heaven, they thought the argument was over. But Yeshua remembered that in the original scriptures, it is written The law is not in heaven. He has defeated heaven with heaven's own word."
This is actually, it's not Joshua, the biblical Joshua. It's Rabbi Joshua. And this, I was actually the first chapter I wrote of this book. I went when I first came up with the idea. I was like, where do you start? This is not, not obvious, especially in a project like this. And it's a very famous Talmudic story. It's called the in Hebrew the tannur, shel akhmayi. It's the guess like the snake oven it's in. Don't really want to go into technical details too much, but it's a question of whether this oven, which is built out of like a Lego thing, it's built out of pieces, whether it is considered a vessel in the sense that it can get ritual impurity or not. And they in the Talmud, they have this discussion, and they have these whole series of miracles trying to prove that one of the rabbis has the right answer. You know, God supports him, including a voice from heaven. And the other rabbis don't know how to deal with a voice from heaven. Except one of them gets up and says, Lo ba-shamayim hi, it's not in heaven. He's quoting the Bible and and and in fact, in the Talmudic legend, God is, I think it's Elijah, the prophet actually was up there, and he reports that God was smiling that he'd been beaten at his own game. But there actually it's, it's considered very like basic or important thing in Jewish law. There's this idea that we don't pay much attention to it today, we tend to think of Jewish laws being very rigid and something that doesn't change, but it's not the case at all. And the rabbi's in the Talmud period were aware of that, that they were adjusting the law to to meet their needs, to to meet, to to deal with with the new situations, and which is why the rabbinic literature is very, very extensive.
So and it also brings up the point that Jews have always argued with God as well as with with each other, you know. And it's a very old, well known joke about Jews arguing, you know, Two Jews, three opinions. And you brought that up a few times in different adventures. So this actually might have been the context of it the domain game,
there was a I should be honest about this one. I study the Talmud with my wife, the Daf Yomi project, which is where you study one page of the Talmud a day. So it's easier today than it used to be because all kinds of online help and translations and so on. So some of the things that appear in the book are because we happen to learn about them at the time I was writing it. So on, this domain game comes comes from the Talmud where there's all kinds of strange rules. And some things I described in the game are actually in the Talmud, not as a game, mind you, but the Halakha questions of what happens if somebody throws something over, over the public domain and the lands in the private domain, these are all kinds of discussions they have. And it crept into my book because we have to study it basically. Of course, the rabbi did not normally have a magic monkey or a pig helping them out in their discussions, but in my book, they help.
Yeah, that was another thing that impressed my fourth and fifth graders, is that these arguments are recorded, and even when a correct decision was was found the arguments, the whole argument still appeared. So we don't just say this is the answer, you know, you show all the different viewpoints and what went into. And they were very tickled that arguing for the sake of Heaven is encouraged and is a worthy occupation.
Yes, the argument is very basic.
One of my favorite encounters was that with Sheshet, who is a blind scholar, and he identified the travelers as they came, and he picked out which was Xuanzang because of his silence. So he said, "monkey wasn't convinced silence is a sign of a scholar. Xuanzang answered, do not speak unless it improves on silence. Sheshet replied, speak little, but do much and receive all men with a pleasant continence. Silence is an empty space. Space is the home of the awakened mind, said Xuanzan" and I just thought that was lovely, the combining of the two cultures there.
These are all quotes from each culture. I want to look for Buddhist quotations about silence. And there's many Hebrew ones, some in the Ethics of the Fathers of Pirkei Avot, there's we'll talk about silence. And so it it's not just a question of parallel. I think cultures that deal with wisdom and respect wise men also have to respect silence when they're not arguing. Mind you. But it's, it's definitely a parallel concept in the two cultures.
When it turns out that Xuanzang, who you mentioned, was getting to be older, needed a ride. He lost his his donkey or horse. Another one appeared, and it turns out that it's Balaam's Donkey. And I don't know if it's too spoilery to say that eventually we find out he's a talking donkey, and that was just a really fun aspect to it. Also, how did you decide to include not only, you know, the the human scholars and rabbis, but the donkey,
You know, this is why somebody was creative. And I like to think of myself as being creative. Actually puts things together. Is an interesting question. I'm not entirely sure myself, but I needed a horse or an animal for the monk to ride on, and we have a talking donkey in the Bible. So it just seemed like the obvious thing. We already have a talking monkey, we have a talking pig, so why not bring a talking donkey in and Balaam's donkey in the Bible actually talks. It takes a while to actually says a few words, but he talks. You know, if you ask even a very educated, Jewishly educated person or or a Christian who's, you know, reads the Bible, are there any talking animals in the Bible? And they don't think you were crazy, what do you mean talking animals in the Bible. Is that not Aesop's Fables, right? It's the Bible, but there's a talking donkey in the Bible. So I used him. He was another character. Of course, he's not really a character in the Bible. He turned into more of a character in my views.
So I wanted to ask to sort of switch gears. You're traveling with a monkey and a donkey. I mean a monkey and a pig, and the monks are vegetarian, and they have the encounter with the Jews, who are not vegetarian. And on one hand, pig is very happy that they don't eat pigs, so there's no temptation there. But they have one discussion that I think the monk sees the Jews as a religious, spiritual, compassionate people, and doesn't quite understand how they could still eat animals. So can you talk about that?
I wrote that, and this, again, goes with meeting people from a different culture and accepting them and understanding them, even though what they're doing doesn't really make sense. I'm personally not a vegetarian. I sometimes thought I ought to be, to be honest, it's one of these points of culturally, where you see in the book that the monk and the rabbis. And Bear. They kind of understand each other. They grow to accept each other. And then it comes to meals, they've got the sticking point, because it doesn't really make sense to this monk that they're eating meat. He comes from a culture a lot of people do eat meat, but he views it as being an immoral thing. You're supposed to be careful with all life. There's some quotation, I think even used about being careful when you sweep the floor, not to harm the ants. You know this, this kind of thing. And he understands that if people are okay, despite the fact that they eat meat, and you have both sides needing to accept the other side, I think as a book goes on Bear, starts thinking about being a vegetarian himself, he begins to understand the moral side of that. There's a number of points in my book where I kind of bring out some moral or spiritual questions. I if you ask me, like, what's, what's the most spiritual point in the in the book, it's when Bear actually looks very, very carefully at a spider. I don't know if, if the if you caught that. Um, it's actually something that happened to me. Wow. I was praying on, probably Rosh Hashanah, during the the COVID crisis, it was outdoors or out in nature. I thought it was great, actually to be having prayers outside, and there was a spider on the tree next to me, and the sun hit is or an angle where its shadow was much larger than the actual creature. And they just found this shadow fascinating. And a spider is fascinating. Like, it's a this little, tiny, little thing. But, like, I actually know somebody said something along these eyes, like, well, you're going to squash that spider. Let's see you make a spider. It's actually real marvel. There's, there's a side of nature that we don't always see, right? We just walk by it, you know, you see the tree, you see the bird, and you walk down without really paying attention. You know, being vegetarian is part of that. I'm I eat vegetarian when I'm in Taiwan, for example. I Buddhist food there, but I'm not a Buddhist, so just it's a more of a Kosher solution.
I think a lot of people can relate to that. So you have obviously done a lot of research, and some of it based in your own Talmud study. But can you talk more about what kind of research you had to do for this?
I started out thinking how I could combine Jewish and Chinese traditions, and I realized that there were classic Chinese novels four or five. I'll get to that in a moment, classic Chinese novels written maybe from the 13th century to the 16th or 17th century. The first one I read was called The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which I read in English. By the way, I don't speak Chinese or read Chinese, and it did not work. I read The Journey to the West, which I did use. And the Journey to the West is a very, long book, the original it's four volumes in English, and I've written a very good translation by Anthony C. Yu from University of Chicago, who has extensive introduction and a lot of footnotes. The original book is just full of references to ancient Chinese poetry, to Taoism to Buddhist ideas. And I was basically flipping back and forth between the footnotes and the text in order to try to understand what was going on, because it's episodic. That's why my book is episodic. It was following that. And it's out of [unclear]. They defeat all these monsters, but there's a lot more going on there. And every culture has, you know, multiple layers. There's language. You use little things, you quote all kinds of assumptions you make about what the other person knows. And I didn't grow up in that surrounding, so that helped me a lot. I read the romantic kingdoms, the Journey to the West Water margin, which is another classic. Which actually I heard is a podcast. There's somebody does retells Chinese stories. In the podcast, I read the Dream of the Red Chamber, which is another one of it. It's actually kind of a curious book, because there are people who study that in English. They call the field red ology. It's a red chamber. It's a later text. And I actually read the Jing ping May, which is a book that's been banned off and on in. In China, because it has some, let's say it's a little risky, put it mildly, but it is extremely well written and has a very strong moral point.
All right, were there any interesting tidbits in your research that you loved but didn't make it into your book,
probably 1000 tidbits. There's, there's all kinds of in the Journey to the West, if we look at that particular book, first I you know I mentioned that the pig is very happy that Jews don't eat pork. Well, during the original Journey to the West, repeatedly, they catch the pig and the monk, by the way, they tie them up, and tomorrow they're going to steam them and eat them, or maybe they'll fry them. You know, there's different recipes for no different these different monsters catch them. The monk, it's believed, because he's a he's lived a pure life for 10 generations, 10 reincarnations. If you eat him, you'll gain immortality. And the pig is just big and fat, so he's, I guess, tasty. So there's this goes on over and over again in the book, but there's some always strange twists in the book. We're talking a book that was written like 500 years ago. And the men in the book, they're talking about the pig and I believe the monk, they drink water from the wrong River, and they get pregnant. These men get pregnant. That's pretty astounding thing to imagine, 500 years ago in China. But somebody thought of this, and then they've got a problem, because men don't have any way of giving birth. They're not built for this, right? And they have to go through a whole adventure and how to solve this problem. But it's just amazing that the kind of things they came up with, or a major obstacles, a mountain, it's thinks horribly because it's covered with rotting persimmons. How do you clear the mountain? It's not just monsters that they fight, and there's plenty of monsters they fight on the way. There's all kinds of other obstacles. I will point out that this like, it's like a fun adventure book. And you know, the video games are like that. But underneath it all are some religious lines, because these are Buddhists are on a journey. It's also a journey of themselves, improving themselves as they go, leaving behind the bad things they used to do, and improving themselves. And if I have another minute here, I'll draw a little bit of a parallel to it's almost like the Wizard of Oz. In the original book, they have the monk, the pig, the monkey, this other character, Sandy, and they each actually represent a different part of a person's character, like the monk is the heart. It's almost like, like in The Wizard of Oz, right? You have these four travelers, each one actually thinks they're missing something, but actually represent that thing, right? There's one who's the brain, and there's one who's the heart, and book is like that. You know, they have these, you know, fun, silly adventures, but it's not just that. It's, there's many levels of meaning in there. There's all kinds of Buddhist ideas and Taoist ideas in there. And at this point, I will admit that I know very, very little about this. I view myself as very, very ignorant of mostly things. Now I don't speak Chinese. I never really studied Buddhism or Daoism in a kind of serious way. And yet most of us in the West are so ignorant of these things, I've turned into like a local expert, which to me, is kind of shocking. I don't really think I understand much about it at all.
That's funny, but you know more than the next person, right? So, yeah, right. Is there anything you'd like to bring up about your book that I haven't thought to ask about?
I think it's a lot of fun, but I believe you mentioned that. I would point out that you're going to get a slightly skewed version of many Jewish legends, because in actual talmudic legends, there are no Chinese monkeys or pigs helping out the ever seen there were Moses crossing the Red Sea, and somebody of Chinese mythology helps him split the Red Sea. These aren't things that are recorded either in Chinese or Jewish history, but they are recorded in my book now,
so it's your own personal midrash.
Well, exactly, actually, you asked about how I thought of connecting this and that, if you think about midrash, many times they do it, it'll take some set of verses and people, the rabbi's (not necessarily, the rabbi's either). Will connect those verses to something else that upfront does not look connected at all. We'll take verses from the Song of Songs and connect it to the Exodus. That's that's a big one. I've actually played this game at a Seder. I'll give people like playing cards with a verse from from some Psalm and another playing card with something else Jewish, and they have to tell a story to connect the two. It's kind of random.
I LOVE that idea.
It was kind of fun. You get ... you get interesting ideas. And that's the kind of creativity you see. You've seen the Midrash in the Talmudic things are constantly connecting things to verses or stories that don't seem to have any obvious connection. But if you think about a little bit, you can come up with something great.
So I wanted to get in our last question. I always ask people, if you could either use your book or not you have a soapbox moment, what call to action for tikkun olam, for repairing the world? Would you like to put forward in the world?
So I was given a heads up on this, and this relates to my book, maybe more to myself. I think we need to listen more people. Need to listen to other people and pay attention to what they're actually saying. There's a tendency. I don't know if you ever read Terry Pratchett. You write some interesting
I love him, yeah,
yeah, yeah. So he's got to see where there's these philosophers talking. They're arguing about something pointless philosophical saying, but the observer notices that none of them are listening to what the other guy is saying. What they're doing is thinking what they're going to say next, and this is not good. We need to listen to each other. And I would even say to ask each other. There's a tendency, maybe more in the States, but I see it here in Israel. So that, how are you doing? I'm doing fine, and you miss an opportunity there to actually meet somebody and actually ask them how they're doing. So listen carefully and maybe ask the next question, and you'll be surprised what you find out, and the world will be a better place for having asked one more question and listened carefully for the answer,
that's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. So if someone would like to contact you, what is the best way
the book is published through Earnshaw books. They specialize in English language books about China. And I've opened up a Facebook page for myself as an author the Joel Bigman books, that's probably the best way to to contact me, and I'll be glad to hear from people I I've, over the years, made a point of contacting podcasters also and asking them questions or comments and good To get feedback.
Great. Well. Joel Bigman, thank you so much for speaking with me about the Second Journey.
Thank you for having me been a lot of fun.
If you are interested in any of the books we discussed today, you can find them at your favorite board and brick or online bookstore or at your local library. Thanks to dianki for use of his Freilich, which definitely makes me happy. This podcast is a project of the Association of Jewish libraries, and you can find more about it at www.jewishlibraries.org/niceJewishbooks, I would like to thank AJL and my podcast mentor, Heidi Rabinowitz, Keep listening for the promo for her latest episode.
I'm Joni Sussman. I am the outgoing publisher at Karben publishing. It will soon be on the Book of Life podcast, and I want to dedicate it to the association of Jewish libraries, which does wonderful things for kids.
I'm Fran Greenman Spitz, and I am the incoming publisher at Karben publishing.
The Book of Life is the sister podcast of nice Jewish books. I'm your host, Heidi Rabinowitz and I podcast about Jewish kidlit. Join me to hear my conversation with Joni Sussman and Fran Greenman Schmitz at bookoflife podcast. Dot com.
