September, 2020 Volume 20, No. 3

Green Tara and the ’s Biographer

By Gilah Yelin Hirsch

Abstract

Born and raised in Montreal’s large Jewish enclave of 20,000, from the mid 1940’s to the early 1960’s the author was deeply educated in sacred and cultural studies in Judaism, Torah, Hebrew and Yiddish as well as secular schooling in English and French. During her early childhood she began to question all received information – and she inexplicably “knew” that there was a place called and a person called the Dalai Lama. As an established artist and scholar, the author was invited round the world, facilitating her ongoing search. It was not until 1979 when she was a visiting artist in London that she met a diplomat who told her that, indeed, both existed in the mystical Himalayas. Ultimately, she not only found Tibet, but was also welcomed by the Dalai Lama’s biographer as an anticipated incarnation of Tibetan Buddhist deity Green Tara, and she finally met the Dalai Lama.

Keywords: Tibet, biographer/Kuno, spiritual journey, tuomo, reflection, recognition

Introduction

From the time I was a little girl in the mid 1940s in Montreal, Canada, I somehow and inexplicably knew that there was a place called Tibet and someone called the Dalai Lama. I grew up in one of the largest Jewish ghettos in North America, more than 20,000 people dedicated to perpetuating Judaism and Jewish culture in all respects. Many were Holocaust survivors or their children and grandchildren. I attended the parochial Jewish Peretz Elementary School, in which the school day was divided in half. Secular studies were conducted in French and English, while Hebrew and Yiddish were the languages dedicated to Jewish culture, history and Torah. My mother, Shulamis Yelin, was a renowned poet and author, a literary celebrity in Montreal and Canada, who suffered severe mental illness which would now be diagnosed as Borderline Syndrome. Although she sought psychiatric help throughout her life, the fledgling discipline could not help her. My father, Ezra Yelin, was a brilliant self-taught polyglot who spoke, read and wrote thirteen languages, and put himself through McGill University soon after he arrived from Poland. When I was eight, he was injured in a car accident that triggered the deterioration of all motor functions over a period of twelve years. My elementary school attendance was curtailed so that I could care for my father while my mother taught school. My mother was terribly abusive, both physically and emotionally to both my father and myself throughout my childhood. My salvation was reading and as a young child I read the great philosophers, writers, early feminists, Freud and Jung, all included in the floor to ceiling library of my parents’ small apartment. I also read daily newspapers from age 5 on and was terribly worried 2 about the Korean war. I was looking for answers to the suffering of my family as well as trying to make sense of a world in turmoil. Although I did not know it at the time, I was born into a lineage of questioners. My father hailed from seven generations of rabbis in Bialystok, Poland. He was rabbinically trained but was an atheist humanist and chose to go into business instead of pursuing a religious life. He was a scholar at heart and failed completely in business, making my mother, a teacher, the resentful breadwinner long before his illness rendered him incapable of working. The Yelin rabbis of Bialystok were luminaries and theological visionaries. My great grandfather, Rabbi Aryeh Leib Yelin, had written the last entry into the Bavli Talmud, Yefeh Aynayim. Literally this means beautiful eyes, but his parsha (chapter) was about perspective and attitudinal change. He was in the first wave of rabbis who were Misnagdim, opposed to Hasidism, the belief and practice of traditionally received Torah, and were encouraged to question everything and adopt a thoughtfully considere