Legal Commentary

One of my favorite yoga teachers tells us that if you are struggling with a problem, a puzzle, or a challenge, stand on your head. You will see the world upside down and you will find a way. I often practice her teaching in my office instead of staring at my computer screen trying to figure out where I want to go with my analysis or a normative argument. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, liked to stand on his head. He was an avid Yogi and travelled to India to study meditation. Here is a picture of him at 71, in 1957, at the Herzeliya beach (where I am heading to lunch in a bit).

I spent the morning revisiting his home in the heart of Tel-Aviv, on the corner of Ben-Gurion and Arlozorov sts.  I went through his amazing book collection. Every wall of his house constituted part of his library. Ben-Gurion was a complex leader. He was born in Poland, the son of a lawyer and a Zionist activist. Early on, as a young student he joined the Marxist Zionist movement and in 1906 immigrated to Ottoman Palestine. He worked in agriculture but it was his political activism that got him expelled in 1915, and for a few years he lived in NYC, working as a journalist. When he returned to Palestine he quickly became the leader of the Jewish soon to be labor movement, led the 1948 war and on May 14 declared the independence of Israel. Browsing through his bookshelves, I tried to understand what inspired him and how the vast range of readings made sense together. In a pre-internet, pre-tv, low-tech era, Ben-Gurion read everything, in Hebrew, English and Spanish. Plato, Kant, Mill and Gandhi; biology and Jewish thought, economics and poetry, physics and philosophy journals. In the middle, an entire wall covered with book on Buddhism, yoga and Zen thought.

It occurred to me that in Ben-Gurion's world, Buddhist thought and practicing yoga and meditation helped reconcile the many contradictions that inevitably come with good faith leadership. Ben-Gurion said once that people always ask whether we would find a land fit for our people, but no one dared to ask whether there will be a people fit for this Land. Yoga means union and spending the morning with Ben-Gurion I was reminded how incredibly difficult it is in our worldly life to ethically unite the challenges, hopes and needs of a country. Ben-Gurion certainly was courageous enough to devote his life to trying to find such union, even as he stumbled and at some turns, failed. I imagined him stopping for a moment when the dilemmas became unbearable and standing on his head. And I wished that some of our current leaders would learn an inverted asana or two for those moments.