Once on the evening marking the beginning of Yom Kippur, I found myself in a dim-lit, nearly deserted bar in a modest hotel at the edge of the Gobi Desert in the Chinese oasis town of Dunhuang.
It was a peculiar place to be on this holy day.
While not deeply religious, I was raised in a Jewish home where candles were lit each Friday night. At thirteen I was bar mitzvahed, and I attended Hebrew school through confirmation. My wife and I joined a temple when our children were young so that they might have some Jewish education. I’d even served on the temple board for several years.
But over time, my embrace of tradition—and, in particular, traditional notions of God—had turned tenuous. The very concept of “God,” perhaps so clear for some, had faded like a photograph left in the sun. Permeating even within Jewish tradition, from Moses to Isaiah to Maimonides, is the notion of the unknowability of God. That unknowability made me question what it was I was praying to. The core of Yom Kippur is praying to God for forgiveness, but I’d come to consider it a hollow gesture to seek forgiveness from a deity I’d found impenetrable at best, and simply a way to explain the unexplainable at worst.
Nevertheless, even with my agnosticism, Yom Kippur normally would have found me in services at some point. Indeed, if not for my work in cultural heritage conservation, which had prompted the trip to China, that’s where I’d have been. So spending this Jewish holy day so far from anything resembling a synagogue was disquieting. And to be spending it away from family, being here in Dunhuang, bordering the Gobi Desert, was plain strange. As a child, the furthest place on the planet I could imagine from my California home was the Gobi Desert. It was as exotic to me as the tales of the Arabian Nights and as distant to me as the moon. That I’d ever travel there never entered my imagination.
Completely unknown to me until my early forties was the town of Dunhuang. If the Gobi Desert was at least a place I could conjure up, no matter how inaccurately, Dunhuang wasn’t even on my mental map. But there I was. In Dunhuang. On Erev Yom Kippur.
For most of its recent history, Dunhuang was a dusty, forgotten frontier post in northwest China. But that belied its historical significance. Before drifting into obscurity around the fourteenth century (an obscurity that lasted until the twentieth century), Dunhuang had, for a millennium, been a place of consequence, first as a military garrison and then as an important and well populated settlement on the ancient Silk Road. It was the first stop for Silk Road travellers entering China from the west, and the last stop in China for travellers from the east.
It was also an entry point into China for one of India’s greatest exports—Buddhism. Seventeen kilometres from Dunhuang is the Mogao Grottoes, among the most important Buddhist sites in Asia. Beginning in the fourth century and for a thousand years in remarkable and repeated acts of veneration, hundreds of Buddhist cave temples were dug into the cliff face at Mogao, then elaborately decorated with wall paintings and sculpture depicting Buddha, his disciples, Buddhist tales, and the life that comes after life. Some caves are no bigger than a closet. The largest cave grotto is nearly the height of the cliff face and contains a nine-story high statue of Buddha. Today with nearly five hundred decorated cave temples remaining, Mogao—designated a World Heritage Site in 1987—is the largest collection of Buddhist art in China.
It is, in a word, astounding.
It was Mogao that brought me that evening to that mostly deserted, charmless Dunhuang hotel bar.
I was on my fifth trip to Dunhuang, each one the result of my work at the Getty Conservation Institute. For decades the Institute had partnered with the Dunhuang Academy, the entity responsible for overseeing Mogao, on a series of projects to conserve and maintain the site. This trip in 2013 was part of the preparation for a major exhibition on the grottoes to be held three years hence at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
Dunhuang and Mogao and the landscape that enveloped them had become rooted in my consciousness, along with my great respect for the Chinese professionals dedicated to preserving and protecting the grottoes. By now Mogao, nearly seven thousand miles from my home, was a place of familiarity. I’d come to regard it with strong attachment; everything from the intricate (if often inscrutable) paintings adorning the interior walls of the cave temples to the short and peaceful walk from the Academy to the grottoes, lined by slender poplars whose leaves danced in breezes blowing in from the desert.
As for Buddhism itself, I neither understood its complexities nor had seriously gravitated toward its spirituality (notwithstanding the fact that my mother, in her youth, had written a paper on Buddhism for her synagogue confirmation class!). But even in the face of my secularity, the cave temples carved into the cliff face exuded a holiness that went beyond their exquisite beauty. Standing in those cool, dark spaces surrounded by wall paintings dense with imagery that ranged from everyday life to the other worldly (and, always, the Buddha), the piety and devotion that went into their making was palpable.
Earlier that Erev Yom Kippur evening, before I wound up in the bar, work colleagues and I had attended an elaborate banquet at the fanciest hotel in Dunhuang. Later, after we’d returned to our own hotel, my Getty colleague David asked the group if anyone would go with him to purchase a pair of shoes he’d eyed at a shop in town. No one volunteered as we were all drained by the day, as well as by an evening of schmoozing with visiting dignitaries.
Seeing David’s forlorn look, I agreed to join him. I liked David, who wildly combined omnivorous and academic scholarship with the rough and tumble sensibility and curiosity of a Brooklyn street kid who grew up in a house where the Jewish belief most rigorously adhered to was, as he put it, “Never cross a picket line.”
In solidarity, I went off with David to the shoe store, situated along the large and noisy traffic circle at the centre of Dunhuang, close to a shop named “Classical Kaka” (it was unclear what they were selling). Passing on the “Kaka,” we went into the shoe store, David bought the shoes, paid less than he expected, and wore the shoes happily out the door.
Back at our hotel, David offered to buy me a drink, and so we walked into the newly installed bar, a gaudy, nouveau riche looking establishment empty of customers save for a single dour looking man at a table by himself. The young woman handling the bartending duties seemed to think it was her task to invite us behind the bar and to point out every bottle of alcoholic refreshment located there. Having communicated our order with some difficulty, we took a seat at one of the seven lurid booths and watched as the woman, with nervous hesitation, prepared our drinks.
And that is how I happened to celebrate Erev Yom Kippur by sipping whiskey with my colleague David, who was, I was certain, the only other Jew at that moment in Dunhuang—and probably the only other Jew within a thousand miles of the place.
But we were not, I knew, the only Jews in the long history of Dunhuang that had passed through here. Of that there was proof.
In 1900, by pure chance, a Taoist monk named Wang Yuanlu discovered a small Mogao cave whose entrance had been sealed up with mud plaster about a millennium earlier, hiding it for centuries. The Library Cave, as it came to be known, contained around fifty thousand objects, including paintings, textiles, and manuscripts on everything from religious to secular matters. It even included the earliest dated complete printed book, the Diamond Sutra.
We’ll probably never know who placed the objects there or why the cave had been sealed up. Most speculate that it was to protect these objects from a possible raid or invasion. What we do know is that the contents of the Library Cave constitute one of the greatest archaeological repositories ever found, offering us vivid testimony of the artistic richness of medieval China, as well as evidence of the variety of peoples and cultures that passed through Dunhuang. In the early twentieth century, several eager and enterprising explorers and scholars from around the world made their way to Mogao and obtained—some would say absconded with—thousands of its contents, which are now housed in cultural institutions well beyond China (that is another, albeit riveting, story).
What struck me personally when I first learned of it was that among the exceptional artifacts bequeathed to posterity by the Library Cave was a fragment of a Hebrew document. Dated anywhere from the seventh to ninth century, the fragment contains prayers from Psalms and Prophets, and is creased, which may mean it was folded and worn as an amulet. Its presence in the Library Cave, which included documents in a variety of languages, is evidence that among the multitude of travellers who trekked through this Chinese settlement over the course of a thousand years were Jews. That Jewish merchants travelled the Silk Road is a long-established fact, as is the historical existence of Jewish communities along the route in Central Asia. One perhaps could say that based on the biblical Exodus, crossing great deserts is embedded in the Jewish DNA.
When in my youth I travelled in Western Europe, I made a point of finding synagogues in cities I stopped in, not to pray but to see physical evidence of the Diaspora. Visiting sites from Italy to the Netherlands that evidenced the historic presence of Jews was simply confirmation of what was already known to me. But Jews in a place of powerful and ancient Buddhist veneration wedged between two great Asian deserts? Well, that was a revelation. I’d flown halfway around the globe to a distant land I’d only vaguely imagined in my childhood, and here, too, the Jewish people of whom I was a part had come.
Who were those Jews who travelled to Dunhuang with Hebrew prayers held close, and why had they left those prayers behind? What lands did they come from and how far did they travel? Where, in the end, did their journeys take them?
Journeying across time and continents is the history of Jews. It is the history of my Jews. My great-grandfather was a rabbi in Lithuania. My grandfather was a businessman in Pennsylvania. My father was a lawyer in California. For perhaps five centuries my ancestors had lived and died in a small corner of the Baltics—having come from somewhere else—and then, in the blink of history’s eye, none were left there.
Dunhuang means “blazing beacon,” a name that grows out of the site’s early function as a place where beacons were lit to warn the surrounding population of possible attack by approaching nomadic tribes.
But I see that designation altering in time. With the arrival of Buddhism, Dunhuang and Mogao became “blazing beacons” of faith, lighting the way toward a spiritual sanctuary. In that sense, there is a modest parallel with Judaism, for within the heart of every synagogue sanctuary is the Ner Tamid, an “Eternal Light” that remains lit above the ark of the Torah.
Is there a faith that doesn’t seek the light?
I ended up travelling to China’s “blazing beacon” six times over twenty-two years. It is the only place outside my country that I’ve visited so many times. In my own country that would be, arguably, Cleveland (and that is yet another, but less riveting, story).
My fifth trip to Dunhuang was my only Yom Kippur there. I’m grateful it happened. Mogao was a place for which I’d come to feel an ardent affinity, a measure not only of my familiarity with the site, but my recognition of how in the midst of a stark and severe landscape there can be great beauty and spiritual expression. And how, in the midst of materiality, there remains the necessity for reflection.
Therein, for me, lies the link to Yom Kippur. The creation of the grottoes with their many replications of the Buddha and depiction of tales of his wondrous deeds may not precisely represent an effort at atonement, but unquestionably they were a profound supplication for blessedness in a world that can be stark and severe. And if finding God on Yom Kippur remains elusive, that fact does not obliterate the opportunity it can offer to fulfill that necessity for reflection.
It would be grandiose to say that I found my own road to enlightenment on that Yom Kippur in Dunhuang. Hardly. The hotel bar in which David and I sat on that holy night was one of the dreariest rooms I’d ever found myself in. Dismal and depressing.
But the fact that the two of us were there was uplifting. It connected us to forebears who travelled many roads we could only faintly conjure. Jews had never settled in Dunhuang, but they had, in its long history, paused there. And now they had again.
Once on the evening marking the beginning of Yom Kippur, I found myself in a dim-lit, nearly deserted bar in a modest hotel at the edge of the Gobi Desert in the Chinese oasis town of Dunhuang.
It was a peculiar place to be on this holy day.
While not deeply religious, I was raised in a Jewish home where candles were lit each Friday night. At thirteen I was bar mitzvahed, and I attended Hebrew school through confirmation. My wife and I joined a temple when our children were young so that they might have some Jewish education. I’d even served on the temple board for several years.
But over time, my embrace of tradition—and, in particular, traditional notions of God—had turned tenuous. The very concept of “God,” perhaps so clear for some, had faded like a photograph left in the sun. Permeating even within Jewish tradition, from Moses to Isaiah to Maimonides, is the notion of the unknowability of God. That unknowability made me question what it was I was praying to. The core of Yom Kippur is praying to God for forgiveness, but I’d come to consider it a hollow gesture to seek forgiveness from a deity I’d found impenetrable at best, and simply a way to explain the unexplainable at worst.
Nevertheless, even with my agnosticism, Yom Kippur normally would have found me in services at some point. Indeed, if not for my work in cultural heritage conservation, which had prompted the trip to China, that’s where I’d have been. So spending this Jewish holy day so far from anything resembling a synagogue was disquieting. And to be spending it away from family, being here in Dunhuang, bordering the Gobi Desert, was plain strange. As a child, the furthest place on the planet I could imagine from my California home was the Gobi Desert. It was as exotic to me as the tales of the Arabian Nights and as distant to me as the moon. That I’d ever travel there never entered my imagination.
Completely unknown to me until my early forties was the town of Dunhuang. If the Gobi Desert was at least a place I could conjure up, no matter how inaccurately, Dunhuang wasn’t even on my mental map. But there I was. In Dunhuang. On Erev Yom Kippur.
For most of its recent history, Dunhuang was a dusty, forgotten frontier post in northwest China. But that belied its historical significance. Before drifting into obscurity around the fourteenth century (an obscurity that lasted until the twentieth century), Dunhuang had, for a millennium, been a place of consequence, first as a military garrison and then as an important and well populated settlement on the ancient Silk Road. It was the first stop for Silk Road travellers entering China from the west, and the last stop in China for travellers from the east.
It was also an entry point into China for one of India’s greatest exports—Buddhism. Seventeen kilometres from Dunhuang is the Mogao Grottoes, among the most important Buddhist sites in Asia. Beginning in the fourth century and for a thousand years in remarkable and repeated acts of veneration, hundreds of Buddhist cave temples were dug into the cliff face at Mogao, then elaborately decorated with wall paintings and sculpture depicting Buddha, his disciples, Buddhist tales, and the life that comes after life. Some caves are no bigger than a closet. The largest cave grotto is nearly the height of the cliff face and contains a nine-story high statue of Buddha. Today with nearly five hundred decorated cave temples remaining, Mogao—designated a World Heritage Site in 1987—is the largest collection of Buddhist art in China.
It is, in a word, astounding.
It was Mogao that brought me that evening to that mostly deserted, charmless Dunhuang hotel bar.
I was on my fifth trip to Dunhuang, each one the result of my work at the Getty Conservation Institute. For decades the Institute had partnered with the Dunhuang Academy, the entity responsible for overseeing Mogao, on a series of projects to conserve and maintain the site. This trip in 2013 was part of the preparation for a major exhibition on the grottoes to be held three years hence at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
Dunhuang and Mogao and the landscape that enveloped them had become rooted in my consciousness, along with my great respect for the Chinese professionals dedicated to preserving and protecting the grottoes. By now Mogao, nearly seven thousand miles from my home, was a place of familiarity. I’d come to regard it with strong attachment; everything from the intricate (if often inscrutable) paintings adorning the interior walls of the cave temples to the short and peaceful walk from the Academy to the grottoes, lined by slender poplars whose leaves danced in breezes blowing in from the desert.
As for Buddhism itself, I neither understood its complexities nor had seriously gravitated toward its spirituality (notwithstanding the fact that my mother, in her youth, had written a paper on Buddhism for her synagogue confirmation class!). But even in the face of my secularity, the cave temples carved into the cliff face exuded a holiness that went beyond their exquisite beauty. Standing in those cool, dark spaces surrounded by wall paintings dense with imagery that ranged from everyday life to the other worldly (and, always, the Buddha), the piety and devotion that went into their making was palpable.
Earlier that Erev Yom Kippur evening, before I wound up in the bar, work colleagues and I had attended an elaborate banquet at the fanciest hotel in Dunhuang. Later, after we’d returned to our own hotel, my Getty colleague David asked the group if anyone would go with him to purchase a pair of shoes he’d eyed at a shop in town. No one volunteered as we were all drained by the day, as well as by an evening of schmoozing with visiting dignitaries.
Seeing David’s forlorn look, I agreed to join him. I liked David, who wildly combined omnivorous and academic scholarship with the rough and tumble sensibility and curiosity of a Brooklyn street kid who grew up in a house where the Jewish belief most rigorously adhered to was, as he put it, “Never cross a picket line.”
In solidarity, I went off with David to the shoe store, situated along the large and noisy traffic circle at the centre of Dunhuang, close to a shop named “Classical Kaka” (it was unclear what they were selling). Passing on the “Kaka,” we went into the shoe store, David bought the shoes, paid less than he expected, and wore the shoes happily out the door.
Back at our hotel, David offered to buy me a drink, and so we walked into the newly installed bar, a gaudy, nouveau riche looking establishment empty of customers save for a single dour looking man at a table by himself. The young woman handling the bartending duties seemed to think it was her task to invite us behind the bar and to point out every bottle of alcoholic refreshment located there. Having communicated our order with some difficulty, we took a seat at one of the seven lurid booths and watched as the woman, with nervous hesitation, prepared our drinks.
And that is how I happened to celebrate Erev Yom Kippur by sipping whiskey with my colleague David, who was, I was certain, the only other Jew at that moment in Dunhuang—and probably the only other Jew within a thousand miles of the place.
But we were not, I knew, the only Jews in the long history of Dunhuang that had passed through here. Of that there was proof.
In 1900, by pure chance, a Taoist monk named Wang Yuanlu discovered a small Mogao cave whose entrance had been sealed up with mud plaster about a millennium earlier, hiding it for centuries. The Library Cave, as it came to be known, contained around fifty thousand objects, including paintings, textiles, and manuscripts on everything from religious to secular matters. It even included the earliest dated complete printed book, the Diamond Sutra.
We’ll probably never know who placed the objects there or why the cave had been sealed up. Most speculate that it was to protect these objects from a possible raid or invasion. What we do know is that the contents of the Library Cave constitute one of the greatest archaeological repositories ever found, offering us vivid testimony of the artistic richness of medieval China, as well as evidence of the variety of peoples and cultures that passed through Dunhuang. In the early twentieth century, several eager and enterprising explorers and scholars from around the world made their way to Mogao and obtained—some would say absconded with—thousands of its contents, which are now housed in cultural institutions well beyond China (that is another, albeit riveting, story).
What struck me personally when I first learned of it was that among the exceptional artifacts bequeathed to posterity by the Library Cave was a fragment of a Hebrew document. Dated anywhere from the seventh to ninth century, the fragment contains prayers from Psalms and Prophets, and is creased, which may mean it was folded and worn as an amulet. Its presence in the Library Cave, which included documents in a variety of languages, is evidence that among the multitude of travellers who trekked through this Chinese settlement over the course of a thousand years were Jews. That Jewish merchants travelled the Silk Road is a long-established fact, as is the historical existence of Jewish communities along the route in Central Asia. One perhaps could say that based on the biblical Exodus, crossing great deserts is embedded in the Jewish DNA.
When in my youth I travelled in Western Europe, I made a point of finding synagogues in cities I stopped in, not to pray but to see physical evidence of the Diaspora. Visiting sites from Italy to the Netherlands that evidenced the historic presence of Jews was simply confirmation of what was already known to me. But Jews in a place of powerful and ancient Buddhist veneration wedged between two great Asian deserts? Well, that was a revelation. I’d flown halfway around the globe to a distant land I’d only vaguely imagined in my childhood, and here, too, the Jewish people of whom I was a part had come.
Who were those Jews who travelled to Dunhuang with Hebrew prayers held close, and why had they left those prayers behind? What lands did they come from and how far did they travel? Where, in the end, did their journeys take them?
Journeying across time and continents is the history of Jews. It is the history of my Jews. My great-grandfather was a rabbi in Lithuania. My grandfather was a businessman in Pennsylvania. My father was a lawyer in California. For perhaps five centuries my ancestors had lived and died in a small corner of the Baltics—having come from somewhere else—and then, in the blink of history’s eye, none were left there.
Dunhuang means “blazing beacon,” a name that grows out of the site’s early function as a place where beacons were lit to warn the surrounding population of possible attack by approaching nomadic tribes.
But I see that designation altering in time. With the arrival of Buddhism, Dunhuang and Mogao became “blazing beacons” of faith, lighting the way toward a spiritual sanctuary. In that sense, there is a modest parallel with Judaism, for within the heart of every synagogue sanctuary is the Ner Tamid, an “Eternal Light” that remains lit above the ark of the Torah.
Is there a faith that doesn’t seek the light?
I ended up travelling to China’s “blazing beacon” six times over twenty-two years. It is the only place outside my country that I’ve visited so many times. In my own country that would be, arguably, Cleveland (and that is yet another, but less riveting, story).
My fifth trip to Dunhuang was my only Yom Kippur there. I’m grateful it happened. Mogao was a place for which I’d come to feel an ardent affinity, a measure not only of my familiarity with the site, but my recognition of how in the midst of a stark and severe landscape there can be great beauty and spiritual expression. And how, in the midst of materiality, there remains the necessity for reflection.
Therein, for me, lies the link to Yom Kippur. The creation of the grottoes with their many replications of the Buddha and depiction of tales of his wondrous deeds may not precisely represent an effort at atonement, but unquestionably they were a profound supplication for blessedness in a world that can be stark and severe. And if finding God on Yom Kippur remains elusive, that fact does not obliterate the opportunity it can offer to fulfill that necessity for reflection.
It would be grandiose to say that I found my own road to enlightenment on that Yom Kippur in Dunhuang. Hardly. The hotel bar in which David and I sat on that holy night was one of the dreariest rooms I’d ever found myself in. Dismal and depressing.
But the fact that the two of us were there was uplifting. It connected us to forebears who travelled many roads we could only faintly conjure. Jews had never settled in Dunhuang, but they had, in its long history, paused there. And now they had again.