Dr. Alexander Berzin: My Childhood and Education at Rutgers University

I was born December 10, 1944, in Paterson New Jersey to a working-class, secular Jewish family. As I learned when I later studied the Tibetan calendar, that was the date that year of Ganden Ngamchoe, the anniversary of Tsongkhapa’s passing away. 

My father, Isadore Berzin, came from an immigrant family that had come to America from what is now Latvia within Imperial Russia. When he was thirteen, he almost completely lost his hearing due to a serious illness. Unable to hear in class, he had to drop out of school. His father, a diabetic, was often too ill to work, and there were five younger brothers and sisters, plus three cousins, at home for his mother to care for. As the oldest child, he went out to work despite his handicap, taking responsibility and helping take care of the needs of all of them. His commitment to taking care of family, especially his mother when she grew old and his wife, my mother, continued throughout his life. Perhaps due to his example, I too was committed to caring for my mother’s needs – not in a material way, but by calling her every week while I was at university and then writing every week while I was in India.

As an adult, my father worked with one of his brothers in the scrap iron business, an early version of recycling. They each had a truck and would go to factories, pick up their scrap metal in heavy barrels and sell it to the scrap yard belonging to those cousins my father had helped provide for in his youth. The cousins were now far wealthier than he was, which must not have been easy. In high school, many of my friends’ fathers were doctors or lawyers. I was ashamed to tell them my father was a junkman, which was what his profession was called in those days. It was only later in life that I appreciated the hard work that he did and the difficult life he was forced to lead because of his handicap. When I was sixty-seven, I began weightlifting and, to my surprise, I discovered that I too was very strong, like he was. He would have been happy to see that I now had a muscular body like his.

My mother, Rose Berzin, also came from an immigrant family that had lived under Imperial Russia – in her case, from Poland. As her family also had very little money, she too had to forego a high school education. She went out to work at the age of fourteen. Her parents, two brothers and sister were all big fans of Yiddish culture, especially theater and music, and were socially and politically active. Although they were poor, they would invite newly arrived immigrants to their home for Friday night meals, and her brothers and sister would recite poems to entertain them. 

My mother was the exception to the family. She was the quiet and shy one. She did not share the interests or activities of her siblings and would never even think to compete with them. She was not emotive but, in her quiet way, was very kind, especially toward those less fortunate than she. Although she had no book learning, she had a tremendous amount of commonsense. As an adult, she worked as a bookkeeper in a small office. Both at work and at home, being very practical and efficient, she would immediately take care of whatever needed to be done, straightforwardly, without ever dawdling. She taught me to do the same. For example, I answer emails as soon as I get them and take care of tasks as soon as they arise. Like her, I too shy away from competing with others and try to avoid all conflict. Also, like her, I am not very emotive. 

I have a sister, Charlotte, seven years older than me. Growing up, we hardly ever played together, and she married when I was eleven, becoming Charlotte Goodnough. Having had two sons, Glen and Gary, by the time she was twenty-one, she later worked in a high school office. She is very social, outgoing and empathetic, can speak easily with anyone, feels her emotions strongly and is freely expressive of them – quite the opposite of me, especially as a child. Although very intelligent, she never went on to college; however, both her sons did. Glen went on to become a judge and Gary to become a university professor of counseling. I think of them as my younger brothers rather than as my nephews. Although I did not maintain much contact with my sister or nephews while I lived in India, I call each of them each week since I moved back to the West in 1998.

My parents also had another son, Joel, who died abruptly at the age of two before I was born. He apparently got a piece of food stuck in his throat. Coughing severely, he was brought to the hospital in a snowstorm in the middle of the night and choked to death before a doctor could come. No one in the family ever spoke about him. 

I was born one year later and looked just like Joel. As I grew up, I felt that I was conceived to replace him. My thinking was if he hadn’t died, I never would have been born, and so I was responsible for his death. Although I hardly ever thought about this as I grew up, this survivor’s guilt played a role later in my spiritual development. It gave me food for thought when trying to understand the Buddhist teachings on karma and rebirth. 

From early childhood, I have had bad asthma, and because of that, I was often hospitalized in my first few years. My earliest memory is being in a crib in the hospital and seeing, through the window, a parade pass by on the street below. I remember crying that I couldn’t go outside and see it, but no one responded to my cries. Even at home, my father couldn’t hear me cry when he had to be alone with me. He only got his first hearing aid after the neighbors told my mother about their frustration hearing me cry when she would go out. Not having had my need for emotional comfort met as a baby, however, taught me to become self-reliant and not to count on anyone to satisfy this need in a personal relationship. As painful as this was, it had the benefit of leading me to turn to the Dharma to fulfill this need. 

Reminded of my late brother, especially when I was wheezing with asthma, my mother was very protective of me, but I always resisted being babied and wanted to do everything on my own. This drive to be independent has been with me my entire life. I wanted no restrictions in realizing and using my full potentials. My mother was very kind and made sure that I had the freedom to grow. She read to me profusely when I was a toddler, and once I learned to read, she enrolled me in a children’s “Book of the Month” club. This was a program that sent me a children’s classic each month. Later, because of my interest, she enrolled me as well in a similar program for science fiction books. When I got a little older, she had my father buy me an illustrated encyclopedia, “The Books of Knowledge,” which I absolutely adored.

As a child, I never played sports and had no interest in watching sporting events or even in riding the tricycle my father bought me. I never even wanted to learn how to ride a bicycle or to drive a car, and so, in fact, I never did. My father tried taking me with him on his truck and bringing me to a baseball game, but I was completely bored. 

From a young age, my passion was to study and learn about everything. I loved school, I loved doing homework, I even loved taking exams. I was always self-motivated, highly disciplined, and naturally concentrated. I needed no encouragement or help from my parents. Throughout my entire education, everything came easily and quickly to me, and I always received very high grades in every academic subject. I was skipped ahead twice to the next higher class and so I was younger than most of my schoolmates. My nickname in grade school was “Professor.” 

All my aunts and uncles and all my parents’ cousins lived within a few miles of each other. They were all very kind people, and no one drank or smoked. Everyone was friendly with each other, and we visited quite often. Although I had lots of cousins, only a couple were my age. We played together when my parents visited, but I never particularly liked playing. 

I was not happy during these early years. I was a chubby, arrogant and, frankly, obnoxious child, who corrected the teachers and was too smart for his own good. I had hardly any friends and was occasionally bullied at school. Buddhist training entails both method and wisdom – the heart and the mind. I would not have much trouble in developing the mind. For me, much more difficult would be developing the heart. I would need a lot of work on improving my personality and social skills. 

Both my grandfathers passed away before I was born, but my two grandmothers were still alive during my childhood, and they spoke only Yiddish. Because of that, when I was eight, my parents sent me to Yiddish school to learn a bit of the language and culture. I was happy to go and developed a love of foreign languages and non-Roman scripts. In addition, two of my maternal cousins were in a teen drama group performing in English some of the works of the great Yiddish playwright, Shalom Aleichem. When I was old enough, I joined as well. Even as a young teenager, I was never nervous to speak in front of an audience.

To please my father, I also went to Hebrew school when I was eleven to prepare for my bar mitzvah. Although most boys began at an earlier age, my mother told the teacher, Rabbi Reuben Kaufman, not to worry that I was starting so late. She assured him that I would have no problem catching up, as I already knew the Hebrew script. He kindly accepted and let me attend, and so every day after school I walked to his temple for class. There, we read through a children’s book on the history of the Jews and the Jewish holidays. I would have liked to have learned about the Jewish religious beliefs, but Rabbi Kaufman never spoke about them. As for studying Hebrew, we merely read through Genesis, just memorizing the English equivalent of each word. In class, Rabbi Kaufman would call us up to his desk, one by one, and each of us would recite these equivalents for the day’s passage. Sadly, he never taught us the grammar, which I yearned to learn. I had to figure out as much as I could on my own. 

We were taught how to chant the rituals in Hebrew, but never the meaning. At my bar mitzvah, I led and chanted the entire morning service – not out of religious devotion, but primarily to show off what I was capable of doing. Rabbi Kaufman just sat to the side, filled with hope that I would follow in his footsteps. But having made my father proud of me, especially in the company of his wealthy cousins, I never went back. Although I enjoyed the chanting to a certain degree, I had found it unfulfilling. Without the meaning, it was empty ritual, and I sought something deeper. Later, when I encountered Tibetan Buddhist ritual, I initially had the same attitude. Fortunately, I had the maturity and patience not to reject it outright but to wait until I could learn its meaning.

Around the age of twelve, perhaps inspired by “The Books of Knowledge,” I developed the aspiration to acquire knowledge of the spiritual thought and literary achievements of all civilizations throughout their entire histories and to be able to put it all together and be aware of it all at once. With that lofty goal in mind, I started to read even more than before, focusing on the classics of Western literature. I read quickly, and when the books were not too long, I would devour one a day. My mother became a bit concerned. To get me away from my books, my parents sent me first to day camp and then to overnight camp each summer, where I had to be physically active and socially engaged with others my age. This was something I very much needed.

The high school I went to had so-called “alpha” classes for the more advanced students. I was in all of them, and there I met others who were also quick learners. By this time, I had developed a good sense of humor, and this made it easier to make friends with a few of them. I joined the drama club, performed in a few plays and even had a girlfriend, Sharon Gordon, in my senior year. But my main interest was in learning as much as I could. 

While in high school, I studied Latin and German, which I loved dearly. The belief at that time was that you needed Latin in order to go to college and German in order to study the sciences. Our German books were still printed in the old Gothic script. My love of non-Roman scripts was starting to grow. 

Although no one in my family shared my interests, from early teenage years I was naturally drawn to Asian culture. This was the beatnik era and, being interested in spiritual matters, I read what was available in those days – the books of Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki and, of course, Siddhartha and other works of Hermann Hesse. I was very intrigued and started doing simple hatha yoga with some friends when I was thirteen. 

Although there were no problems in our large extended family, I developed at this age an aversion to getting married, having a family, buying a house and a car, and having to work at some unfulfilling job all my life just to pay off a mortgage and loans. I saw leading a so-called “normal” life as a trap, as an obstacle preventing me from using my full potential. Perhaps I was influenced by Hesse’s books, especially Demian and Narcissus and Goldmund, but I have maintained this feeling all my life. 

My father had a debilitating stroke when I was fourteen, which rendered him half paralyzed and unable to speak or to recognize anyone. He basically cried and screamed most of the time. Although the doctors assured us that he was not aware of his situation, I was not convinced. I avoided thinking about it. After my mother tried to take care of him at home, which was a complete failure, he had to be institutionalized in a state facility for the incurably ill. He was too agitated and loud to be kept anywhere else. 

The first time I visited him there with my mother, a patient transporter wheeled a gurney with a corpse on it into the elevator we were in. When we exited the elevator and entered the ward where my father was kept, I encountered a room full of patients, most of whom, like my father, were crying and screaming. My father didn’t recognize me, and in response, I emotionally shut down. Seeing the traumatizing effect on me of encountering such suffering, my mother never brought me to visit him again. 

Since now my mother had to go out and work full-time, I had to grow up very quickly and take more responsibility for myself. Fortunately, the family of my best friend, Jonathan Landaw, took me under their wing, and I spent a lot of time at their home. Jon’s father, a kindly doctor, took special interest in me and engaged with me in lively intellectual discussions. As I never had that with my own father, even before he became sick, I loved spending time with him. He became my role model.

Soon, Jon and I became like brothers. I remember once, when we were working on a high school project together, I suddenly had the feeling that, somehow, we would play a role in something historically significant. Of course, I had no idea that both Jon and I would become Buddhist teachers when we grew up and that we would help to bring Tibetan Buddhism to the non-Tibetan world. 

The late 1950s was also the Sputnik era in America, and we were all encouraged in high school to study science. I was interested in how the Russians had gotten so far ahead of America, and so at age fifteen I decided to conduct some research on this topic at our local library. The result was a fifty-page paper I wrote on the education system in the USSR, which was far more intensive than what I was experiencing in the United States. Little did I know that, in the future, I would spend a lot of time in the USSR doing projects there for His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

After graduating from high school at sixteen, I went to Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to study chemistry, which I did for two years. Studying chemistry was great training for refining my analytical skills: I loved finding solutions to complex math, chemistry and physics problems. This love later got transferred to analyzing texts and doing analytical meditation on the complex topics in the Buddhist teachings. I was never attracted to concentration meditation. I felt I was concentrated enough, especially in my studies, and wanted to develop other skills.

Rutgers required every student to receive a well-rounded education. Science students were required to pass a Humanities exam and humanity students a science exam. I found this a wonderful policy, and so, in addition to my science courses, I took a few electives in the humanities, such as Art History. I appreciated very much the balance it gave to all my science courses. 

Rutgers was an all-male school at the time, but we could also take electives at Douglass College, Rutgers’ all-female sister college on the other side of town. Taking advantage of this during my second year, I took an elective called Tradition and Transition in Asia. One lecture was on how Buddhism spread throughout Asia and was adopted to each culture it met. Hearing this changed my life. I was only seventeen, but after learning about this, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to learn how the Buddhist masters brought and adapted the teachings to other cultures and to do that myself. I wanted to become a bridge between cultures, and I’ve never wavered from that aim throughout all my life. This fit in perfectly with my childhood aspiration to know and encompass the learning of all civilizations.

Professor Ardath Burks, one of the three professors who taught the Douglass course, told us of the Cooperative Undergraduate Program in Critical Languages that was being started the next year at Princeton University, down the road from Rutgers. Princeton had all the facilities for learning Middle Eastern and Asian languages, but hardly any students for studying in them. Having realized that I did not want to spend the rest of my life in a chemistry lab and, being excited by this golden opportunity to go to Princeton and pursue this path to become a bridge between cultures, I applied to study Chinese and was one of the six people accepted into the program. Like Rutgers, Princeton was also an all-male school at the time. One of these six who were chosen was a woman, who would become the first female student to study there.

My father died just about when I learned of this Princeton program. I had not gone to see him since that first traumatizing visit in the state institution. Since then, I had not wanted to even think about whether his crying and screaming had meant that he was aware of his situation. Even at his funeral, I felt very little. So, having learned that Buddhism spoke at length about the truth of suffering, I was ripe to go deeper and to learn more. The Princeton program was fully funded by the Carnegie Foundation and so there was no financial obstacle to joining. In fact, with my top grades and modest family background, I received full scholarships and generous fellowships throughout my university training, from B.A. to PhD. My education never cost me a penny and I finished with no student debt. Although student debt is very common nowadays in the USA and is usually very high, it was not so common in those days and was much lower.  

While I was at Rutgers, I had a girlfriend, Bernice Berzof. When I told her I would be going to Princeton, which was just a short bus ride from New Brunswick, she suggested we get engaged and, when we graduate in two years from then, we get married. Given my aversion to being tied down in a marriage, I ended the relationship when I moved away. Nevertheless, we kept in touch even after she married and became a successful tax lawyer in Philadelphia under her married name of Bernice Koplin.