So here it is very rare to find a Jaina. You can see it. You will not find many Indians here, because to them also I am close, and it hurts. But for the non-Indian it is not a problem. In the first place the Jew has no expectations of me, so there is no involvement. He is not expecting anything from me. He comes to me with an open heart, without any prejudice. He wants to understand me, he does not want to manipulate me. The Jaina wants to manipulate me, then there is difficulty. Because of the expectation…the frustration.

The Jews were waiting for the Messiah for thousands of years. They were hoping the Messiah would come and would fulfill all their desires. And the Messiah would come and would prove that they were the chosen people of God. “The Messiah will come, and that will bring a Jewish era in the world….”

And then comes Jesus…and all the hopes are destroyed forever. After Jesus, the possibility of the world turning into a Jewish world has become impossible. After Jesus, the chosen people are no more chosen. After Jesus, Christians have become the chosen people of God. The Jews were hoping that Jesus would give them more consolidation, and he started to uproot them. And he had to uproot – that is the only way to bring the future in. The past has to be destroyed, the old has to be destroyed to give birth to the new. The known has to be thrown – that is the only way to invite the unknown.

Naturally, Jews were very much offended. They were very much offended by Jesus. And then these two thousand years after Jesus…. Because of Jesus, Jews have been in misery for these two thousand years: Christians have been torturing them, killing them, murdering them. and all that the Christians have done in these two thousand years provokes again and again a great enmity towards Jesus.

So the first thing to be understood: it is very easy to accept a stranger. Jesus says two things again and again. One: Love your neighbor, and another: Love your enemy. And my feeling is that both are the same – the neighbor is the enemy. It is the most difficult thing in life to love your neighbor. It is very easy to love a stranger. You meet a certain man or a woman on the train. You don’t know anything about him, he does not know anything about you. And how open you become! Within minutes of being introduced, you are saying things to each other that you have not even said to your beloved. Nothing is involved – the next station will come and he will get down and disappear forever – you will never see him again. You can be open to him, you can be true with him. Have you not observed this? With strangers you start confessing things that you cannot dare confess to anybody you are related with, because then there is danger. No danger with a stranger….

So when a Jew comes across Buddha, it is very easy to understand, because there is no prejudice, no presupposition. Your being a Jew does not become a hindrance with Buddha. He is so far away, so unrelated. He was not against Moses, he was not against Abraham, he was not against David; he is not related to Jewish history at all – alien, a foreigner. You can accept him as a guest.