Rabbi Daniel Siegel – Head of Jewish Life

Travels and travails

This week’s parashah is fittingly called Mas’ei, Journeys/Travels, as it concludes the book of BeMidbar, reviewing the wanderings of the Israelites in the Wilderness.

I recently returned from Ladakh (in Northern India) whose population is largely comprised of Tibetan refugees who fled their homeland in the 1950s, following the Chinese occupation. I made my way to this difficult to access yet beautiful and intriguing land to experience and gain a better understanding of Tibetan culture.

Prior to visiting Ladakh, I had been in Tibet which, on contemporary maps, often appears as part of China, reflecting Chinese control of the Tibetan homeland since 1959. In Tibet, it is a criminal offence to own a Tibetan flag and Tibetans are required to fly Chinese flags on their houses and residences. Visiting Tibet and then Ladakh, one could understand the Tibetan sentiment that they are in ‘exile’ at home and at ‘home’ in exile.

I visited several refugee communities in Ladakh, the largest, Choglamsar, on the outskirts of Leh, as well as several communities in the Pangong Lake region, which Nomadic families call home.

A 73 year old man who fled Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, as a child, without his parents who were killed by the occupying Chinese forces, proudly brought me to his ‘free settlement’ over which he flew his large Tibetan flag and indicated, in pointing to the mountains through which he made his way to freedom, that one day his people, if not he himself, will once again fly their flag over their homeland.

In Choglamasar, which was given the name Sonamling Tibetan Settlement by the Dali Lama, who fled to India with 80,000 of his countrymen in 1959, and, with them, still remains in exile, I met a Tibetan refugee who together with his son were the only surviving members of his large family who made the journey to freedom in the mass exodus of his people. I spoke with the grandfather and grandson who worry for the future of their people and if they are living in the age of the last Dali Lama.

In his book The Jew in the Lotus (echoing the Tibetan mantra “Om mani padme hum”- Praise the Jewel in the Lotus), Roger Kamanetz describes Dali Lama’s historic meeting with a group of Rabbis and his great desire to understand how our people survived and thrived in exile and how his people might be blessed with the same good fortune.

Mas’ei records the travels and the travails of the Israelites at the same time as it points to the promised land the people will soon enter. I wonder if the Tibetans likewise will experience the triumph of hope upon the heels of more than half a century of travel and travail. I hope the words of the Dali Lama night prove prescient: “It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown”.