| United Against a Common Enemy? |
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| Written by Dara Klein | |||||
| Wednesday, 09 November 2005 | |||||
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Identity Maintenance of Tibetans and Jews On an unusually sunny day of a rainy week, Tibetan monks wearing red robes wove between westerners in the streets of Dharamsala, India. It didn’t look like a pattern, or anything special, but it sounds mystical in writing. Tibet sounds mystical too. It is not. Tibet is a real place with real people and problems. You should look it up if you don’t know where it is. Tibetan exile is no Candy Land either. Dharamsala, India (the heart of the Tibetan government in exile) is a destination for thousands of refugees who traverse the Himalayan mountain range to escape educational restraints, religious persecutions and cultural suppression. Today, Tibetans are dealing with issues of regaining their homeland and maintaining their identities. In an attempt to understand this, I looked into issues of identity maintenance from a Buddhist perspective during my two month stay in Dharamsala. I discussed Buddhist philosophy with many learned Buddhism scholars, most of them monks who had earned Geshe degrees (the equivalent of a doctorate in Buddhism). Amid animated laughter and discussion on Buddhism, one particular Geshe would make it unexpectedly clear to me that Tibetans have problems that mirror those Jews face in the Diaspora. The question asked by both cultures is how do we keep a diasporic people together? How do we remain Jewish and maintain this idea of Jewish-ness, even outside our Jewish communities? How do Tibetans remain Tibetan, even without a homeland? I asked the Geshe if according to Buddhism it is ever beneficial for a people to unite against a common enemy; perhaps for the Tibetans, uniting against the Chinese who invaded their homeland would be appropriate. He responded by telling me that some years ago he and a number of other Tibetans were invited to a dinner where people “spoke of the problem of how they made us slaves.” He explained that these people ate flat bread they called the “bread of affliction” and talked as they ate about how they eat to remember. I nodded, thinking of my own Passover Seders, my own Maxwell House haggadahs, and the repetition of that phrase, “bread of affliction.” I had never really thought about its meaning, the way the word affliction places an implied blame on the Egyptians. I interrupted him. “Was it a Seder you went to?” “Yes, yes it was.” He told me that after the Seder Tibetans asked him why these Jewish people were doing this. He did not have answers. He did not know why. He felt it was not good practice for any group trying to cultivate identity to focus on their anger toward an enemy. From a Buddhist perspective, acts of remembering negative emotions perpetuate hatred and are not beneficial to anyone. This does not mean that people should forget negative encounters or histories, but merely that people should not dwell on these. Thus, repeatedly remembering hatred as a way of preserving Jewish identity promotes a sort of negative identity. I was struck by his words, but instead of asserting my Judaism defensively, I decided to take advantage of his candor and take his perspective on Passover to heart. Was he right? Does the act of remembering the suffering imposed on us strengthen our anger more than our solidarity? What does it mean if we are united under anger, under the rehashing of Egyptian afflictions? Is our aversion to others is integral to Jewish preservation? Is this very negativity what Tibetans are lacking in their own cultural preservation? These are questions to be seriously contemplated on an individual and community level. It’s time we realized this crucial role that Passover plays in our Jewish consciousness: year after year at the Seder table, we recreate again and again the potential benefit or harm of collective remembrance.
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