NEPAL

The beginning of Yom Ha’atzma’ut, Israel’s Independence Day, is celebrated every year with an impressive ceremony on Mount Herzl, which includes song, dance, and a military tattoo. The highlight of the ceremony is the lighting of twelve torches, representing the Twelve Tribes of Israel. One of the highest honors that the State of Israel bestows on citizens who have made an exceptional contribution to the country and its people, is to have them light one of the torches. This year, the year of the Corona, 2020, marks the 72nd year of Israel’s independence, and one of those honored to light a torch was to have been Chani Lifschitz, the Chabad Shlucha who has been in Kathmandu for the past 20 years along with her husband Chezki. They have been not only a home away from home for tens of thousands of Israeli backpackers and travelers, but also a place of refuge, rescue, a haven in times of crisis, and a helping hand when God forbid there’s been a death of a hiker somewhere in the Himalaya. It should have been a well-deserved honor indeed. 

I have had the wonderful pleasure of being hosted by the Lifschitz family on a number of occasions when I’ve been in Nepal with groups of travelers. And sharing a Shabbat meal with young people from all over the world is always a wonderful experience.  

The Himalaya mountain range was the first thing I saw when I flew into Nepal the first time. I could not believe the splendor. I had flown over the Swiss Alps before and they were indeed impressive, but nothing could have prepared me for this:

It was so beautiful that I immediately made the bracha of עושה מעשה בראשית as well as שהחיינו and then the tears streamed down my face. As I look back on highlight moments in my life which I’ve been blessed to experience, this is right up there near the very top. My heart is filled with joy and gratitude for this good fortune.

On each of my second, third and fourth tours to Nepal I took a flight from Kathmandu to Mount Everest. It’s about a 90 minute round-trip flight, and of that there’s approximately 20 minutes flying around Everest. During that time, everyone aboard is invited into the cockpit for an up close and personal view of the mega-mount. It’s something I definitely recommend. To see Mount Everest with my own eyes. Another שהחיינו moment.

אשא עיניי אל ההרים – In almost every place that I visited in Nepal, I was able to “lift my eyes to the mountains” and see those magnificent, glorious, majestic, lofty, beautiful mountains. I have mentioned often before that I am a mountain person. I live in the mountains. When I return from my travels, immediately upon leaving the airport, I yearn to see the mountains where I live. And my mountains aren’t particularly high, but nevertheless, I love seeing mountains. 

So here I was, being blessed with this vision of the ultimate mountain range on our planet. Since then, I have been fortunate enough to have visited the Andes, the Canadian Rockies, the Drakensberg among many other mountain ranges. I have lifted up my eyes to the mountains. And been uplifted by them. 

Arrival into Kathmandu’s international airport is a mixture of innocence and incompetence. Nepal receives around one million tourists per year. Most of those fly into Kathmandu. Yet their small, charming, brown brick airport terminal is not ready to receive such large numbers. The visa process is cumbersome. It requires completing paper visa application forms which can be completed only upon arrival, and then lining up with the required cash to pay for the visa, at the passport control counter. There are few counters, and the lines are long. The upside of this lengthy process is that by the time you get to the luggage belt, your luggage is already waiting there for you. While in other airports anywhere else this would definitely frustrate me, here it didn’t. The local immigration staff are gentle, smiling people. They seem to have all the time in the world. And all of a sudden this rubbed off on me. Very strange, but there it was. Placidity. I was calm. How odd.  

Driving out of the airport and into the city – the airport is remarkably close to the city, seriously close – was brief. As the bus drove out of the airport, we seemed to have hit downtown traffic immediately. Nepal immediately reminded me of India. But not. Same, same but different. The streets were tarred, but dusty. The buildings were all brown. It appeared somewhat poverty-stricken. But there were hundreds of cars. Small ones, but many, many cars. And buses and trucks. And more trucks. From that point of view, I was reminded of the Indian city of Pune, where I worked for 18 months in 1999-2000. There was the same bustle and honking that I had become used to in India, but here the architecture was different. Unusual. There appeared to be a lot of triangularity dominant in the architecture, something I had never seen before. The hotel where I stayed was the best hotel within a reasonable walking distance of Chabad, so that’s where I chose to stay. And seeing that I would be spending Shabbat in the city, I decided that the first thing I needed to do was to take that walk from the hotel to Chabad.

Chabad is located in the Thamel district of the city, which is the heart and soul of Kathmandu. It’s defined by its narrow streets, multifarious small stores selling all sorts of trinkets, clothes, touristy stuff, and a variety of foods and drinks. And throughout it all was this beautiful Buddhist music playing in the background. I have said this before: this music touches a very deep place inside me. Ohm Mah Nee Pahd Me Hum is a 6 word Buddhist Mantra which is said or sung over and over. I was once told that the entire tune is to be repeated 99 times, and judging by the time I spent in the Thamel, it was played far more than that. According to Tibetan culture, it is said that all the teachings of Buddha are contained in the mantra Ohm Mah Nee Pahd Me Hum, and that to know the phrase is to know enlightenment. Contained in this verse is the truth of the nature of suffering and how to remove its root cause. Interestingly, each of the 6 syllables has certain Sanskrit meanings that oppose certain internal forces that cause suffering.  

Om (ohm) - Om is the sound or “vibration” of the universe. This sound is the most important of all; but in the context of chanting and mantras, it is meant to destroy attachments to ego and establish generosity.

Ma (mah) - Removes the attachment to jealousy and establishes ethics.

Ni (nee) - Removes the attachment to desire and establishes patience.

Pad (pahd) - Removes the attachment to prejudice and establishes perseverance.

Me (meh) - Removes the attachment to possessiveness and establishes concentration.

Hum (hum) - Removes the attachment to hatred and establishes wisdom.

Here’s a link if you want to listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UOcXiBGGb8

 OK, enough of that. Once I had found my way to Chabad, I retraced my steps and hopped a ride to Durbar Square. There are three Durbar Squares in the Kathmandu Valley. One each in Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur. Durbar means Palace or Royal, and these were the squares outside the royal palaces in each of these three ancient kingdoms. They also form(ed) the center of the city and the primary location to which all visitors are drawn. While I did get to see all three, the one in Kathmandu was the one that interested me most, because nearby I also sought out the home of the Kumari Devi, Nepal’s living child goddess. For me this was a unique phenomenon. I thought the days of living gods were long gone by. But apparently not. The Kumari Devi is a young girl, chose by traditional methods from certain families, and found by the elders to be worthy of the title. She then moves into this opulent (in Nepali terms) building which becomes her home and which she never leaves, until she reaches puberty, at which time her divinity terminates and she becomes just another girl again. While she’s “in residence” both she and her family gain fame and fortune. The trouble is that she’ll find it difficult to find a husband later, because who wants to marry a former goddess? I found it interesting how the divine and the mundane were so intertwined.  

While in Durbar Square my group was suddenly surrounded by a noisy demonstration. A whole crown of a few hundred people were marching through the square, with drums and cymbals, and shouting slogans – or what I assumed were slogans – as they proceeded through the square. They made their way off to one side where a podium with a table had been set up, along with a lectern and Nepalese flags, a microphone, loudspeakers, and a chorus of cheerers. Seeing as all was written in Nepalese, we didn’t know what it was about, but a question to a local provided the answer: there’s an election coming, and this was a political rally. This particular rally was for the Maoist party, which was considered leftist. Which party was considered to be on the right? The communist party. Yep, go figure. Nepal had not had a stable government in many years, ever since the royal family had been slaughtered in a patricidal rage by one of the princes, who then committed suicide. Not that Nepal’s government had been stable before that, but this event had resulted in a severe power vacuum, and there really hadn’t been any political stability in Nepal for many years. 

One of the things we were told by our local guide, which was also repeated to us by numerous local folks, is that Nepal was never colonized. True, sort of. While Nepal had indeed never been colonized, it has been conquered by a whole slew of foreign countries, including both China and India. Of course, that’s not really a surprise, because Nepal lies nestled between these two giants, on the trade route, and was often a desired piece of real estate going all the way back into antiquity. The closest that Nepal came to be colonized was when it was defeated in battle by the British Raj. However, the Brits were so taken by the bravery of the Ghorka soldiers, that rather than colonize the country, they entered into agreements with it, and drafted Ghorka soldiers into the British forces. That has remained the case even until today. Ghorka soldiers serving under the British flag participated in the fighting in Iraq some years ago.

The following morning, we all rose really early in order to travel to the village of Nagarkot to witness sun rise over the Himalaya. The road up to Nagarkot is narrow and winding, and somehow, the bus made it to the top without sliding off the road and down the steep mountainside. I can’t say that I didn’t hold my breath every now and again and say many a short prayer on the way up. So, there we were, bundled up against the cold, looking east for the first ray of sunlight. And then, as it peeked and peaked, a collective “ah!” was heard from everyone in the group and I thought to myself, hello, isn’t this a little like the sun worshippers of yesteryear? I must say it was quite spectacular and just seeing it and having that experience… it really was so incredibly special. Afterwards we were invited to sit in the restaurant to warm up and also to enjoy our Shacharit minyan before this spectacular scenery, even though for that we had to face west. But no worries, there were plenty mountains to enjoy there too.

Stupa, Pagoda, Chedi. These are all names given in different countries, for the same thing: a place of worship, a holy site, that supposedly contains (though not always) a relic of a Buddha. My purpose in stopping in at Bodnath, adjacent to – or even part of – Kathmandu was to see its famous white Stupa. I never realized how large it would be. I have visited many Stupas in India, but while I knew about this one, it’s size was nevertheless quite surprising. There is a difference of opinion regarding the relic in the Stupa of Bodnath. Some say it’s a relic of the past Buddha, Kashyapa, while other maintain there is a bone here from the skeleton of the original Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama. I tend to lean toward the former opinion because the current Stupa is not the original that was built here around the year 600. This one was erected after the original was destroyed in the 14th century by the Mughal conquerors of the area. Either way it doesn’t really matter because it remains a holy site. I didn’t hear the usual music here, but there were many, many devotees circling the Stupa and passing their hands over the multitude of prayer wheels the surround the Stupa.   

Unlike the Stupa and Bodnath, at the Stupa at Swayambhunath the haunting melody of Om Mane Padme Hum is all over the place. The words of the mantra are also embossed on the many prayer wheels that surround the Stupa. The other thing that I found here and was not – fortunately – at Bodnath was… monkeys. So many monkeys! And they are sometimes aggressive, specially when they’re hungry. I was asked why something isn’t done by the authorities to rid the place of this troublesome bother. The answer lies in the fact that monkeys are actually considered holy and protected. This is due to the appearance of Hanuman, the Monkey god from the Ramayana, one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India. (By the way, the Ramayana has slightly different versions – and names - in both Thailand and Cambodia). The Stupa here , like its counterpart in Bodnath is also very large and very white. The view from here though, is much better. While the Bodnath Stupa is pretty much inside an urban area, the one in Swayambhunath is located high above the Kathmandu valley and there’s quite a steep climb of ramp and stairs to get to the top.

While we were here we came across another, very upsetting, phenomenon that is becoming increasingly troubling. Begging children. This is a huge problem and there are many NGOs that are active here in Kathmandu and the valley, that try to eradicate this terrible practice. The trouble is that children are taught by poverty stricken parents to go out and beg for money rather than go to school and get an education. It’s very hard to avoid the sad eyes and pleading, outstretched hands of these young, raggedy urchins. And it’s very easy to give away a few coins to get them to rush off to their next victim. But are we really doing them a favor? Even giving them food, and it’s usually the food we don’t want to eat, or leftovers, or worse yet – candy bars – is not being kind to them. I once had a gentleman on tour who brought with him packages of pencils, which he used to give out to begging children all over India and Nepal. Better, yes, but still… Now begging is not to be confused with giving alms, which is an age-old Hindu and Buddhist tradition, which is why monks, who walk about in the mornings with their alms bowls in their hands, will never go hungry. Begging is not akin to giving alms. And giving these kids a handout is not doing them a kindness. Like I said, there are plenty NGOs who do wonderful work with the poor, and it’s far better to give any charity moneys to them.

Sadhus – holy men – who seem to have taken vows of poverty because some of them barely even have the clothes on their backs, are to be found at many sites of interest in the Kathmandu valley. They are easily visible because of the white powder with which they cover their bodies, the long bedraggled, uncut dreadlock-looking hair, their garish yellow, crimson, or vermillion colored garments. Some of the sadhus sit there in order to earn a few bucks from allowing you to capture their image, so whoever wants to snap a picture of them should only do so after receiving permission and making the required payment. And they were sitting, many of them, alongside the Bagmati River, Nepal’s sacred river, in Pashupatinath, opposite the Hindu temple. Non-Hindus aren’t allowed in, so I was limited to viewing the place from the outside, where I sat among these holy folk. The Temple on the Bagmati stands close to the prime cremation site in Nepal, on the banks of the river. I had seen this practice before in Varanasi in India, where families bring the shroud wrapped body of their relative to the riverbank, dip it in the river, and then they prepare the funeral pyre, lay the body on it, and set it aflame. There was some wailing and mourning sounds, but not too much. I guess its because in their faith, death is part of the process of transition from one form of life to another, while by us it’s considered the end of life. Which is why our mourning customs are so much longer than theirs. What was very interesting to me is that once the fire was set, those who had come just sat around and it seemed a very mundane process from then on. Of course, it takes a long time, because the shrouded body has just been dipped in the river, and it takes quite some time for the fire to consume what it needs to consume. The pyre is not as hot and a mechanical crematorium, so it obviously takes longer. Pashupatinath is located very close to Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport, so this was my last stop before heading to the airport for my flight out of Nepal.