On the road: wandering jews, travellers, researchers

La comunicazione fatta dalla Dr.ssa Maria Silvera al Convegno IMA tenutosi a Tel Aviv in aprile 2009

I shall premise that my profession enables me to say that thoughts, emotions and behaviours have the same dignity even if, generally, we are more appreciated as thinkers than feelers. As well, cultural back ground is essential for the construction of thought. In Deuteronomy it’s written: my father was a wandering Arameus…he was stranger in Egypt…he became a slave.
We, Jews, didn’ t occupy a space, we inhabited the time and the book was our handy frame. There is a place from which we came and a place to which we go, where we are going to build something new on the foundations that we have in our mind, we cope with a ‘here and now’, on the basis of ‘there and then’. Our tools must be in mind, flexible, already known and used, but adaptable to a new experience.
In Genesis, Lech Lechà, our old travel book, God makes the Brit with Abraham and gives him a future sending him away from the land of his father.
I notice that when we meet, as now, quite a few of us leave their mother tongue for an interesting and pleasant exchange of inter-cultural issues.
The question of belonging is connected to a space-time distance. The need of belonging evokes the feeling of loosing something, the need of containment, the wish to discover something else and all the consequences of a problem of borders and conflicts, for example conflicts between generations.
What does it mean to cross the border?
Flexible personal and geographical boundaries are dangerous or helpful in this job?
Generally, nowadays, our environment is multicultural, so it is essential to bridge cultural diversities. The problem could be how to put together different belongings.
We, Jews, have experience of that.
A clear cultural reference helps in going far and integrating in a new situation, in the same time. This is a push to remember the experience of migration, of diversity, of change.
I invite you to confront the position of the traveller, who leaves a known land for a new one, with the position of a researcher who moves towards a new field. In both cases the anxiety in researching something new takes to discover creative solutions.
Aren’t the experience of “travelling”, the feeling of being citizens of at least two countries, the knowledge, even if not deep, of at least two languages, a good source for the human adventure of meeting others (two different cultural spaces)?
As we say in Pesach, we walk with a glance turned to the past and another one towards the future (two different times).

We may imagine that the area of an individual mind is a transitional area that connects the individual to the world.
Malcom Pines, a famous group psychoanalyst, said “Each person can look in his own mind, observe and analyse his own past and present mental states, and on this basis make inspired guesses about the minds of others.”
Beside that, we know the importance of transgenerational transmission in building identity, individual identity and group identity, and in promoting scientific plans.
So, looking at past and future, forwards and backwards, near and far, we increase our ability in taking care of others as well as in discovering our limits and capacities.
This concept of travel through different areas, driving us to the experience of migration, pain and weaning, gives me the chance to remember what Tobie Nathan wrote about his experience.
Tobie Nathan, jew, born in Egypt, is very well known among the colleagues involved in Ethnopsychiatry. He remembers a feeling deeply grafted in him and not easily explainable, it happened when he was 8 years old, when his family emigrated for the first time.
[ Translation is mine]
“All of a sudden the water in which fishes were swimming changed as for temperature, salt, acidity and the air became heavier, thicker. The external world changed: the language, the rules of the games, but also something else, much more difficult to understand. The fear, that kind of fear that children are able to perceive in the eyes of adults. Just much later on, I could understand that when there is a break in the continuity of the time, this break often provokes a second one afterwards. In fact to overcome a shock it is necessary to transform that break in a structure.
Then, when I was 9 years, I migrated a second time and again it was necessary to adapt to a new metamorphosis. ……..
Clinic experience taught me that when the external world appears unstable and is wavering, the individual is obliged to make evident and exterior the internal structure, in order to protect his identity….. That is why I became so beware of the research of internal meanings…..”
This is a good representation of travel as a tension towards knowledge, as a discovery of ownself, as a meeting with the Other. Nomads inside.
In fact, through the interaction with another culture than yours you become more aware of your self. That’ s what we call mirroring, as it happens when you see your image in a mirror. On another level, you have an important function in the society.
To conclude I call yor attention to the role of jewish physicians as cultural mediators.
Let’ s look at the social part they played during Middle Ages, Renaissance, in Ferrara, Padova, Roma… where the culture of the non jewish society was limited by several difficulties. One of them, language, could be solved by rabbis – physicians who were able to translate medical texts from arabic giving a better chance not only to the treatments of the whole society, but also to the possibility of rising to higher dignity of the jewish comunity, in a hierarchic society where power and knowledge were coincident.

In that way we arrive to here and now, problems of bioethics, subjects regarding beginning and end of life, subjects on which Italians are discussing a lot recently. Jewish physicians have a special position in the national debate in order to contribute to it thanks to their old/modern theories. But this is another story…
Thank you.

Maria Silvera
Psychologist, psychotherapist
Hospital Psychiatric Department
Associazione Medica Ebraica Italia
Milano