Feuerstein’s lesson

By David Meghnagi*
It has been seven years since Reuven Feuerstein’s passing. Though, his voice has kept on resonating with those who could know and appreciate his scientific and cultural commitment and his open-mindedness. Born in 1921 from a rabbi family, the fifth of nine sons, Feuerstein grew up in a religious Zionist setting which did not disdain socialism. Age three he could read and write. Age eight he taught a fifteen years old pupil how to read prayers in Hebrew; the kid’s father feared that his son could not recite the Kaddish for him someday.
On the verge of the Nazi invasion, Feuerstein was in Bucarest, teaching in camps created by the Zionist movement in preparation for life in Israel. He then carried out his activity in Transylvania with children escaped from extermination. Imprisoned and then freed, Feuerstein reached Israel. There, “in that jumble of almost impossible experiences, of unprecedented efforts for survival but also of immense hope and enthusiasm”, as he often told me, he started his work with escaped children, then with Jewish children coming from Arab countries, from Morocco, Libya, Yemen. Lastly, with Ethiopian Jews arrived in Israel after terrible mishaps with the “Moses” operation. Important material that he proudly showed me and that should be revisited and studied.
During our conversations in Jerusalem, he used to tell me: “David, why don’t you represent me in Italy and Europe?”. To which I answered: “Because we are friends and I would like to be such forever”. He laughed fondly at my words, which implied both a distance and a profound closeness. His greatest wish was to include his method into our students’ educational programs. An insight on his thinking and on his method would have been interesting within a program dedicated to the great season inaugurated by Vigotskij: a Master’s degree. Yet at the time I was already heading two: the first was on Shoah’s teaching, the only one in Italy, and the other on eating disorders, realized in collaboration with Pediatric Hospital “Bambino Gesù”. It would have been impossible to head a third Master’s degree, also because of university rules.
So we chose together to include a discussion on his methodology within the framework of the two existing Masters. A fascinating challenge I would have liked to further explore with a research on educational programs implemented in Israel during the 1950s.
Among the many ideas we often discussed and sadly were never able to realize, there was a training project for 300 educators in African villages. Jokingly I once asked him why did he insist on the number 300. He looked at me with his childlike eyes: “I don’t know. There has to be a reason”. He smiled when I told him maybe he was inspired by the biblical story of the three hundred fighters chosen by Gideon to take on the Philistines.
Conversations went differently with his brother Shmuel, who passed away in 2018. Shmuel had dedicated an interesting study on the biblical and Talmudic sources of the educational theories developed by Reuven, from a philosophical and theological angle. A rabbi and a philosopher, Shmuel loved discussing the differences among the imperatives coming from the biblical thought and those coming from Socrates. You could spend hours talking to him and it was nice to see how much the two brothers respected and listened to each other.
The idea that a starting limit was unsolvable was a luxury that an Israeli society in the making could not, nor should, allow itself. In the 1950s there was not a person in the country who was not marked by tragedy. If he himself was not a survivor, then his relatives had died in the Lagers. Sometimes it was the entire home community to have been exterminated. Then there were those fallen in a bloody war of destruction set off by confinant states, that Israeli called “war of liberation” (milchemeth ha-shichrur) to feel optimist and perceive themselves as other people and nations. Lastly, there were masses of dispossessed, escaped from Arab countries’ pogroms, camping in shacks until half of the sixties’ because despite the huge efforts done the country could not give more.
“Us Israeli – a labour left-wing politician, committed to the hard attempt at dialog with the arab world, used to tell me with bitter irony in the seventies’ – are not allowed to be pessimist. It would be a lethal act for our own survival!”. I remember telling him that there was a similar thought in the Bible involving the Divinity, since twice during his wonderful work, on the third and on the sixth day of Creation, he felt the need to repeat it was good work, wishing that humankind, whom he had given the right to choose between life and death, would not destroy it.
Being secular, he was surprised that the Bible could be read as a text to search out. “It is what the Jewish tradition has been doing for millennia, lest it be saturated. Freud’s greatness, I added, was to transfer a technique born in Talmudic academia to explore psychic life. It is not by chance that in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ he stated to treat dreams as a sacred text.”
Without a good dose of optimism, acquired and consolidated in early relationships, it would be hard to bear the burden of existence. The fairytales parents tell their children every day before sleep also help cultivating a sane optimism to protect them from desperation.
Thinking traumas and starting limits are insurmountable limits, for a country made for over two thirds of immigrants whose world was shattered, could mean a final sentence. Believing in the possibility to change our own destiny, to invent a different future despite the past and the present’s wounds, being optimist, so to speak, was a necessity before it was a scientific truth.
The cognitive modification theory that Feuerstein adopted from Lev Vigotskij, one of the major education scholars of the twentieth century, found in Israel a particularly favorable context to be accepted and appreciated. Feuerstein first approached Piaget’s thought, detaching himself later, in the fifties, when he went to Switzerland to be cured from TBC he contracted working with children escaped from lagers. The essential of his approach, which made his contribution complementary to the construction of the great Genevan psychologist, was present since the beginning of his work as an educator and as a psychologist. His approach was the product of a great historic climate and of a resiliency cultivated through the centuries which put focus on the value of human existence.
During the years Feuerstein perfected his method, Moshe Feldenkrais, a Jewish engineer of Russian origins, starting from a completely different field, subatomic particles studies, and starting from practicing martial arts, reached not very dissimilar conclusions on the innate potentiality of the human brain to invent new learning paths. If a person suffering a physical or psychic trauma were to meet someone able to understand them and aptly support them, all hope was not lost. Feldenkrais’ work’s reference framework was different, but the lesson was the same: starting damages, and those suffered, must not constitute a final sentence.
Even in the most difficult situations you should not lose hope. You need to dream and imagine a better world for yourself and for others.

*Psychoanalyst
Translated by Silvia Bozzo and revised by Antonella Losavio, students at the Advanced
School for Interpreters and Translators of Trieste University, interns at the newspaper
office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.