The Beit Esther youth center, created under the name Beit Ham in 1990 in Jerusalem, is set up in the very center of the city. It takes in young people aged 13 to 18, in difficulty, adrift. Some call them “young people in danger,” “youth at risk,” without our always being quite able to identify for whom the risk and the danger lie: for the young person or for the surrounding society?
How does one give a place in this house, then by extension in his neighborhood and finally in society, to a young person who feels “excluded,” “rejected,” “abandoned,” “undesirable,” “bothersome,” “superfluous,” so that he may feel recognized, appreciated, valued? How does one help him to restore a positive image of himself, a feeling of confidence in his own word, in himself, and in others?
How does one combat the images—weighty, suffocating, wounding—that gnaw at him: those of the “delinquent, addict, violent thug, layabout, good-for-nothing, crook…”?
How does one offer him a place of unconditional welcome, a benevolent listening ear, satisfying rules of life, a warm empathy, a team that advises and supports him in these difficult moments and the social dead ends he is confronted with?
Since 1981, the association Beit Ham has worked in Jerusalem on these questions relating to adolescents in difficulty.
Each adolescent subject is welcomed with his singular history
The history of the subject “transcends” the history of the group, of the nation, of the ethnicity.
It constitutes a beyond of identifications, allowing one to be reunited with oneself and one’s singular life-narrative. At Beit Ham, the young person’s identity is the object of particular attention, provided that it presents itself not as an “alienation” but as a richness. Identity open to the encounter with the other is a precious tree that we must cultivate in the garden of the encounters of the adolescent being.
In their place of welcome, the identity singularity of each subject cannot be built by excluding the other, since the golden rule stipulates that it is forbidden to exclude.
A double pendulum-like movement structures the adolescents’ mode of encounter in the house: defending, supporting, developing one’s singularity, and opening oneself onto the group, within a space of mutual respect and a sustained quest for reciprocity.
What bearing does the house have on the unfolding of their existence, on the construction of their singular identity?
We have chosen the trajectory of one young person to question ourselves together about the welcoming of the cultural and social dimension of the young person in a house where it is forbidden to exclude. This place aims, during this difficult period of their adolescence, to offer them a space of construction, where they can re-member their history, invent an attractive present, think a workable future.
In this account, that of Moussa, all the events and facts that concern him have been displaced or transposed so that the young person keeps his anonymity and cannot be identified.
Moussa-Johny, between two or three names, Jewish and Arab
Moussa, 18, wants to change his first name; he can no longer bear it. He would like to be called Johny, like the French singer he is fond of. He listens to him often and knows practically all his songs by heart. He wants to call the little band formed within the framework of the Beit Ham music school The Johny’s Brothers. This band is composed of two Israelis and two Palestinians, all natives of Jerusalem. Moussa is the youngest of the group. Dana, his sister, often comes to sing with them. Her voice is very beautiful, warm and rousing.
The band is progressing, but what name to give it? It is not always easy to find a name that represents you when you are an adolescent. They seek both not to renounce their cultural identity and to forge a transitive name. A name that passes between the two cultures, Jewish and Palestinian.
This choice of name was finally made with a great deal of humor.
One evening at the music club, the discussion grows very heated. Despite the respect and affection that emanate from their encounter, the choice of name reveals a stake difficult to manage. One of the members of the group proposes “Abou Babou,” a name with a pleasing sound, of Arab origin. However, a drawback arises at the moment of justifying it. The guitarist, Ibrahim, precisely wants the band’s name to have an Arab ring to it: “We take risks in our society at war when we play together. The name has to protect us. It’s important that it not identify us as Hebrews.” And he goes on: “Some accept and support us, others criticize us violently. And besides, Abou Babou is amusing, it’s easy to remember.” For his part, Oury, the Israeli drummer, does not like the idea of a name with more Arab than Hebrew resonances; one must therefore find a name that is at once amusing and neutral.
The name must represent an “equals sign” between the two peoples. The transitive function of the band’s name has the mission of ensuring a balance of the cultural representations of the two populations. The name is like the tightrope walker’s balancing pole; it maintains balance so as not to fall, neither on one side into the rejection of Palestinian society nor on the other into that of Israeli society. A footbridge must be put in place, a name found for the ferryman between the two shores. The band as a group must produce a Name that allows the erasure of the memory of the dominant-dominated relationship in order to promote that of equality between subjects. Does their music not come to bear witness to its capacity, as mediator, to transcend religious, ethnic (?), national, egotistical borders?
The discussion takes a bad turn. Ibrahim invokes an argument that sets “fire” to the group. The tightrope walker and his balancing pole are suddenly drawn, between them, toward the chasm and the furnace that rises from it. The ground of their encounter cracks.
Ibrahim maintains that it is better to choose a name with an Arab ring because Muslims are more numerous in the world. If tomorrow the band puts out records, the audience will be larger and the musicians quickly recognized. And he adds that a Hebrew name—he is sorry, but today it goes over badly in the world; better to avoid it. As no one has suggested a Hebrew name, his argument seems all the more out of place. Ibrahim dislodges the group from the space of “sufficient neutrality” where the musicians had been able to take their place. What is happening to him? The tone rises in the group and the discussion takes an unbearable turn. Speech loses its noble function of regulation, of pacification, of transition. The educator who follows the group then lets out a: “Enough of this Souk [chaos / Arab market]. Stop it, we can’t hear ourselves anymore.” This cutting voice, which the young people do not recognize in him, produces an effect: seeming to come from elsewhere, it takes them by surprise.
The “Souk” is taken up in chorus by the young musicians: “There’s a name for the band. The souk, it’s an Arabic word, but used by Israelis and Palestinians, and then by everyone. Even in the United States and in Europe, they know what it means, a souk.” Oury likes this idea, and so do the other musicians. The souk is also the marketplace where all exchanges take place.
The educator is satisfied. This signifier, the “Souk,” he had not prepared with a view to generating a ferrying word. His concern was to repair the imbalance between them, not to invent a clearing. But in the educator’s profession, sometimes, the unconscious makes unexpected gifts; it hears things that we ourselves do not know how to spot. The educator’s voice comes from Elsewhere, not only because its tone is unusual, but because it delivers a signifier with a transitive function that has the power to restore a certain balance. It allows the tightrope walker to continue his course along his wire. The balancing pole functions once again.
This experience surely made a great impression on Moussa. “He too suffered from his name.” Today, he came back with a request to change his first name. I knew his Muslim father and his Jewish mother well. The couple had suffered greatly from rejection by both their families.
For a long time they kept their relationship secret. When she discovers that she is pregnant, the mother confesses to her family the name of the child’s father. Her father flies into a terrible rage and beats her violently. She is hospitalized and her father arrested. The couple, feeling threatened, decide to go into exile in a place where no one knows them. The mother names her son Moshe, the Hebrew equivalent of the Arabic name Moussa. At the Israeli school, the son chooses to be called Moshe. This, he thinks, will cause less trouble than his Arabic first name. He invites no one home so as not to create awkwardness. He has never met either of his two families of origin. His parents have decided to keep to themselves in seclusion in order to feel protected.
Around the age of 13, when I meet him at the club, Moussa wishes to go and see his grandparents on both sides; he wants to present himself before them and say to them: “I exist, my name is Moussa-Moshe, I am Jewish because my mother is Jewish and Muslim because my father is Muslim.” He dreams of this scene.
The price of this disclosure is very heavy. His two parents invented a story for their family. They maintained that, no longer able to live in Israel, nor in Palestine, rejected on both sides, they were leaving the Near East for an unknown destination, perhaps France or the United States. Since then, they have never given any news. They cut themselves off entirely from their families. In fact, the mother, secretly, has had sporadic meetings with her little sister and from time to time gives her news. Moussa, indiscreetly rummaging through the papers his mother hides under her bed, discovers the address of his maternal grandparents in Israel. He posts himself next to their house, without being seen, and follows, for days and days, their every movement. One day, he takes three steps toward them, then flees. He grows weary and does not go back.
Moussa wants to change his first name. Neither Moussa nor Moshe. A first name come from Elsewhere, from another, pacified land, where he could find rest beyond the rift that runs through him and makes his life painful. From his parents, Moussa has retained the names of two countries, France and the United States, which promise security and appeasement. Two countries in which his parents thought to find refuge if their life in the Near East became unbearable. Moussa invests a brand-new “Name.” Johny comes from “his imaginary lands,” where, for him, dignity, recognition, and freedom reside. Johny presents one advantage: it is an American first name borne by a French singer: Johnny Hallyday.
Moussa witnessed the creation of the name of the band Souk. He perceived the relief of the musicians, brought about by leaning on a signifier that knows how to preserve the balance and the respect of each one. He too seeks for himself a name of passage, a tightrope walker’s name. The first name Johny seems to him to fulfill this mission. It could be a good “passe-partout” charged with bringing down the borders, those factors of human destructiveness, and dissolving the underlying hatred. A name come from the in-between spaces, from the kingdom of mediations, from the peaceful shore where the furious battles, the humiliations, and the fear cease.
For several years, the band Souk performed in the Middle East and made many trips to France and the United States. At each of its concerts, the band brought together an audience composed of Jews as well as Arabs, and of all those who loved their music.
The powerful intercultural equation installed within Moussa/Moshe, the mode of resolution worked out to allow within him cohabitation, often helped the band to build its space of living-together and to spread it among the public.
A crossroads of identities
Moussa’s story illustrates the complexity of transmission between generations that the people of this country may encounter. The parents of Moussa’s mother come from Iraq; her father and mother speak Arabic perfectly. At home, Arabic is the language spoken, and Moussa’s grandmother expresses herself with difficulty in Hebrew. They came to settle in Israel two years after the creation of the State of Israel, having left Iraq in haste, following threats in their village against the Jews. They left behind all their personal belongings.
In 1950 they found a country at war between the Jewish world and the Arab world.
Like all the new immigrants, they received from the State substantial aid to settle in the country.
The public housing that had been allotted to them was located facing Jordan, which they could contemplate every morning from their window. A more bitter version held that their house faced the Jordanian cannons.
The State of Israel needed at the time to populate its new border in Jerusalem in order to strengthen and secure it. In that period, this situation was common.
The new immigrants from the countries of the East—from Russia, Poland, Romania, Germany—in building the country had themselves too often set up their houses in the Negev desert, following the example of their leader Ben Gurion, or along the lines of a future border.
Moussa’s parents came from an Arab village located on the outskirts of Jerusalem. In 1948, at the declaration of the independence of the State of Israel, the armies of the new State’s neighboring Arab countries went to war against it until 1949, the date of the armistice that was to divide this country between Jordan and Israel.
Many Arab families then left Israel, frightened, alarmed by the situation of the conflict that had just broken out. The propaganda coming from the Arab countries invited them to join the neighboring countries in order to reinforce the armies of “reconquest.” The intimidation coming from certain groups in Israel aimed to push them out beyond the borders, to exile them.
Moussa’s grandparents on his father’s side lived in Jordan, where they had come to take refuge in order to flee what would take in Arabic the name Naqba, “the catastrophe.” Moussa’s father was entrusted to a maternal uncle who, for his part, had stayed within the borders of Israel. He had attended school, learned Hebrew, and adopted Israeli nationality.
As an adolescent, he had suffered greatly from the difficulty of going to Jordan to visit his parents. Moussa’s father had developed a more liberal vision of social relations, which he had forged in his encounter with Israeli society. The relationship with his very religious uncle had become difficult.
He no longer really knew which way to turn. He had long hesitated to go to Jordan to join his parents without ever really deciding. He had successfully completed studies that allowed him to earn a good living in Israel.
For some, Jordan meant a daily threat; for others, a permanent refuge. Yet three things in common ran through these two families.
A shared lived experience in the new State of Israel, Arab culture, and the sensation of being in exile.
A fourth point concerned Moussa’s parents more particularly. They were both in revolt against the overly narrow religious frameworks and the murderous nationalist expressions. They had militated together in a party that advocated more freedom, justice, and dignity for the peoples of the region, under the banner of the slogan: two peoples, two States. From this they had conceived a great complicity, a friendship that turned into a love relationship.
Moussa’s parents seem to have built their couple upon this profound bond. When their mutual love was discovered by their two families, a new thing in common was to bring them together. They were both threatened with death.
Moussa’s parents—Jewish mother and Arab father—constituted one of those complex configurations that can arise on this feverish soil. Moussa came into the world in this boiling cauldron.
At first, he had chosen to perform in an Oriental folk-dance group, then he turned toward music. Later, he met other friends who together formed Jewish-Arab bands. The youth music center of Beit Ham in Jerusalem enabled him to run such a group.
Moussa now had to be able to confront his question of identity by trying to lean on the team that welcomed him.
He approached it by raising the double question of his own name and that of the band constituted by their gathering.
In the band, Moussa/Moshe took the nickname Johny.
During a concert on the square in front of the Jerusalem City Hall, he is paralyzed. He recognizes in the audience his maternal grandfather, so often observed. He is surrounded by many people whom he supposes to be part of his family. At the end of the performance he approaches them; he trembles inwardly. A young woman asks him: “Are you Johny?” From her questioning tone, which he interprets as suspicious, he thinks for a moment that he has been unmasked and then answers in a monotone: “Yes, I’m Johny, and my mother lives in the United States.” Yet no one had asked him anything about his mother.
In the story of Moussa/Moshe/Johny we have encountered the tribulations, the rifts, the dead ends in which all these names are caught within the social and political fabric. Moussa, before his maternal grandfather, presents himself as American.
The band is nevertheless called Souk, and all the other musicians are Arabs or Jews. This bothers no one. His protectress is indeed supposed to live in the United States; his account can withstand an incoherence. Johny/United States resonate together. The name refers back to the place. It indicates an origin. The force of the name prevails over the plausible.
It is precisely this profound associative bond among the name, the place, and the origin that characterizes the capacity of the name to form a unity on which the subject can lean. The name is in connection with origin; it positions the subject in time. The name is in connection with place; it positions the subject in space. The name is a space/time complex delivered in its relation with the other. It is the kingdom of correspondences, intrapsychic and intersubjective.
Epilogue. The name and the place.
To think the history of adolescents in Israel within a multicultural society, caught up in a conflict installed since the creation of this State, surely requires a formulation of the management of this plurality.
The space of identity is composed of several dimensions with which each adolescent under construction must manage his existential “bric-a-brac.”
Palestinian Israelis, Arab Christians, Black Jews, Messianic Christians, Jews for Jesus, Israelis from the Arab countries, mixed Muslim-Jewish couples, anti-Israeli Orthodox religious Jews… a palette of multiform identities arises from these places of encounter where seven million Israelis forge the desire to live and to inscribe themselves socially.
On all sides emerge tendencies to want to radicalize one’s identity, to produce it as an “entity of the extreme,” at the risk of fanaticizing it, of finding oneself tipping into a narrow nationalism, a religious sectarianism, an unbridled hedonism, or else a cynical nihilism. The adolescent, builder of his social ideal, in quest of new identifications, often wanders among all these ice floes.
In particular, the adolescents who frequent the street, those whom we welcome in our youth centers, are sensitive to all these currents, these contortions, and these ruptures. Our approach with them consists in being able to offer them places of encounter with adults, educators, capable of receiving their questioning about life and about living-together, of helping them to work on their Israeli or Palestinian identity, or that of the man without borders and the citizen of the world.
We never take sides for any of them. In the midst of this souk and this bric-a-brac, we navigate with a single approach, the one we have inherited from the teaching of Freud and Lacan, of Foucault and Goffman, of Tosquelles and Oury, of Mannoni and Dolto.
We had lived through the time of a fertile crossing between democratic and secular institutions and the development of psychoanalysis, toward the social, beyond the couch.
The adolescents find in our clubs the home they would have wanted to have. A home that welcomes them as they are, in the expression of their identity-related, social, psychic suffering. They will be able to be heard and supported by a team that will give them the time to seek and to find themselves. From then on they will be able to confront others in the reconstruction of the bond that had been broken and to build their lives.
Immigrants from France, we brought in our professional baggage to Jerusalem in 1980 the attitudes of mutual respect, of listening to the other, of the emergence of the subject, and of confidence in the becoming of the social bond. These contribute, for us, every day, in our places of welcome, to helping the young people forge a name of their own in the city, a consolidated name, one that they feel sufficiently at ease to bear among others and sufficiently at peace to transmit, tomorrow, to their children.