Psychiatric Times Magazine Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD, FCAHS H. Steven Moffic, MD November 20, 2023 https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/the-gaza-israel-war-a-major-poetic-emergency The Gaza-Israel War: “A Major Poetic Emergency” A Poetic Conversation Among a Palestinian Israeli Psychologist, an Italian Canadian Psychiatrist, and a Canadian United Church Pastor in a Time of War November 20, 2023 Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD, FCAHS H. Steven Moffic, MD Columnist’s Introduction Get ready for something unique and extraordinary, more than I even could have wished for! It caught my breath and brought me to tears. Take these lines from Dr. Di Nicola’s piece: · “Not poetry of war, but poetry of life.” · “The words I might have spoken are now a choking silence as I think of you and your loved ones, of all the families and remnants of families, trapped within the maelstrom.” ... Now we have another most moving example, full of depth, involving a Jewish psychiatrist, a Palestinian Israeli psychologist, and a Christian pastor, all also poets. In an earlier parallel process, over the last few years I’ve been involved in editing books on Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, Christianity and Psychiatry (all for Springer). If I imagined those volumes talking to one another, I would wish it would be in an interaction just like these writers have had—a reflection of their religions, professions, and themselves at their very best complementary essence.

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Psychiatric Times Magazine
The Gaza-Israel War: “A Major Poetic Emergency”
A Poetic Conversation Among a Palestinian Israeli Psychologist, an Italian Canadian Psychiatrist,
and a Canadian United Church Pastor in a Time of War
November 20, 2023
Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD, FCAHS
H. Steven Moffic, MD
Columnist’s Introduction
Get ready for something unique and extraordinary, more than I even could have wished for! It
caught my breath and brought me to tears. Take these lines from Dr. Di Nicola’s piece:
 “Not poetry of war, but poetry of life.”
 “The words I might have spoken are now a choking silence as I think of you and your loved
ones, of all the families and remnants of families, trapped within the maelstrom.”
Then there are these lines, which shook me to my soul since I have recently experienced hurting
others unintentionally more often, whether from my insensitivity or the sensitivities of our
circumstances:
 If I speak I will hurt you
not by intention
but by the complexities of being
other
You probably know the cautioning statement: “Be careful what you wish for.” It implies that a
wish coming true may not turn out to be what you expected, from being anticlimactic to an

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example of the law of unexpected consequences. Ever since the current conflagration in Israel
and Gaza erupted on the dawn of October 7, I was wishing that Jewish and Muslim mental
health professionals could continue to work together and even expand their collegiality and
cross-cultural patient care. However, I soon learned that didn’t seem to be the case, and more
often relationships were turning into mutual blame, criticism, and disintegration. I decided then
to put out a call for successful examples, one of which was presented in the column “We Answer
the Call for a Joint Jewish and Muslim Psychiatrist Statement,” by Ahmed Hankir, MD, and me.
Now we have another most moving example, full of depth, involving a Jewish psychiatrist,
a Palestinian Israeli psychologist, and a Christian pastor, all also poets. In an earlier parallel
process, over the last few years I’ve been involved in editing books on Islamophobia, Anti-
Semitism, Christianity and Psychiatry (all for Springer). If I imagined those volumes talking to
one another, I would wish it would be in an interaction just like these writers have had—a
reflection of their religions, professions, and themselves at their very best complementary
essence.
It is time to revise that original wish statement to: Be grateful for your wish being
fulfilled. In terms of timing, I am also grateful that this “Thanksgiving Special” is written
right before the American Thanksgiving weekend. It is also the weekly Torah (Old
Testament) portion where Jacob, to become one of Judaism’s 3 patriarchs, during
ongoing conflict with his brother, wakes up from a dream with awe and surprise,
realizing the divine was present. And so I awoke and was reminded this morning as I
finishing readying this interchange. Most fortunately, Jacob’s conflict with Esau was later
resolved well. May our current Mideast one do so similarity.
Now my wish is for you to go on and savor this piece and let us know what you think.
– H. Steven Moffic, MD
I – “Not poetry of war, but poetry of life”

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Mustafa Qossoqsi, PhD, was speaking in Assisi, Italy at the International Family Therapy
Conference in July of this year. Friends and colleagues from all over the world had spoken at the
three-day event to celebrate a pioneering Italian family therapist, Maurizio Andolfi’s 80th
birthday, and to share our work. Same old, same old – and then Mustafa spoke and woke me
out of my slumber. He told his family story, a Palestinian story, a story about belonging and
history, trauma and exile.[1] The outlines were familiar to me – I had been to Israel and did part
of medical school in Beer Sheva in the Negev desert – but something made me listen more
attentively to Mustafa’s story than anything else at that conference. My new collection of
poems, Two Kinds of People (Delere Press, 2023),[2] was in press and more than therapy what
came to mind as Mustafa unpeeled the layers of his family story was the poetry of Yehuda
Amichai in Jerusalem and Constantine Cavafy in Alexandria.
I introduced myself briefly to Mustafa. He responded warmly and told me he is a Palestinian
citizen of Israel, a clinical psychologist, and a poet from Nazareth and we traded the names of
our poetic authorities. When we had both returned home – Mustafa to Nazareth and myself to
Montreal – I wrote to him and offered to start a poetic conversation:
I was moved, provoked, chagrined, stimulated, excited, disturbed, exhilarated and
touched by your presentation!
It was an encounter with your history, your truth, your pain against the truth, the pain,
the history of so many others I have encountered in the land of Israel. It prepares me
perhaps to visit it (again) but for the first time.
As a fellow poet, I invite a dialogue with you to know better your history, your family
story and your poetry.
Mustafa was generous and receptive:
It's clear you listened with an open mind and heart, really delving into the ideas I
was trying to get across. It takes a lot of empathy and intellectual honesty to

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provide the kind of thoughtful and detailed feedback you gave on a politically and
emotionally charged issue, and it meant so much to me.
And he shared a poem which touches me deeply, cutting to the heart of my own
uprootedness as an Italian and a Jew (all the following poems are only cited here in
part):
I love those who do not find their place
They crash into their lives like a repeated coincidental accident between a cloud and a
wall
Every morning they cut their roots
Then they sew them back to the ground
Like promising wounds
I am one of those who did not find my place. As it happened, after the conference, I took my
family to visit my birthplace in the Abruzzo, just south of Assisi, and described it to Mustafa:
It was both moving and disturbing to see the village reduced to a shadow of what it once
was (a grand metropolis of some 2000 souls at its height, reduced now to some 850) and
much of the lower town abandoned and shuttered.
And thinking of his people, the Palestinians, I added:
How much more painful to be forcefully removed from one’s birthplace ...
Mustafa has a conduit into “things as they are,” to echo Wallace Stevens whose poem, “The
Man With The Blue Guitar,” is about how art represents and transforms reality. Mustafa is a
storyteller and a transformer.
We traded poems and perceptions. Through therapy and poetry, we forged an emerging
friendship. And then came the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7th in the Negev desert, not
far from where I had trained in Beer Sheva. My first reaction was to write to Mustafa to express
my concerns for his safety and proposed a poetic conversation (October 29th):
I am thinking of you.

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Thinking about the pain you must be experiencing.
And I’m thinking that if psychology and therapy and poetry cannot speak to this, cannot
bridge this, then we are truly lost.
My heartfelt offer to you is this: let’s write to each other in poetry about our pain, our
suffering, our distress, our despair even, and find a language together to find our way
into this, through this, and if possible, out of this ... “at least on paper,” as Italo Calvino
once said in one of his novels.
Mustafa responded (October 30th):
Indeed it’s a very painful time.
I really hope poetry could save us.
If conflicting sides read the poetry of each other, war would and hatred would be
prevented. Not poetry of war, but poetry of life.
We can try.
We can try. The next day, he sent me “a poem of these days” – “While waiting for the war,” an
opening phrase he repeats several times, each time affirming life:
While waiting for the war that started over a hundred years ago, I choose books to read,
as the idea of dying without hearing life’s last word pains me.
I search my library for the letters of Freud and Einstein about the war,
and a book by Thomas Ogden accidentally falls into my hands: “reclaiming unlived lives.”
Even before receiving his poem, I wrote “Lazarus Risen” soon after October 7th, horrified by the
greatest number of Jewish deaths since the Holocaust in Europe and the anticipated Israeli
response to Hamas in Gaza. It’s a dialogue with two Anglo-American poems, TS Eliot’s “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”:
This Lazarus has seen hell
And cannot come back
Stretched out as he was;
His limbs severed,
his head separated from his body,

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his body burnt and the ashes strewn
Across the reddening sky,
Like Sylvia’s hair.
Extracorporeal – extraterritorial –
Lazarus risen
To tell you all
“While waiting for the war,” as Mustafa wrote, two more poems fell out of me. “I Am The
Blade” (November 2nd) plays with a line from Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando – “Nothing thicker
than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.” And the only thing that
attenuated my distress these days was the notion that as bad as it could get, there would be
“The Day After” (November 5th
):
The day after the last gun is fired
and the last bullet pierces the last limb
and the last rocket explodes over the last house
…
We –
who have the energy of slaves
and the will to survive –
will say, “I am a witness”
We –
who still have the heart to endure
and the humility to hope –
will sing, “I am a poet”
Meanwhile, I invited a Montreal poet and United Church pastor, Jan Jorgensen, to join our
poetic conversation. Her debut collection of poems and prayers, Birthing Godde (Ekstasis
Editions, in press), offers a privileged access to a poet with a searching sensibility,
imbued with the searing spirituality of Simone Weil.[3] Jan responded with “Silence”:
If I speak I will hurt you
not by intention
but by the complexities of being
other
…

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I think of “word bombs”
of the facts that are true
the facts that drive us apart
I wonder what else might be true
Mustafa is as sensitive a reader as he is a poet (November 13th):
It’s truly heartwarming to hear from you, especially in such challenging times. I’m
holding up, thanks for asking, and I hope the same for you.
“Silence” is a complex love poem for struggling humanity. We probably need poetry of
silence to heal us from the violence of words.
Your poems Vincenzo are of a deeply beautiful and moving impact, where future can be
dangerously imagined and rewritten: hope is the blade.
I love the idea of “in poetry we trust” emerging from yours and Jan’s poems, because
God is a poet.
II – “A major poetic emergency”

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Mustafa sent a new poem, “Psychological first aid” (November 13th), repeating a powerful
rhetorical device where he takes a thought and plays it like “the man with the blue guitar” of
Wallace Stevens’ poem, riffing on a theme, taking reality, then chopping it up like a Picasso’s
cubist painting, “The Old Guitarist,” refracting reality into transformative visions. Mustafa’s first
aid finishes with bitter irony:
Breathe
We revolt simply because we can no longer breathe, says Frantz Fanon
So, breathe.
That’s all there is to it.
You are just a little bit dead.
and the more you breathe, the more you will die, deeper and more peacefully.
And the world will be okay.
In my reply to Mustafa’s powerful poem, I wrote:
This is a masterly expression of the complexity of living ... that we sometimes have to
grasp through the deaths and losses we witness.
In North America, it’s impossible to read this exhortation to “breathe” without thinking
of George Floyd’s death as he pleaded to the policemen who suffocated him, “I can't
breathe.” His death triggered Black Lives Matter and his plea became the slogan of that
movement.
A stunning and quietly explosive poem!
Jan and I met through a poem of mine … “Minor Poetic Emergencies.”[4]
I sent him that poem and shared the experiences of friends in the Italian, Sephardic Jewish and
other ethnic communities – the Armenian, Christian and Greek communities of the Arab world
– from Alexandria to Aleppo, Baghdad to Benghazi, Cairo to Casablanca, and my favorite poem
of exile, Constantine Cavafy’s “The God Abandons Antony,” with its moving closing line:[5]
And say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

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And this adieu resonates inside me in the voice of my inner child who lost his birthplace in the
Abruzzo and Sylvain, my dear friend in Montreal, a Sephardic Jew who lost his Alexandria, and
my fellow artist here Arsinée, an Armenian who lost her Beirut, not forgetting either the Jews of
Arab lands who lost their homes or the Palestinians who were displaced and dispossessed at the
same time. All of us extraterritorial. And the dead, extracorporeal like Lazarus, always rising
anew, refusing to lie still.
Mustafa replied (November 15th):
Our correspondence is one of the few and more significant threads that hold me truly
connected to humanity in these dark and utterly horrifying times. Don’t be mistaken,
these words are tears, writing in these days, is crying in all its senses. The honesty and
the sincerity of our conversation advise me to confess to you: I’m crying while reading
and writing this morning. Crying for massacred lives, for unborn lives, for hostage lives,
and for peaceful and peace-making lives slaughtered on both sides of this infinite war.
In the remaining time, while I’m not writing and reading, I’m busy regulating my
emotions, doing my clinical work, and resorting to some “minor poetic emergencies”
(masterful, beautifully crafted poem).[4]
Can poetry survive massacres and catastrophes? Are we living a “major poetic
emergency”? (emphasis added). I mean, are we in the realm of the unspeakable and the
uncanny, is silence the only possible alternative?
My heart is broken but not defeated. It’s so hard to think about all the lives that have
been shuttered into pieces, the lives that could have been, the lives that will never be.
I cry also for what you say, and for your exiled and ruptured life, I empathize deeply with
your trajectory of uprootedness, and with the inventive complexity you’ve chosen to
embrace and the poetic solutions you’ve managed to invent and create.
Mustafa then turns a poem by Yehuda Amichai called “Tourists” who confuse the value of a
Roman arch with a living person and to the lived reality and interpenetrated identities of Jews
and Palestinians:[6]

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The fact is that on this land no one can a pretend to be exclusively “the one” or “the
other,” we are so interconnected, so interdependent, we are so Palestinian, and we are
so Jewish, without sacrificing any uniqueness, the two nations summarize the fallibility
and the invincibility of humanity.
An American diplomat, Aaron David Miller, called Israel-Palestine “the too much Promised Land”
in his memoir of the Oslo Peace Process.[7] And that’s the tragedy of these competing and
seemingly incompatible narrative claims!
Mustafa then concludes with a new poem written just a few days before the war, “Tips for a
beginner musician” …
It would be wise, if it were up to you, to forget everything you know about forgetting.
Be mindful: music only accompanies solitude if it is deep and feminine like a well.
Despair is soothed by music only if it is beyond consolation.
Remember: music truly lives only in forgiveness.
Let us close with a pastor’s prayer and a poet’s hope from Jan (November 15th):
Dear Mustafa and Vincenzo
Vincenzo and I have been friends so long, I feel his pain in my chest – an ache that has,
at times, made me struggle to breathe.
Mustafa, I feel your pain and sorrow in my throat –
any words I could search for are not enough – the words I might have spoken are now a
choking silence as I think of you and your loved ones,
of all the families and remnants of families, trapped within the maelstrom –
If we had written these messages on paper, like we did when I was young …
some of your words would have been obscured by your tears
and I, reading, would have witnessed my tears mingling with yours, Mustafa.
And I am moved by the thought of our tears erasing words ...
would that we could recreate worlds, erasing cruelty, murder, fear-mongering, because
those words had ceased to exist.

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Now I am thinking of the prophets whose poetry insisted on redemption and restoration
– how it was the very ordinary things – building a home, and living in it, planting a fig
tree and eating the fruit of one’s labour – that are promised, just as it was the man and
his family and not the history of the site that mattered in Yehuda Amichai's poem.
It is life that matters.
Mustafa, your words touch our hearts, you open a window into your world so that we
can send our love ...
I pray for you and those all around you.
Amen! “So be it” from the Aramaic, shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims in closing their
prayers.
References
1. Qossoqsi, Mustafa. Intergenerational Psychosocial Effects of Nakbah on Internally
Displaced Palestinians in Israel: Narratives of trauma and resilience. PhD thesis,
University of Essex, 2017.
2. Di Nicola, Vincenzo (text), Donoyan, Arsinée (photography). Two Kinds of People:
Poems from Mile End. Afterword by S Vaubel. Singapore: Delere Press, 2023.
(Nominated for The Pushcart Prize)
3. Jorgensen, Jan. Birthing Godde. Victoria, BC: Ekstasis Editions, in press.
4. Di Nicola, Vincenzo. “Minor Poetic Emergencies,” in: The Unsecured Present: 3-day
novels & pomes 4 pilgrims. Foreword by Jan Jorgensen, Afterword by Thomas Zummer. New
York, NY & Dresden, Germany: Atropos Press, 2012, p. 161.
5. Cavafy, Constantine P. “The God Abandons Antony,” in: The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy:
A New Translation. Translated by Aliki Barnstone, Foreword by Gerald Stern. New York, NY
and London, UK: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006, p. 45.
6. Amichai, Yehuda. “Tourists,” in: The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited by Robert Alter. New
York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015, p. 299.
7. Miller, Aaron David. The Too Much Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli
Peace. New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2008.

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Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of
psychiatry, and is now in retirement and refirement as a private pro bono community
psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric
Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19
pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award
from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative
Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a
Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the
Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He is an
advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout,
and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry
for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and
Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.
Dr Di Nicola is a child psychiatrist and family psychotherapist in Montreal, Quebec, Canada,
where he is Professor of Psychiatry & Addiction Medicine at the University of Montreal and
President of the World Association of Social Psychiatry (WASP). He has been recognized with
numerous national and international awards, honorary professorships and fellowships, and was
recently elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and given the
Distinguished Service Award of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Di Nicola’s work
straddles psychiatry and psychotherapy on one side and philosophy and poetry on the other. Dr.
Di Nicola’s writing includes: Letters to a Young Therapist (Atropos Press, 2011, winner of a prize
from the Quebec Psychiatric Association), Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social
Sciences, the Humanities, and Neuroscience (Springer Nature, 2021) and two chapters in Dr.
Moffic’s forthcoming volume on Eastern Religions, Spirituality and Psychiatry (in press) in
psychiatry and, in the arts, his “Slow Thought Manifesto” (Aeon Magazine, 2018) and Two Kinds
of People: Poems from Mile End (Delere Press, 2023, nominated for The Pushcart Prize).