Gabor Maté

Talking with authors

The 35th annual Vancouver Writers Festival includes many members of the Jewish community among the more than 115 authors from across Canada and around the globe who will join the events on Granville Island and elsewhere Oct. 17-23.

The festival will celebrate the five shortlisted Scotiabank Giller Prize finalists; engage in conversations with Booker Prize-winner Douglas Stuart, as well as Canadian superstars Heather O’Neill, Billy-Ray Belcourt and Wayne Johnston. It’ll host conversations between emerging Canadian and American poets, novelists and memoirists, and feature flagship favourites like the Literary Cabaret, Sunday Brunch and Afternoon Tea.

The guest curator of this year’s festival is 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Omar El Akkad, who has invited a wide range of authors, including Noor Naga (Egypt), Elamin Abdelmahmoud (Ontario) and Threa Almontaser (United States) – and many others – to join him for six conversations that focus on home, identity and storytelling

Among the Jewish community members participating in the festival are Méira Cook, with her adult-young adult crossover novel, The Full Catastrophe, in Mecca, Mitzvah and Milestones, and in Wry Humour for Modern Life; Tilar J. Mazzeo (Sisters in Resistance: How a German Spy, a Banker’s Wife and Mussolini’s Daughter Outwitted the Nazis) speaks with Marsha Lederman (Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed); Sarah Leavitt facilitates a workshop led by University of British Columbia’s creative writing department; and Guy Gavriel Kay (All The Seas of the World) takes part in Fabulous Historical Fantasy.

Lederman is one of the authors participating in the The Power of Story: Live Recording for CBC’s The Next Chapter, she hosts Generational Fiction: Stories of Lineage, History and Things Passed Down, and moderates Bestseller to Blockbuster. Actor, theatre critic and UBC professor emeritus Jerry Wasserman moderates Building Suspense, on writing thrillers, and Dr. Gabor Maté talks with Globe and Mail reporter Andrea Woo about his latest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture.

Festival tickets ($25) can be bought online at writersfest.bc.ca or at the event venue, starting 45 minutes prior to the performance. There are discounts offered for regular events to seniors (10%) and youth under 30 (50%).

– From writersfest.bc.ca

Leading Canadians in environment, music, mental health

Liliana Segal with Green Chair Recycling’s 2017 Canada’s Volunteer Award.

Green Chair Recycling, founded by Liliana Segal, was recognized in 2017 as a business leader in British Columbia and the north by Canada’s Volunteer Awards. The awards, given by the Government of Canada, were presented in a ceremony held in Ottawa on Dec. 5, International Volunteer Day, to individuals and businesses across the country who contribute to and strengthen their communities.

The awards booklet noted, “Vancouver-based Green Chair Recycling is helping to keep waste of out landfills one event at a time. They work with their clients to create zero waste events, where 95% of event waste is recycled. They work with over 3,000 volunteers who are green ambassadors to track waste at their events, provide education outreach and give free presentations to any interested group. Their volunteers also run free educational field trips to landfill and recycling facilities to show students the reality of landfills and to learn how recycling happens in their communities.”

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The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) is Canada’s largest mental health and addiction teaching hospital, as well as one of the world’s leading research centres in its field. CAMH Difference Makers – 150 Leading Canadians for Mental Health was a national movement that started in 2017. Its purpose is to encourage people to speak freely about mental illness because CAMH sees how these conversations help break down the stigma that prevents people from getting the care they need.

In April of last year, guided by a national committee of leading experts and advocates, CAMH launched a cross-Canada call for nominations of people influencing change in the area of mental health and giving us new reasons for hope. It invited Canadians to nominate a person with lived experience, a caregiver or family member, a health professional, a researcher, an advocate, a philanthropist – anyone making a difference in small or big ways; in local or international circles; in public or private lives. Nominations were open until July 1, and more than 3,700 names put forward.

Among the 150 selected as Leading Canadians for Mental Health were members of the B.C. Jewish community. In alphabetical order, they were David Granirer, Dr. Gabor Maté and Lorne Segal.

David Granirer

It’s hard to laugh when it seems the entire world is crumbling around you. That is what makes Granirer’s approach to dealing with depression so noteworthy. When he experienced depression as a teenager, Granirer saw his condition as something shameful. Today, he realizes shame is as bad as the illness itself.

As a staff member at the Vancouver Crisis Centre, Granirer began to use humour at work to help trainees get through stressful days. This led to a growing passion for stand-up comedy and to eventually founding Stand Up for Mental Health. The program teaches stand-up comedy to people living with mental illness to help them build confidence and break down stigma. Through Stand Up’s 500 shows so far – performed to mental health organizations, government, corporations, the military, schools and correctional facilities – Granirer has helped thousands see mental health in a different light. Through his unique program, Granirer helps people understand not only do we need to shed shame, but that a smile, a laugh and happiness can exist alongside the challenges of mental illness.

Dr. Gabor Maté

When Maté retired from medicine, he turned from using his insights on addiction, early childhood development and trauma to support society’s most marginalized, to inviting growing audiences in Canada and around the world into new dialogues on compassion. He is internationally known for his work on the mind/body unity in health and illness, on attention deficit disorder and other childhood developmental issues, and his breakthrough analysis of addiction as a psychophysiological response to childhood trauma and emotional loss. He is the author of four best-selling books published in 20 languages on five continents, including When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection and the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction. His TED talks, YouTube videos and international speeches have helped focus attention on the mental health and trauma issues that underlie addiction. Maté shows humility and compassion, giving a sense of hope that, in a world where many people are shut down, defensive and fearful, there is a guiding light ahead and a new world of possibility.

Lorne Segal

Segal, a business leader and philanthropist, has been involved with Coast Mental Health’s Courage to Come Back Awards since their inception in 1998. At that time, the stigma surrounding mental illness was even more of a barrier to public engagement than it is today. During his almost two decades with the awards, including serving as chair for the past 12 years, he has helped transform the event into one of British Columbia’s premier mental health campaigns. Under Segal’s tenure, the number of guests has tripled to 1,500, with the awards also reaching more than a million people through television, print and other media. Segal has been instrumental in inspiring more than $15 million in support for mental health programs such as housing, employment and other support services to more than 4,000 people annually living with mental illness. His decision to start supporting the event at a time when mental health wasn’t popular was quite simple. He saw an issue that affected many and wanted to do something about it. Not only has he been successful in this, he has helped spread greater awareness and support for mental health in British Columbia.

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Toronto-based band Beyond the Pale’s latest CD, Ruckus, reviewed in the Jewish Independent Sept. 15, 2017, was nominated for two Canadian Folk Music Awards last year, for World Music Group of the Year and Instrumental Group of the Year. While the band didn’t win a 2017 award, it has been nominated now for eight CFMA honours, and won four.

“Six of the 12 songs on Ruckus are originals, while the others are arrangements of traditional melodies,” noted the JI’s review (jewishindependent.ca/the-complexities-of-ruckus). “All of the musicians either composed an original piece or participated in the arranging. They are a tight ensemble who play around with tempo and style with such ease that the complexity of what they’ve created isn’t what you’ll first notice. And that’s what makes their music so good.”

Panelists talk about BDS movement

Left to right, panelists Gabor Maté, Michael Barkusky and Yonatan Shapira. (photo by Zach Sagorin)

Independent Jewish Voices-Vancouver hosted A Conversation About BDS (boycott, divestment and sanction) on Nov. 8. IJV’s Martha Roth, moderator of the event, told the Jewish Independent, “The Israeli government propaganda has been so strongly anti-BDS and people are terrified of it.… We wanted to make a safe space for discussion.”

In order of presentation, the four panelists were columnist Dr. Mira Sucharov, an associate professor of political science at Carleton University, who joined the discussion via FaceTime; Yonatan Shapira, a former Israeli rescue helicopter pilot who has become a Palestinian solidarity activist; Michael Barkusky of the Pacific Institute for Ecological Economics, who was born in South Africa and was an anti-apartheid activist during university; and author and speaker Dr. Gabor Maté, a former Zionist youth leader.

The BDS movement (bdsmovement.net) calls for Israel to end “its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantl[e] the [security] wall”; recognize “the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality”; and support “the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.”

Shapira told the crowd: “The BDS movement is a human rights-based initiative calling for equality … end of occupation, end of apartheid situation and to promote the right of return. It is not saying that Israel is the most devilish thing in the world. It doesn’t say what is happening in Syria is better.… It is just a nonviolent practical tool to change the power balance in the situation.”

Maté based his view on the actions carried out in 1947/48, which, he said, “involved massacres … expulsions of large numbers of people from their homeland … demolition of hundreds of villages, the bulldozing of gravestones. Going to Palestine-Israel today is like going to Europe today and looking for a trace of Jewish life.”

He continued, “On top of that now, you have this occupation, this totally illegal occupation… Even if you assume Israel has a right to conquer those lands in 1967…. They never had the right under international law to enter these demographic changes, that’s against the law. To build businesses and economy, that’s against the law. It’s not even controversial.”

The only panelist against BDS, Sucharov said, “I have spoken out, mostly through writing, against BDS … for the reason, I think the end-game is confused.”

While portions of Sucharov’s arguments were inaudible due to technical difficulties, she did make her main points heard. She referenced Prof. Rex Brynen of McGill University, in saying, about the right of return, “repatriation in that case would refer to Palestinians who are still stateless being able and encouraged to return to a Palestinian state, but, in order for that to happen, a Palestinian state needs to come about. So the question is, How to change this tired and bloody status quo that we see right now in order to see a Palestinian state?”

She added, “Instead of boycott, I call for wrestling, grappling and engagement. Instead of shunning, I call for dialogue. Both sides want, if you want to use the binary construct of sides, to play their own game of boycott and shunning and narrowing of the discourse…. The most egregious expression of that has been the academic boycott that has been used to cut off the kind of debate and dialogue we are having today.”

She said, for example, that philosopher and law professor Moshe Halbertal was blocked from speaking at the University of Minnesota on Nov. 3 for 30 minutes by BDS supporters, and that she has witnessed the same shunning of dialogue “within the mainstream Jewish community.”

Shapira later responded to the notion of academic boycott: “Only if the professor is connected and representing an official institution in Israel, then it’s a target for the boycott.… All Israeli universities are connected to the occupation … therefore, if someone is representing them, it’s a target for the boycott.”

About the debate over SodaStream, which was located in the West Bank and employed 500 Palestinians, Sucharov said, “One could certainly view that as a way of propping up the settler project, and we know the settlements are illegal under international law. What was key and what the boycott movement got wrong [is], the owner had stated that if and when there would be a Palestinian state, tomorrow he would seek to keep the plant there and simply pay taxes to the new Palestinian state.” She later added, “This is an example of direct investment that will be essential to help the Palestinian economy in its sovereign incarnation.”

Maté countered, “When you are taking people’s lands, when you build a wall that separates them from their fields, when you make life impossible, when you destroy their economy, when you practise environmental degradation on their whole country, guess what, they are going to be desperate for jobs.” He said SodaStream’s “giving 500 jobs to the Palestinians” was “not an argument against boycott, not an argument against economic pressure.”

Sucharov argued that BDS works against a two-state solution: “Scores of Palestinian, Israeli and joint Palestinian-Israeli NGOs are doing work in the West Bank and Israel. There are many groups seeking to engage the situation. With boycott, one has cut off one’s ability to connect with those activists who seek to engage, to visit Israel, visit the West Bank and try to change status quo.”

Shapira said, “Wake up from this old dream of a two-state solution…. We are intertwined together with the Palestinians whether we want it or not. We have to move on from a conflict between two sides … an occupier force and an occupied, an oppressor and oppressed, a colonizer and native. This is the context and we have to change the mindset.

“It is not, let’s go for a dialogue meeting with Israeli and Palestinian kids. I am not saying I am against dialogue,” but dialogue “will not be what brings the solution … the solution will come when we change the power dynamic.” He said, looking at the audience, that they “were probably a part of struggle to end apartheid…. If you supported boycott back then, you should support boycott now.”

About the use of BDS to end apartheid, Barkusky said, “About 25% of South African civil society wanted the end of apartheid … and my worry is that I don’t think that 25% of Jewish Israelis today are ready for a two-state solution, or certainly not a one-state solution.” Barkusky warned that “any BDS strategy, to be effective, needs to avoid sweeping the centrist majority in Israel into the hands of the right-wing.”

Barkusky was “ambiguous” about BDS. “There are certain, obviously attractive features of BDS. It is accessible when other strategies seem futile and it appears to be nonviolent,” he said. However, he added, BDS “is a collective punishment strategy,” akin to an aerial bombing: “hard to target and collateral damage.” BDS can be “damaging and [destroy] people’s livelihoods,” he said, and it “is not exactly nonviolent: it can crush peoples’ hopes, it can lead to suicide, it can lead to domestic violence.”

Maté said it is a “pipedream to shift Israeli policy by being really nice about it.” When it came to boycott specificities, he said, “If you are only willing to boycott stuff from the occupied territories, boycott stuff from the occupied territories. If you want to boycott everything, boycott everything…. If you want to boycott academia as well, go ahead, I don’t care. Because it doesn’t matter what small, little arguments or details we want to engage in because the overall reality for everybody who has been there … is so horrible and is getting daily more horrible that the insanity is out of control now and only external pressure will do anything about it.”

Shapira said, “You cannot live in peace and security if you are superior over other people in that country. You cannot have the oxymoron of a Jewish democracy. We have to give up this idea, it is not possible.”

Around 80 people attended the event, which was held at the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture, including professor Rabbi Dr. Laura Duhan Kaplan, interim director of Iona Pacific Inter-Religious Centre at the Vancouver School of Theology. She told the Independent, “There was a significant amount of agreement in the audience and so the questions were not as provocative as they would have been if … most people weren’t left-leaning.”

Zach Sagorin is a Vancouver freelance writer.

Healing after trauma

A screenshot of Dr. Gabor Maté and Rita Bozi in The Damage is Done, from video by Patrick McLaughlin.

The Cultch often presents non-traditional shows that confront uncomfortable questions. This year, one such show, The Damage is Done by Rita Bozi, brings to the stage an examination of trauma and its psychological impact on individuals and families.

The Damage is Done combines theatre, dialogue, essay, video, music and dance. It features two performers: Bozi, and physician and author Dr. Gabor Maté, who has written on various psychological issues, including addiction. Bozi plays several characters in the show, while Maté plays himself.

photo - Gabor Maté plays himself in Rita Bozi’s The Damage is Done — Gabor Maté plays himself in Rita Bozi’s *The Damage is Done*. (photo by Farah Nosh)

“I comment on Rita’s actions on stage, like a Greek chorus,” Maté said in an interview with the Independent. “We are trying to find some meaning to the trauma endured in the past, the traumas our families went through, and to learn from it. If we don’t process trauma, it will control our lives. The after-effects of trauma influence how we see ourselves: either as victims, or it makes us overcompensate, try to appear more powerful than we are. Sometimes, people try to get away from the pain with drugs – that’s where addiction comes from.”

Maté explained that deep trauma is often transmitted through generations. It affects social units and families as well as individuals. “The children of Holocaust survivors often have elevated stress hormone levels. When a young mother is depressed, her baby suffers, even though everyone loves the baby and nobody wants it hurt…. The play is an exploration of how trauma works and how we can find liberation from it. Before we heal, we must find the problem, acknowledge it.”

He accepted this project despite a busy schedule and multiple speaking engagements because it touches on issues about which he has been advocating for years. “Medical schools don’t teach students about trauma and its psychological impact. When the young doctors start working, they feel the lack of that knowledge. They want a guidance of how to connect physical and emotional healing, and not many people talk about the subject.”

So, many professionals turn to Maté. His seminars are in such demand across North America that sometimes he spends days on the road. “In the last week, I had eight speaking engagements,” he said. In various American and Canadian cities, addiction workers, trauma specialists, therapists and educators, as well as family members and others, comprise Maté’s audience.

“I’m trying to answer the question, ‘Why?,’ the same question Rita asks in her play, so I provide the framework for her story. I think it’s very important. So many people suffer from trauma, physical and psychological. It’s impossible to separate the two. I’m not going to launch a second career as an actor, of course,” he added with a smile, “but it was an interesting challenge, something different. Besides, I like Rita.”

Bozi also spoke with the Independent. She explained that the show was years in development. Its most recent version premièred in Yukon last year. “This show is ultimately about compassions for ourselves and others,” she said.

Maté’s involvement in the project was paramount to her. “I attended several workshops with Gabor and I read his books. He once said, ‘We need to be asking not why the addiction but why the pain?’ As a therapist and a child of immigrant Hungarian parents who lived through the war, the Soviet occupation and the revolution, I have long been concerned with inherited historical trauma and its effect on families and offspring.”

She continued, “I wanted Gabor a part of it. Why mention him if I could have him? I had already been making a connection with Gabor through email over our shared Hungarian backgrounds…. He felt like kin. We were speaking the same language (apart from Hungarian) and we both felt the power of the mind-body connection affecting our lives.”

It took Bozi 12 years from the seed of the idea to the show itself. “I play out my family drama, and Gabor plays the poetic counterpoint. He helps my character come back to ‘self.’ He helps her understand her own experience of the family situation, her part in it and how to begin to transform the inherited pain. He brings his razor-sharp insights to the show and his ability to be concise about what is happening. He sees what is hidden, cuts to the chase and helps guide one to the pieces of self that were lost when trauma occurred.”

According to Bozi and Maté, healing comes from the ability to look at traumatic events from infancy and early childhood with humor and compassion – even though the damage is done, we can defuse its impact.

The Damage is Done will be performed at the Cultch from Oct. 20-24. Before that, Bozi and Maté are taking the show to Banff, where both their evening shows are already sold out. For more information about the local production, visit thecultch.com/events/the-damage-is-done-a-true-story.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].