Migration
Kristina Polukordene, who led a crisis counseling seminar for us in HEPI, jokingly called the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise “the first migration crisis in human history.” It is a beautiful, multi-layered analogy that I have revisited many times since. I am a stranger in a strange land, and this is one of the central facts of my life in recent years. Over the two years of the war, this motif has not only gained new personal resonance for me but has become the leading theme of my practice. The biblical analogy helps me understand why talking about this is so difficult. The migrant experience inevitably forces us to look at ourselves anew, through the eyes of another—to “see that we are naked,” and thus, to feel shame. Living where we were born, we exist in a state of relative innocence; we are wrapped in a world of social connections, concepts, and things that feels unshakable and self-evident. Our place in that world seems natural, a given right. Migration s...