Today is the New Year for the Tamil People and Jewish Passover!

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PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

When I awoke on Saturday morning, I received an email note from our production editor for our book in progress: Islamophobia and Psychiatry, second edition. The note stated that she would be out for the Tamil New Year and return to work on April 15. She rarely explains why she is out for a spell, so this must be a particularly meaningful reason.

Having just led the publication of the edited book Eastern Religions, Spirituality and Psychiatry, also for Springer, I knew we had not covered the Tamil people specifically. I wondered what we might have missed and whether a column like this one could make up a bit for the neglect. All I personally recalled about the Tamil people were that they were involved in a civil war in Sri Lanka, maybe for decades, at the end of the 20th century.

The Tamil New Year this year also comes not only in the middle of the Jewish Passover holiday, but Passover is also known as one of the 4 Jewish New Year’s. What similarities might there be?

In case you also are not familiar with the Tamil, here is what I just learned. They are a people that originated in Southern India and who continue to speak the ancient Tamil language. In particular, Tamil scholars have contributions to understanding sociology and anthropology, such as community dynamics. I have read that there are anywhere between 60 to 80 million still in southern India, about 3 million in Sri Lanka, and then scattered elsewhere in the world, including the United States. Religiously, most are adherents of Hinduism, and as we discussed in Eastern Religions, Hinduism has not had a history of anti-Semitism.

In the 1980s, conflict increased in Sri Lanka between the Ceylon Tamil and Sinhalese Buddhist majority, resulting in guerrilla warfare among Tamil militants for a separate state. However, they were defeated in 2009 and about 80,000 killed in what some have called a genocide.

Similarly, Jewish people have a long history of trying to have a homeland and acceptance in the diaspora but been subject to many traumatic expulsions and genocides. Currently, the relatively new state of Israel has in turn been accused of genocide.

Passover is a holiday celebrating the journey to freedom to escape slavery in Egypt. Along the way to freedom, the people had to get over a slave mentality and become uncomfortable with freedom, as well as the ethic to not to celebrate the defeat of their enemies. Whether the break-in arson the night before last of the residence of Pennsylvania governor Shapiro, who is Jewish and was celebrating Passover, was anti-Semitic, political, or something else, is yet to be determined.

The Tamil New Year holiday, called Puthandu, is a day to clean, reset, and start afresh—all goals of Passover too. What also seems in common with these coexisting holidays of peoples that came out of different areas of the East was that both were subject to genocidal intent by others and a challenge of how to handle their own power when they had the opportunity. One potential risk is overly identifying with the prior aggressors, which we even see in hostages who identify with their captors in what is called the Stockholm Syndrome.

Perhaps these 2 peoples can be seen as further illustrations of the common vulnerability in our human nature to fear the other, scapegoat and hate them, and to try to obtain power over them. At its essence, the world’s conflicts between peoples have to stem in some ways from our human nature and calls for possible interventions based on these tendencies and vulnerabilities. So far in history, there have been steps taken forward, but then often slips backwards.

What new possibilities for more unification of peoples can emerge? Perhaps it will come with the ever-powerful development of artificial intelligence.

Psychiatry comes out of this basic understanding of people, our strengths and vulnerabilities, so we have an important role in reinforcing any social or individual endeavor toward peace and mental health.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement 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 presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. 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.