Walking the walk, talking the talk
For half of my life I have been wrestling with Hebrew, and Hebrew, unfortunately, keeps winning. I have had more ulpan teachers than Elizabeth Taylor has had husbands, and still I struggle to carry on a conversation with an Israeli that doesn’t include the phrases “Where is” and “the bathroom.”
Perhaps the problem is that I really didn’t get serious about learning Hebrew until I was already an adult. In my day “Hebrew school” meant learning to read the Hebrew alphabet; as for what those letters actually spelled, it was hoped that we would somehow absorb that through osmosis. When I did get around to studying the language in Israel, during extended stays in my early twenties and late thirties, I made the classic mistake of living in Jerusalem and spending my days speaking English with the other “Anglos.” The folks who really wanted to learn the language went native and lived in development towns where the immigrants hailed from Russia and Ethiopia, not Brooklyn.
And yet I hope it doesn’t sound like boasting when I say that even I am leaps and bounds ahead of most American Jews. We have created what is perhaps the first Jewish culture in 3,000 years that experiences most of its tradition in translation. That Tevye sprinkled his Yiddish with fractured Hebrew teaches us that the average shtetl Jew was hardly a scholar, but at least he was subliterate in more than one language. As Hillel Halkin wrote in the journal Sh’ma, “Until modern times, a fluency in Hebrew was considered a sign of being an educated Jew.” Today when Jewish scholars and communal professionals meet for conferences, even in Israel, the lingua franca tends to be the lingua anglia. Halkin bemoans the “disappearance of Hebrew as the international language of the Jews.”
Most American Jews would not consider this an existential threat on a par with, say, intermarriage or anti-Semitism. Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, would beg to differ. Wieseltier was in New Jersey last month, at an event announcing the launch of the Hebrew in America project by the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. American Jews’ Hebrew illiteracy, said Wieseltier, will “leave American Judaism and American Jewishness forever crippled and scandalously thin.” Without Hebrew, he went on, “the Jewish tradition will not disappear entirely in America, but most of it will certainly disappear.”
Jerry Hochbaum, who heads the foundation, put it this way in a note to supporters: “Jewish peoplehood is achieved by the transmission of our collective memory and culture, rooted in our common language and culture. With the serious decline of Hebrew in the Diaspora, not only are we lacking a common language, i.e., words, but also a common vocabulary of values, norms and ideals.”
Hebrew in America hopes to reverse this by seeding a pilot project in Bergen County in partnership with its Jewish federation. The first phase of the project is signing up local Jewish early-childhood programs to host Hebrew-language immersion programs. Part two will attempt to “change the culture regarding Hebrew in the Jewish schools.” And the third — and perhaps most important — component is conceptual: raising Hebrew literacy as a communal priority.
When I first heard about the project, the Hebrew phrase that came to mind was from Ecclesiastes: hevel u’re’ut ruach — “futile and a pursuit of wind.” It’s one thing to get a core of observant Jews, already committed to day-school education, to ramp up their Hebrew studies. You can even get a slightly less committed ring to learn a few more phrases or fund a few more Hebrew language studies courses in the community or colleges.
But anything more ambitious? You can’t sustain an interest in a language unless it is woven into the warp and woof of everyday life. Before modern times, Jews were trilingual at least, because they felt a need to study Torah in the original, a need to converse with their neighbors in Yiddish or Ladino, and a need to speak to the gentiles in their native tongues.
What need does Hebrew literacy fulfill in this day and age? To study a Talmud available in at least three English editions? To converse with Israelis, most of whom speak English anyway? As I wrote to an Israeli friend who is excited about the foundation’s project, I’d almost rather my kids learn Chinese, so at least someone can speak to our overlords in the year 2020.
Still, something Hochbaum wrote tempered my pessimism. The project’s focus, he wrote, “would be primarily on Hebrew as a portal to Jewish culture, literacy and Jewish text, not on spoken fluency.”
Today when I’m asked if I speak Hebrew, I reply, “No, but I know a ton of Hebrew words.” Which is no small thing — if my ossified mind can’t form strings of words into coherent sentences, it can recognize and appreciate enough roots and allusions to open a window into Torah, the Hebrew newspapers, Israeli pop songs, and taxi cab conversations.
It could be argued that, thanks to an explosion in English translations of Jewish text and Israeli literature, English-speakers are already able to peek through that window. Halkin, who is himself responsible for dozens of Hebrew-English translations, thinks such confidence is illusory. What gets lost in translation, he writes, “is the innermost pith of all language, the intimate feel and touch and interrelatedness of words that are never the same when translated….
“A Jewish culture in translation is a culture that has lost its flavor.”
Jewish communities tend to be mobilized by crises, like rescue and “continuity.” Perhaps Hebrew literacy doesn’t seem to rise to that level. So let’s just call it a challenge — an etgar — and urge Jewish leaders and educators to support the rescue of a culture and the continuity of its tradition.