Hebrew for Fun and Prophets
By Joseph Lowin
Executive Director, National Center for the Hebrew Language

"Hebrew is not a language; Hebrew is magic." I am told this, not by some wild-eyed mystical kabbalist encountered in Israel’s Negev, but on the streets of Tel Aviv, by a plain Jew, a middle-class urban Israeli, a rationalist.

He goes on to explain that, for him, Hebrew is magic, not because it contains hidden secrets about the universe but because if you stare at a Hebrew word long enough, it will reveal its own meanings to you. "Hebrew is magic," he goes on, "the way Shir ha-Shirim (the Song of Songs), is magic. With its three-lettered root, it invites and urges you to come into the center of its essence. Hebrew is magic because, in opening up for you a pathway to understanding words, it teaches you to understand the history and the values of the people that uses these words, the Jewish people. Hebrew is the insider’s guide to the way Jews think. As such, it teaches you to understand yourself as a Jew.

My rationalist mystic notwithstanding, when we speak of Hebrew in America, we are always speaking of two types of Hebrew—the Hebrew that provides a focus in space, and leads us to our fellow Jews in Israel, those who have, in the words of Ruth Wisse, "the will to sovereignty," and a focus in time, a focus that leads us back to the Jewish textual tradition. Alvin Schiff, in The Mystique of Hebrew, calls these two types, "the Hebrew that keeps up with the times and the Hebrew that keeps the constants." Recently, an organization of Jewish educators used a medical metaphor for the usefulness of Hebrew, refuat ha-nefesh and refuat ha-guf, healing the soul and body. I myself am partial to the idea of "Hebrew for fun and prophets."

It is a matter of no small importance that two of our foremost writers in America—Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick—have depicted, in their fiction, both of these aspects of the Hebrew language in America.

One of the more important scenes Roth’s masterpiece, The Counterlife (1986), takes place in an ulpan class in the fictional West Bank settlement of Agor. Here is Roth’s uncannily realistic description of the scene:

"Henry/Hanoch [the wayward brother of narrator Nathan Zuckerman] was one of fifteen students gathered in a half-circle around their teacher’s chair. The students were either seated or sprawled on the grassless ground and, like Henry, most of them were writing in exercise books while the teacher spoke in Hebrew."

At one point, the narrator is invited to take part in the class. The dialogue proceeds as follows:

—Do you know Hebrew?

—All the Hebrew I know are the two words we began with in the Talmud Torah in 1943."

—What were the words?

—Yeled was one

—Boy. Very good. And the other?

—Yaldaw.

—Yaldaw. You say it like my Lithuanian grandfather. Yalda. Girl. Yalda.

—Yalda.

—Now that he says yalda correctly, maybe he can begin to have a good time here.

As a writer, Zuckerman/Roth is conscious of the role that Hebrew plays in creating a cultural context. He asserts that Hebrew creates a link between the playfulness of everyday life--fun with yeladot—and prophecy, the search for a meaningful Jewish identity. "There’s one dichotomy missing about which you said little, or nothing: Hebrew/English. Out at Agor anti-Semitism comes up, but nothing that I heard all night from you or your friends about the Hebrew aspect and the large, overwhelming cultural reality of that. Perhaps this only occurs to me because I’m a writer, though I frankly can’t imagine how it wouldn’t occur to anyone, since it’s finally Hebrew more than heroism with which you have surrounded yourself, just as if you went to live forever in Paris it would be French with which you constructed your experience and thought." For Roth/Zuckerman it makes sense to live in a Hebrew world, a world on which the language itself confers normalcy, no less than do other aspects of Israeli daily life: the sunshine and the falafel, for example. Obviously, for Philip Roth, the Hebrew language is a tool for keeping up with the times.

In Cynthia Ozick’s latest novel, The Puttermesser Papers the protagonist, Ruth Puttermesser (the mild butter knife of Jewish history), also studies Hebrew, but not in an Israeli ulpan. Rather, she takes private lessons from her great uncle Zindel, a shammes in a local shul, for whom the study of Hebrew is the study of the origins of Jewish concepts. Even the shape of the letters in Hebrew script, no less their combinations, has meaning for Uncle Zindel, who, as the lesson begins, is chewing a hard-boiled egg in his run-down tenement apartment. "First see how a gimel and which way a zayen. Twins, but one kicks a leg left, one right. You got to practice the difference. If legs don’t work, think pregnant bellies. Mrs. Zayen pregnant in one direction, Mrs. Gimel in the other. Together they give birth to gez, which means what you cut off."

I don’t know if curriculum specialists would want to recommend this method for regular classrooms but it must be acknowledged that in his own graphic way Uncle Zindel gets his point across.

Ruth Puttermesser, an autodidact by inclination, gets her insights into Hebrew as the source of Jewish thought not from Uncle Zindel but from the study of Hebrew grammar. Here is how Ozick describes the learning process:

In bed she studies Hebrew grammar. The permutations of the triple-lettered root elated her: how was it possible that a whole language, hence a whole literature, a civilization even, should rest on the pure presence of three letters of the alphabet? The Hebrew verb a stunning mechanism: three letters, whichever fated three, could command all possibility simple by a change in their pronunciation, or the addition of a wing-letter fore and aft. Every conceivable utterance blossomed from this trinity. It seemed to her not so much a language for expression as a code for the world’s design, indissoluble, predetermined, translucent. The idea of the grammar of Hebrew turned Puttermesser’s brain into a palace, a sort of Vatican; inside its corridors she walked from one resplendent triptych to another.

Hebrew—a code for the world’s design. Hebrew—a key for understanding creation. Hebrew—a key for understanding the Jewish attitude toward creation.

Ozick’s Vatican metaphor brings to mind a bit of irony concerning the attitude toward Hebrew of American Jews. While Jewish Americans were rebelling against Hebrew in favor of the use of the vernacular in Jewish life, Protestant Americans were teaching their students Hebrew. Did you know, for example, that there was Hebrew in the Ivy League colleges before there were Hebrews? Between 1777 and 1790, all students at Yale University, for example, were obliged by President Ezra Stiles—for very practical reasons—to take one class in Hebrew. Here is how Jeremiah Mason puts it in his memoirs: "During our senior year the President . . . insisted that the whole class should undertake the study of Hebrew. We learned the alphabet and worried through two or three Psalms. . . . The President had the reputation of being very learned in Hebrew. . . for [which] he professed a high veneration. He said one of the Psalms he tried to teach us would be the first we should hear sung in heaven, and that he should be ashamed that any one of his pupils should be entirely ignorant of that holy language." It was obvious to Ezra Stiles that all Yale men would be going to heaven and that they should be prepared linguistically to take charge there as they were destined to take charge of America.

While this quaint Protestant anecdote has much to teach us about Hebrew as a link to the sources of our tradition, we should pay closer heed perhaps to the Catholic attitude toward the role that Scripture should play in the lives of ordinary Catholics. Milton Himmelfarb, in a 1969 Commentary essay, "Hebraism and Hellenism," remarks that "many Christians were persuaded that the priests kept the Bible in Latin to keep it from the people, a priestly monopoly." Was this not, one may ask, the reason the Rabbis wanted the Bible to remain in Hebrew? Himmelfarb insists the opposite was true. "Jews knew that . . . it was the ideal and the effort of the Jewish society that every . . . Jew should be taught all the sacred literature he could master--and, along the way, the Hebrew and Aramaic in which it was written. When modern Jews began to rebel against Hebrew in favor of the vernacular, that was not because they resented a rabbinical monopoly. What modern Jews resented, in fact, was that the rabbis wanted Hebrew not to be a monopoly." What the Rabbis wanted then is what we should want now: that every Jew be a learned Jew.

While modern Rabbis are not exactly opposed to serving as mediators between the sources and their students, many are confident enough in the strength of their own position and in the power of the Jewish sources that they are willing to take a chance on the Jewish people. With Hebrew in their baggage, Jews would be equipped to guard against a poorly reasoned interpretation and an incompetent interpreter. It is axiomatic that it would be difficult to put either weak thinking or demagoguery past a Jew who knew Hebrew and could see for himself whether or not an interpretation was on the mark. A Jew with Hebrew could claim ownership of Judaism, as a Jew without Hebrew could not.

So, what is more important, Hebrew for fun, or Hebrew for prophets? The former provides the flowers of civilization; the latter provides the fruit. Who would want to live without either?