The second in our dizzying septet of disallowed statements is not so much an issue of proscription as of pronunciation. We are told in Proverbs that "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver." But against that wisdom must be set experience. As people of the book we know all too well that reading a word does not teach us how to pronounce it. And, living in a largely Anglo-Saxon culture we also know all to well the cost of using the wrong accent or pronunciation –the official entrance exam for the individual colleges of the great Oxbridge universities has always been to listen to applicants pronounce the college names.

  So while we understand that knowing how to pronounce something is in no way a true measure of a person’s knowledge or worth, we also have deeply rooted feelings that it is. It is into this very treacherous territory I step – and certainly without intending to embarrass anyone -- when I point out that that there’s a word that is very important to us that many of us do not know how to pronounce. In fact, as I have been thinking about this topic I realized that I had no particular reason to be certain that my pronunciation was more correct than that of others.So I went to a specialist to check it out. Happily for me, the pronunciation I had picked up from others does turn out to be correct; else I’d have had to discard this talk, leaving us to just sit here for 20 minutes or so as if we were a Quaker meeting.

  That word is … Well, let me say why this is in the least little bit important. I must tell you that I’m not even talking about English here, but about Hebrew.

  "Ahh," everyone sighs, "Hebrew. I’m not expected to be able to pronounce Hebrew. That’s one of the reasons I hated synagogue (a Greek word, incidentally) or temple: all that droning, meaningless Hebrew." 

  And I agree. I too hated having to sit there and not know what was going on. Had I known, I would have hated that, too, but of course for different reasons. Nonetheless, I want to use this opportunity to start a dialogue about Hebrew within the Congregation. 

  Now, when I say "Hebrew" you have to imagine that I am also saying Yiddish. Not that they are interchangeable; their origins and histories and cultural  appendages, and the reasons why Humanistic Jews might pay attention to them, are quite different. I’ll be talking mostly about Hebrew, but I – and certainly others – could raise similar reasons for thinking hard about the role of Yiddish in our congregational culture. To represent such arguments here let me share this forum for a minute with the distinguished writer Cynthia Ozick, who in 1969 has a character speak of Yiddish thusly: 

"A little while ago there were twelve million people – not including babies! – who lived within this tongue, ands now what is left? A language that never had a territory except Jewish mouths, and half the Jewish mouths on Earth already stopped up with German worms. The rest jabber Russian, English, Spanish, God knows what. Fifty years ago my mother lived in Russia and spoke only broken Russian, but her Yiddish was like silk. In Israel they give the language of Solomon to machinists. Rejoice – in Solomon’s time what else did machinists speak? Yet, whoever forgets Yiddish courts amnesia of history. A thousand years of our travail forgotten."

  Back to the finds at Ugarit. Soon scholars had heaps of tablets, but not a clue as to how they might be deciphered. No one had ever seen Ugaritic before.  Then, it appears, someone had one of those ideas "so crazy it has to work." A sampling of Ugaritic text was analyzed for letter frequencies, and matched against the known letter frequencies for the earliest samples of Hebrew. Lo and behold – or, as we say in Hebrew, Hinay -- this provided enough of a clue to allow the reading of the documents to begin.

  So the roots of Hebrew are really ancient. While writing was probably invented before the Egyptians, the alphabet was invented by the Phoenicians. And don’t let the priestly stories in Torah fool you. Phoenicians, Canaanites, early Hebrews – all cousins, with lots of intermarriage. It was our ancestors who invented the alphabet. AND taught it to those upstart Greeks. 

  The Greeks thought this was just the sphinx’s whiskers. However, they noticed that Hebrew was structurally different from Greek. In particular, where changes of vowel sounds in Hebrew tend to take you to a related meaning of the same word, in Greek vowel changes lead to different words, as often as not. In English and other Indo-European languages vowel charges yield pairs like

     dog-dug 
     for-fire-fur-fewer-far-fare 
     lung-long 
     lute-light 
     parte-porte 
     bier-beurre

or different forms of weak verbs 

     sung-sang 
     dig-dug 
     run-ran 
     ring-rang

and so on.

In Hebrew you have vowel changes providing a rich network of related words

     katav – he wrote 
     k’tav - a document 
     keetev – he wrote busily 
     k’teev - spelling 
     k’tovet - an address 
     k’toovet – marriage documents

or

     kadosh – a holy person 
     kodesh – holiness 
     kadish – the mourner’s prayer 
     kiddoosh – prayer declaring the Shabbat to be holy

and when Hebrew is written without vowels, as Phoenician certainly was, these differences are elicited by context.

  The Greeks, observing that vowels were never written and also seeing that there were signs for Hebrew consonants they didn’t have in Greek, asked if it would be ok to use those letters for vowel sounds. "Nu, why not?" asked the Hebrews. And so it was. For example, there used to be a very deep guttural sound in Hebrew. It has disappeared from the Ashkenazic form of Hebrew, and there are only remnants of it now in Sephardic Hebrew. Its symbol was at the time written like a circle – although the symbol in Hebrew has changed over the centuries – and the Greeks recycled it as their sound for "oh."

  Ok, so we should honor Hebrew, but we can do that, as the great Indo-European playwright once said, in the breech. Beyond that, questions abound. Hebrew was relegated to the status of a holy language – lashon kadosh – well before the start of the rabbinic period. It’s generally agreed that the vernacular during the 2nd Temple period was Aramaic. Hillel may have said "Im ayn ani li, mi li" in Hebrew, but when he said "lemme have a pastrami sandwich on rye, to go," he said it in Aramaic." 

  The lashon kadosh – even thought it was not the everyday language of family or business for most of our history – did serve a purpose long after it had been relegated to the synagogue. In one of A. B. Yehoshua’s historical fictions, set during the previous turn of the millennium, he has a Jewish merchant from Tangiers travel into the heart of what is now Germany, to Worms to visit a community of Jews there. Among fluencies in Arabic, Latin, Greek, French and others, their one common tongue turned out to be Hebrew. This function continued during the age of exploration, when the Jews are involved in international trade. But, that may not have much relevance to us -- we’re not planning to visit distant cousins on the other side of the known world. 

  Others have argued the importance of Hebrew for survival. The Russian novelist, poet and Zionist Perez Smolenskin wrote in 1870 "We who have no national monuments, no solid ground, and no outer authority, have one treasure … Who rejects this tongue rejects the entire people!" And in 1904 the scholar Solomon Schechter said "Hellenistic Judaism is the only one … which dared to … dispense with the Sacred Language. The result was death. It withered away and terminated …"

  Some would promote or value Hebrew because of its renaissance in Israel, where it has been turned into a living --i.e. slang-ridden, idiomatic, and garbled – language; what one of my Hebrew teachers calls "Falafel Hebrew." But that’s an argument that requires one to see Israel, at least metaphorically, as either a refuge in case of another Holocaust or as the place we go to "next year" when the Messiah cometh. Neither of these positions has strong ties for us, I think.

  What then? Ignore Hebrew? As individuals, perhaps. But as a Jewish community, or a Jewish Movement, do we really want to do that? Some here would gladly say "yes." That’s a rational position. Others would share my own sense that there would be a loss to our ability to feel ourselves as Jewish were we to wash our hands and leave the Hebrew to the synagogue up the street, to the branches of Judaism planted elsewhere. 

  Shall we then keep Hebrew as a ceremonial trapping? Create a cadre of Rabbis and others to be the keepers of the no-longer-sacred language? I can see the ad now:

 Want a Humanistic Blessing in Hebrew? Send a SASE to Box 12483, Farmington Hills Michigan. Allow esera yomim (10 days) for delivery.

  Tacky, tacky. And pointless. We don’t want mumbo-jumbo. Our interest in Hebrew – if there is one, very much an open question – surely demands that in some, perhaps infinitesimally small way, the language have some life for us.

  And that, it seems to me, requires that the individuals of the community have some personal connection with it. But there we go again. What connection can we have? And, if we decide that there is no reasonable way to do this, should we then wipe all the Hebrew from our services? Is it meaningful to include Hebrew if we don’t connect to it? If I were to tell you that the Humanistic blessing for the end of the Shabbat was "Barukh ha-zara v’ha-soolam, sheh ohavim ha masdayrah ha shlaymim" – why not? Only a few people here would be suspicious, and they’d probably chalk their confusion up to mypoor accent, or a few spelling errors. Should we use Hebrew when, for all most of us know, we might be saying " blessed are the sow and the heel, that love the perfect linotype machine?"

  I don’t have a proposal to put before you to solve this puzzle, but I have had some thoughts. To develop even the simplest would take some time, have some psychic (if not fiscal) cost, and would inevitably be a turnoff to some people. Let me just offer them as a springboard for further discussion.

  1. We can learn to say Hebrew correctly. Most of us say Hebrew only from transliterations or dim memories. But even transliterations require a certain minimal language competency. For example, there are two hard "Kh" sounds in Hebrew. There’s ch as in Baruch, and kh – more guttural -- as in Khaverim. There is no "ch" sound as in "chew." Not to know this much is not to know that when Hebrew speakers transliterate they use kh for KH  and ch for ch. And not to know this leads to an entire roomful of people singing the most philosophically central song we have – Ayfo Oree – and pronouncing its most philosophically central line – Ayfo kokhee; kokhee bee – just plain wrong. It isn’t ko-chee – unless you agree that the Native Americans were the ten lost tribes. Sorry if that was a bit too ko-cheesy.

  Another word, one of the central seven subjects of this seminar series: While it’s a stretch to say that this is a word that we don’t or can’t say at KB, we’re certainly not completely sure how to say it. That word is, in fact Two words: Kahal b’raiRA. There are a few plausible variants that I’ve heard – and as I mentioned, I was sufficiently unsure to check it with an Israeli. My point is only that this is our name: we might consider paying attention to the sound of the language and to getting it right.

  2. The alphabet. Might we have interest in making a project – perhaps in the Sunday school as well – of learning to decode the alphabet? We could blend a minute of Hebrew letter recognition into our Sunday meetings, and in a year we’d all be able to sound out the alphabet. There are signs all over this building in which we meet that we could practice on. Maybe in a second year we’d learn a few words, a little bit of writing. Not much effort and not much achievement, but something to serve as a springboard, or to give us a sense of connection with King Solomon and his machinists.

  3. Meanings. We sing songs and have no idea what they mean. Can we choose a new song every so often and learn its translation word by word? Not as part of a conversation course, but just learn the meanings of the words. We sing Shalom Haverim. Shalom is peace, but more than that, it is "completeness," the same root as for "perfection." And who are these Haverim? Are they just friends, or something more. We sing Lo yisa goy el goy cherev. Nation will not lift up sword against nation. Does that mean something different from "people will not fight other people?" Does the language tell us about the context? The context about the language? And then there’s "Hallelujah" and "Amen." These are words with specific meanings. Don’t we want to know that one means "praise God?" and the other means "I believe?" Or. maybe we don’t?

  As we discuss these notions, I think it is useful to recognize that we are not alone. Across our movement other communities face the same questions.  Even, in fact, among the madrikhim – the leadership – there has never been a language requirement, and this is currently a topic of intense debate. And during the month of November more than 1,050 Hebrew Crash Reading courses are being offered at more than 760 locations in North America. It is a continent-wide program designed to introduce generations of Jews to the Hebrew language. And let’s not discount how many of our own kids incorporate Hebrew into their Mitzvah services. My experience is that parents sometime encourage this, but rarely if ever require it. Do the kids exhibit a need that we are too jaded to recognize, or just an immature romantic streak that they’ll remember fondly but recognize as essentially pointless?

  Hebrew and Yiddish are our history; for some of us Ladino is important too. Immigration, the Holocaust, and the growth of a movement that allows us to separate Jewishness from ritual and religion, have created a chasm between modern Jews and their ancestral languages. Can we, shall we, bridge it?

presented on November 18, 2001 at Kahal B'raira