Say something personal. Say something from the heart. The Hebrew aleph bet shares the keys beneath my fingertips.
I am wearing jeans. I packed only skirts, and I am wearing jeans. … I am a Jew in pants or in shorts or in skirts or in denim overalls, beseder?
- journal entry from the first time I came to Israel, eight years ago
What strikes me here is the love for Hebrew. The way “beseder?”—“okay?”—fits so naturally, the reverence for the Hebrew alphabet, the aleph bet, beneath my fingers. This journal entry was written long before I ever knew Yiddish. To be honest, I would have laughed then if you told me I would speak Yiddish one day but not Hebrew. It’s not that I had any of that cynicism I hear so often towards Yiddish (“Why learn a dying language?”, “But you’re not Chassidic”, “How weird”, “How cute”, “How funny”); learning Yiddish was simply not in the picture; it would seem just as unlikely a language for me to learn as, say, Dutch or Hawaiian.
I am now in Israel again, the aleph bet sharing the keys beneath my fingertips again. I feel incredibly privileged and grateful to be traveling here for the third winter in a row through my work. Today as I walked off the plane and headed to passport control, I felt a new surge of affection for this wacky and lovely country, and for the language that I always felt I could almost, almost understand.
Because you know that feeling of being so absorbed in something, words around you register as being spoken, and you can’t quite catch them unless you switch your attention? That’s how I felt about Hebrew, particularly with songs: if only I paid closer attention, I would understand. I did take Hebrew classes in college and Biblical Hebrew classes afterwards, and I can follow (and even sing) along in services at shul. But I am not really much closer to understanding than I was before… which makes sense, as I haven’t really taken serious time to study and speak it.
Still… the yearning is back, which is a start. Listening but not hearing. Wanting to get inside the words. I know learning a language is not like focusing a lens, or switching my attention like a window on my computer. But I don’t want to be surprised for the rest of my life that I know Yiddish and not Hebrew; I want to know both.
לַיְלָה טוֹב, layla tov, good night.
What is the source of your yearning?
Reading your post, I take away that it is your lack of comprehension that is itself the source, with your travel forcing you to remember.
For me personally, I find a similar yearning to understand. Not just with language but much of what happens around me. The Jewish stuff does end up taking much of my energy however. With regard to Evrit, I desire much more to comprehend it than to speak or read it even. I value consciousness and understanding is just one way to be conscious, passively. People who grow up around other languages, will have some level of comprehension of those other languages. People who don’t do not get to comprehend, unless they take an active role.
Jews tend to have a collective people consciousness. However, this consciousness becomes more and more confounded as Jews split themselves (or are split) off into different sects, levels of observance, countries of exile, and languages. What is left is more a yearning for the collective than an actual collective consciousness. Those who are left conscious of their Jewishness cannot escape a yearning just to put things back together into oneness (See moshiach, in gathering of exiles, and lehavdil political Zionism).
We so want to have this consciousness, but alas it alludes us, and without other options, we grasp at the broken shards of reality in hope of at least getting a little closer.
Woe, we are in exile. Yet how do we balance our yearnings with our hereness? Are we fated to a pursuit of the elusive? And at what cost?
אַ קשיא אַף אַ מעשה
——
Anecdote: One of the Hasidic workers here on the farm, my friend Avrum, was once talking about his parents. Avrum is originally from Eretz-Yisrul. He said that his parents know Evrit, and I asked him if he knew it.
נײן. זײ האָבן עס גערעדט װען זײ האָבן געװאָלט אַז די קינדער זאָלן נישט פֿאַרשטײן.
(No, They spoke it when they didn’t want me to understand)
Yisroel, this is really lovely and a post unto itself.
Yearning is definitely the right word… though, and maybe this is me being obtuse, I don’t think this particular situation needs to be a grand metaphor or a pursuit of the elusive. I do literally want to learn Hebrew.