Holy Tongue
By Mordechai Schiller
Not all languages are
created equal. There is one language apart from all others.
Hebrew is called "Lashon
Hakodesh" — the Holy Tongue. There are some who might dismiss this as
just pious Heb-perbole. But you don't have to be pious — or Jewish — to know that
Hebrew is special.
Personally, I have no
problem with axiomatically quoting the Torah. We hold its Truth to be
self-evident. As an old bumper sticker put it: "G-d said it. I believe it. That
settles it!" But, for the cynics, skeptics, and others absolutely
sure of their uncertainty, rather than beg the question by jumping right into
quoting the Torah to prove its own specialness, let me start with a venerated
secular source: the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
The word "Ivri —
Hebrew," means otherness. According to the OED, the etymology of the
English word Hebrew is:
"Middle English Ebreu, from Old French Ebreu, Ebrieu (nominative Ebreus, 12th cent. in Hatzfeld
& Darmesteter), from medieval
Latin Ebrus for
classical Latin Hebræus, from
Greek Hebraios,from
Aramaic 'ebrai,
corresponding to Hebrew ibr? 'a
Hebrew,' lit. 'one from the other side (of the river)'; from '?ber the region on the other or
opposite side; from '?bar to
cross or pass over.)"
Eons before Oxford, the Midrash explained
why the Torah calls Abraham "ha'Ivri — the Hebrew." The
word Ivri is related to the word eiver, meaning
"on the other side." The Midrash explains that Abraham was unfazed by standing alone
in his beliefs. "The whole world stood on one side and he stood on the
other."
Could Thoreau have known
this Midrash? In his essay, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,
Thoreau wrote that Abolitionists should withdraw support for the government of
Massachusetts and
"not wait till they constitute a majority
of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it
is enough if they have G-d on their side, without waiting for that other one.
Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one
already."
Shortly after my brother
Rabbi Nota Schiller (dean of Ohr Somayach in Jerusalem) got married,
he moved to Israel. Before he left, he went to take leave of, Rabbi Yitzchok
Hutner, zt"l, the late dean of Yeshiva Chaim Berlin.
Rabbi Hutner told my
brother, "When we make a l'chaim toast for a yahrtzeit,
we say, 'May the neshamah have an Aliyah [May
the soul rise to a higher level in Heaven].' Now, I say to you, may your Aliyah [ascension
to live in Israel] have a neshamah [soul]!"
In the course of the
conversation, my brother mentioned that he was concerned about adapting to a new language.
Given his lifelong involvement in writing and communication, he was afraid he
wouldn't be able to fully express himself, writing in Hebrew.
Rabbi Hutner told him that people
can readily learn to write in a new language. "But nobody,"
he said, "writes poetry in
an adopted language."
Poetry, he explained, is
too profoundly connected to our primal emotions. "There is one exception,
though," the sage said, "A Jew from any country can learn to write
poetry in Lashon Hakodesh; because Lashon Hakodesh is
every Jew's first language."
Still pondering Rabbi
Hutner's premise that no one writes poetry in an adopted language, my brother
asked, "But what about Joseph Conrad?" (Conrad was a Polish
immigrant, and one of England's greatest lyrical novelists.) Rabbi Hutner
countered, "That is not poetry; that is prose." Apparently, Rabbi
Hutner felt that — no matter how poetic — prose couldn't be verse.
A horse
of a different color
Hebrew is the language of
Creation: The Mishnah in
Ethics of the Fathers tells us "that "the world was created with 10
utterances." The Divine created the universe using one set of tools:
Hebrew words.
The Torah says Adam
called his wife ishah (woman) because "she was taken from ish [man]."
The foremost commentator, Rashi, explains, based on the Midrash, that this
derivation teaches us that "The world was created with Lashon
Hakodesh — the Holy Tongue — Hebrew."
Adam later "called his wife
'Chavah' [Eve] because she was to be mother of all chai [life]." The name Adam itself comes from the
Hebrew word adamah [earth],
because G-d created Adam from the earth.
A Horse is a horse, of course. But is it, really? The Oxford
English Dictionary (OED) says the etymology of horse is: "hors = Old Frisianhors, hars, hers (Frisian hoars),
Old Saxon hros (Middle Low German ros, ors, Middle Dutch ors,
Low German and Dutch ros), Old High German hros, ros, Middle
High German ros, ors, German rosz, all neuter, Old Norse hross masculine;
not recorded in Gothic. The affinities of the word outside Germanic are
uncertain. …"
In other words, nobody knows for sure. So, "You pays your money
and you takes your choice." Or, as Mark Twain said, "It is difference
of opinion that makes horse-races."
On the other hoof, the Hebrew word sus is a horse of a
different color. The Torah says that the Divine brought all the animals before
Adam, "…and whatever the man would call each living creature — that was
its name."
Adam didn't "give" the animals names. He
prophetically connected with the spiritual essence of each animal and called
it by its name. Thus, the Hebrew word sus isn't a mere label. It
definitively identifies the creature we call a horse.
More to the point, all other languages are
nothing more than collections of arbitrary sounds that enough people got
together and agreed on to refer to a specific object.
In our case, that object is a mammal that has hooves, pulls loads, runs
races and helped win the West. All things being equine, there is no
intrinsic meaning to the juxtaposition of phonemes riding on horse. Since Hebrew is the language of
Creation, by corollary, it is the language of prophecy.
As my brother said, "In prophecy, there is an absoluteness to
diction and syntax. We scramble to catch the bobbing and weaving sparks of
holiness hidden elsewhere. Yet the
phrase 'V'romamtanu mikol ha'leshonos — He lifted us above all other
tongues' — means just that." And so, only Hebrew is "Lashon Hakodesh —
the Holy Tongue."
When I was a rabbinical student at the Beth Medrash Gevoha in Lakewood,
NJ., I would sometimes spend lunchtime in the yeshivah library, reading Sefer
HaCarmel — a dictionary/thesaurus based on the commentary of the Malbim (d.
1879).
The Malbim wrote in the introduction to his commentary on the book
of Isaiah that the Jewish prophets
never used two different words to mean the same thing.
There are no "synonyms" in Hebrew. That is, there are no
interchangeable words. Each word is
precise and essential. In his commentary, he defines seeming synonyms
explaining the fine differences in meaning.
Yehuda Leib Gordon, the poet (d. 1892), and Pinhas Rutenberg (founder
of the Israel Electric Corporation) were both irreverent enough to name
electricity for an angel in Ezekiel's vision: "Chashmal."
It is ironic that the fathers of Modern Hebrew couldn't come up with a
more creative word in Ivrit for Alexander Graham Bell's
"harmonic telegraph" than telefon.
Lamentably, Modern Hebrew continues to deteriorate. How sad that the glut of Western media led
to Israelis giving up "Shalom" for "Bye." But there is still hope. The OED says
the etymology of "goodbye" is "A contraction of the phrase G-d
be with you"!
