Category: Hebrew Language Instruction (Fall 2005)

The following is an excerpt from the book "This is My God."

The first tractate of the Talmud, Benedictions, fixes the times and customs of saying the Sh'ma, does the same for The Eighteen, and then develops the blessings for all occasions of life. The antiquity of the Creed and the Service is evident in the matter-of-fact way the Talmud discusses them.

Benedictions lays down the rule that one should bless the Creator for every good in this world; and it even contains a remarkable blessing on evil news. Perhaps the most startling passage in it, for a modern reader, is an open authorization to pray in English; that is, in any language one understands. The popular notion is that English prayer is a shattering heresy. Our common law allowed it two thousand years ago.

Despite that, the Jews have always clung to a Hebrew liturgy. In previous times it might have caused less trouble and disaffection if the prayers had been in Greek, Aramaic, Latin, Egyptian, Arabic, Spanish, French, Turkish, German, Polish, or Russian. But the community, by a continuing mass instinct, has held to the Scripture tongue. That instinct is asserting itself today in the United States, in the Reform and Conservative movements, which year by year bring back more Hebrew into their devotions.

Today we have printed translations. In olden times, when knowledge of Hebrew was sometimes scantier than it is today, there was an important synagogue officer, the meturgeman or translator, who called out line by line the vernacular meaning of Torah readings. In certain Sefard prayer books you will still find interlinear Spanish. Our people have put themselves to all this awkwardness and difficulty and persisted in praying in Hebrew. My guess is that they will always do so.

A language has a genius. Some works translate well, others are untranslatable. Moliere is effective only in French. Without knowing Arabic nobody has ever understood the Koran. Pushkin remains a possession of the Russian people, though the world has acquired Tolstoy. In general, the higher the charge of peculiarly national identity and emotion, the less translatable a work is.

The Hebrew Bible speaks with power in all the tongues of earth, but it sounds to nobody else as it does to the Jews. The Second Table of the Ten Commandments reads in Hebrew something like this: "Don't kill; don't be vile; don't steal; don't tell lies about others; don't envy any man his wife or house or animals, or anything he has." This sounds shockingly wrong in English. For the English genius, religion is solemn and stately; Canterbury Cathedral, not a shul. The grand slow march of ”Thou Shalt Nots" is exactly right. Religion for the Jews is intimate and colloquial, or it is nothing.

Our liturgy, at least the classic part, is as colloquial and easy-flowing as the Torah. No adequate or even approximate translation of the prayer book exists. The King James Bible serves as a mine for splendid translations of Psalms and other Scripture stretches. Even so the change from Hebrew to English drastically alters the feeling. Translators of other sections use the King James diction - wouldst and thou and vouchsafe and loving-kindness and all the rest - and the tone and texture of our prayers nearly evaporate. People complain sometimes that praying in English makes them feel as though they were in a church. It is a just reaction. They experience the English genius, not the Hebrew.

All the same, half a loaf is assuredly better than none. If prayer in the current language resulted in a stronger and better informed Jewry, whatever the watering down of meaning, every man of sense would be for it. But on that head we have twenty centuries of experimental evidence. Translated prayer has been, in the communities that have adopted it, a first step toward general loss of Hebrew. Loss of Hebrew has always been a long step toward loss of law, custom, and knowledge, and toward oblivion by absorption.

The fact is that Judaism always has worked by raising the small cadre of Jews to an extraordinary cultural level. The Jews to stay alive have had to know two or three languages. All of them have always had to read and write. It is everlastingly uphill work. Nothing else seems to answer.

During the war I led many services in English, and I have prayed in English. The Talmud surely is right to advise a man to pray in any language that he understands rather than to give up prayer because he does not know Hebrew. For all that, I do not imagine that I can spare my children the old Jewish task of mastering the holy tongue. This was true before the birth of Israel made it an important modern language. Goethe in his day, Edmund Wilson in ours, learned Hebrew to find out what the Bible was driving at. So in all times have many Christian scholars. We learn it to find out what our Torah is telling us and what we truly mean by our prayers. It is work. But any intelligent adult in a year can command the simple Hebrew of our liturgy if he wishes.