Sermon: Shabbat Vayetze
Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 1 December 2020
Last week we read about how Jacob, with his mother Rebecca’s connivance, tricked Esau out of receiving Isaac’s blessing. To escape Esau’s murderous anger, she tells him to go and stay for a short while with her brother, his uncle, Laban, until Esau’s anger has abated and he can return home. This week we’ve seen how that ‘short while’ became twenty years. But finally he’s leaving, prompted to go by a dream which he tells to Rachel and Leah. Twenty years earlier he’d also had a dream –about the ladder and the angels going up and down. In other words, this whole episode of his life has been bracketed by dreams. And dreams will continue to play a major part in his life with the dreams of his son Joseph.
Next week we’ll be in December and, by a curious coincidence, two Jewish dreamers connect at this time, each with a dream about what could be.
The first was Ludwig Zamenhof, born in December 1859. He was an opthalmologist but from childhood, had been fascinated by the idea of a world without war and believed that a major way to achieve that would be if the world had an auxiliary, secondary language. “I am profoundly convinced,” he wrote, “that every nationalism offers humanity only the greatest unhappiness … It is true that the nationalism of oppressed peoples – as a natural self-defensive reaction – is much more excusable than the nationalism of peoples who oppress; but, if the nationalism of the strong is ignoble, the nationalism of the weak is imprudent; both give birth to and support each other …”
It must presumably be the bane of existence for any international organisation to have a number of official languages and not simply because everything needs to be translated, but because every translation is, by its very nature, an interpretation. We know from personal experience what problems can arise if we don’t get the words right – and that’s when we’re all talking the same language!
In 1887, Zamenhof published a grammar for this language, laying out the basic vocabulary and grammatical rules. He published it under the pseudonym of Doktor Esperanto (Dr Hopeful) – hence the name Esperanto. His aim was to create an easy and flexible language that, he hoped, would serve as a universal second language to foster world peace and international understanding
Initially it attracted considerable interest. The 1905 Jewish Encyclopaedia wrote of some 200,000 Esperanto speakers worldwide. Wikipedia estimates some 2 million speakers. You can now find online courses to learn Esperanto. Zamenhof died in 1917.
The other language dreamer was Eliezer Perlman, born in December 1858 in Lithuania, one year before Zamenhof. The mythology has it that one of his teachers in yeshiva gave him a Hebrew translation of Robinson Crusoe. It was a turning point for him – he believed that Hebrew should be an everyday secular language and not just reserved for religious purposes. His parents brought him home when they heard of his new interest and when they found him continuing to read secular books, they threw him out of the house. He had become involved with Hibbat Zion, the early Zionist movement, and in 1879 published an article calling for the establishment of a Jewish national entity in Palestine. He published it under the name we now know him by – Eliezer ben Yehudah. When he finally went to Palestine in 1881 he spoke only Hebrew, even with his family. His wife died soon after they arrived; he subsequently married her sister and they began compiling the first dictionary of modern Hebrew. He died in 1922 and she carried on working on it until her death 30 years later.
Today it seems obvious that Hebrew should be the language of the State of Israel. But just over 100 years ago it was by no means a foregone conclusion. The Orthodox opposed it because they thought it would debase the ‘holy tongue,’ Many Yiddish writers were against it and some Zionist leaders, including Herzl, thought Ben Yehudah’s dream laudable but totally unrealistic.
In the first decades of the 20th century Hebrew had to compete with French and German. Indeed in 1913, the so-called ‘Language War’ broke out in the newly-established Haifa Technion. Many on the faculty decided that instruction should be in German because it was the language of science and modern Hebrew didn’t yet have a developed scientific and technical vocabulary. In the event, the pro-Hebraists won and their victory ensured that Hebrew would become the language of the as-yet unborn Jewish state. Initially the Mandate authorities only wanted English and Arabic as official languages. Ben Yehudah led the fight to make Hebrew the 3rd language. He lived long enough to see that happen in 1922.
What these two language dreamers, Zamenhof and Ben Yehudah, understood was that language isn’t just about communication. Language tells us who we are. And that’s why minority nationalist groups emphasise the need to restore their language – Celtic, Cymru, Breton, Catalan and so on. To regain your language is to regain part of your group identity and pride.
Eva Hoffman, left Poland in 1968 because of rising antisemitism, settling in the USA. She wrote about the experience of leaving one country and settling in another and called her book “Lost in Translation.” What she’s really describing is what it’s like to lose a language – and therefore an identity, a culture. It is very difficult to live ‘in translation.’
Jews in the former Soviet Union started to learn Hebrew because they wanted to emigrate to Israel. But learning Hebrew soon because something much more than just a part of the preparation to go on aliyah. It became the key to recovering their Jewish identity. And the KGB understood that too – and that’s why they cracked down so hard on attempts to learn Hebrew, bring Hebrew books in from the West and so on.
For you can’t understand what Judaism really is about without some knowledge of Hebrew. You can’t live perpetually in translation.
We can talk in English about Jewish prayer but without knowing the difference between the English word ‘prayer’ and what underpins the Hebrew word ‘tefillah,’ we’ll always be missing out on crucial levels of Jewish understanding. There’s a world of difference, for example, between what Judaism understands by ‘tsedakah’ and its English equivalent ‘charity.’
In a fortnight we’ll be lighting the Chanukiah. Chanukah is perhaps, the festival par excellence which speaks to us about Jewish identity. The Greeks didn’t want to physically wipe out the Jews, but they did want the Jews to become more Greek than Jewish – the threat that represented was of a spiritual, not a physical, genocide.
Zamenhof was a misguided dreamer: the Messianic Age won’t have arrived when we all speak the same neutral language but when we have learned to communicate despite our different languages. Maybe Esperanto never really took off not simply because people clung to narrow, chauvinist nationalism, but because it would have resulted in the loss of specific identity, a richness of life, culture, viewpoint and approach that comes with a pluralist society, with people speaking many languages.
Ben Yehudah’s horizon of concern was the Jewish people but not in some exclusive sense. Concerned with the renaissance of the people he understood that crucial connection between language and identity. The enemy is not diversity but ignorance, the lack of a shared vocabulary, the lack of a trained, informed memory.
Zamenhof and Ben Yehudah represent two sorts of Jewish dream. I presume neither would have argued that we shouldn’t know other languages. But I imagine Ben Yehudah’s lament being something like: “Jews know the languages of many peoples – but not always the language of their own people. How can our sense of identity, of self-respect, of pride not fail but be damaged?”
Just under a century since Ben Yehudah’s death, his concern about language remains as poignant and insistent as it must have been in his time. Chanukah reminds us of the need to affirm, through the medium of the Hebrew words we use, what our identity is and how we express it.