using language

[cellio]

For a while I've been compiling a mental list (which I should turn into a written list before it rots) of tips and tricks for leading services. I mean to someday share this list with my congregation's other lay leaders (after running it all by my rabbi). These tips come from learning on the job (a lot), observing my rabbi (a lot), formal education (a little), and watching other lay leaders (a fair bit). This weekend I observed something kind of related that I don't want to lose track of.

What I noticed was that the rabbi sprinkled his talk liberally with Hebrew words, some well-known and others that could be understood from context even if you didn't previously know the words. He never used the language in a way that would leave an uneducated listener completely in the dark, but he also did not shy away from using Hebrew. I like this, a lot, and in my experience the Orthodox do this a fair bit in general. It's something that Reform Jews could learn from.

I speculate that Reform leaders, wanting to be as open and accessible as possible, shy away from this for fear of losing people. And there may be some merit in that fear, as members of Reform congregations are less likely to have gone to a full-time Hebrew school and thus been able to absorb more of the references. On the other hand, it's not as if I had that experience or have become fluent, and I can generally follow these conversations. Given a statement like "when Moshe brought the luchot down from Mount Sinai and saw the people worshipping the golden calf...", don't most people understand that "luchot" is "tablets"? That's the sort of context I'm talking about. That, and sometimes people use a term and immediately translate -- "Nadav and Avihu made an aish zarah, an alien fire, on the altar...". This just makes the educational aspect a little more explicit.

As with everything, context and audience matter. When my rabbi and I talk he uses a lot more Hebrew than he does when giving a sermon, for instance. When friends and I are discussing some bit of torah or halacha the Hebrew terms fly, though I wouldn't do that when talking with random members of my congregation. But I wonder if we don't shy away from Hebrew a little too much. It's happened in the liturgy already (and Hebrew is now coming back into favor in the last couple decades), and that avoidance helped to move Hebrew from "normal" to "strange and foreign". But maybe we should be pulling small bits of the language back into the normal lexicon of synagogue discourse, not just in worship but in conversation, as a way of making Hebrew seem less foreign and scary to folks.

Comments

[siderea]

Speaking as a group-dynamics nut, I'd like to play devil's advocate. It's not that I think your idea is a bad one, but I want to point something out.

This is The Jargon Problem. And part of the jargon problem is that most people are less comfortable than either you or I are with strange lexicon in the conversations. The very usage of unfamiliar terms can be an enormously strong turn off for Adam Normal.

(This is, BTW, one of the things I like least about normals.)

Allow me to point out to you the original meaning of "shibboleth". People experience words as boundaries. Unfamiliar jargon can be like a "KEEP OUT -- NOT WELCOME" sign to many of them.

Also, allow me to point out a related problem for groups which do use jargon. Say Group A's leader decides to start working in the jargon a little at a time. After five years, the membership of Group A is quite comfortable with the jargon it's learned and has positive feelings about bringing in new jargon for its edification. At that point, if a new member shows up, he has a very different experience than had all the people who were Group A members all along. They were ramped up gently. The new member is confronted with a group of people all of whom use and are comfortable with (what is to him) a large amount of foreign jargon: to him, it's not a ramp it's a cliff. He has to acclimate to as much jargon as everyone else did over five years in a group, instantly and alone. That's bad enough per ipse. What's worse is that the members of Group A have no awareness that this is going on. They all think "What's the problem? We learned this jargon. So it's reasonable for other to learn it." They have become wholly out of touch with the new-member experience, and don't realize it. They extrapolate inappropriately from their personal experience, not realizing just how different the circumstances are.

(Yes, this is a repurposed SCA rant. Reduce, reuse, recycle! No new ideas were harvested for the manufacturing of this product.)

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

Living in the orthodox world I find that we have a *LOT* of Jargon. Now if you speek Hebrew its not a problem, as most of it is just Hebrew words (with some Yiddish as well). But in English it can be a right pain in the but. The problem is that in many cases the idea described by a Hebrew term is not exaclty the same as the idea described by the English word.

For example "Tzedaka" is often translated as "Charity" but there are a lot of conotations that don't really line up. And of course "Tamme" and "Tahor" which involve state of ritual purity, its hard to even talk about them in English.

Interestingly my Israeli gamer friends tell me that they have the same problem the other way round when it comes to gaming. They find it easier to game in English, even though eveyone in the room is a native Hebrew speaker. Its just the Jargon of gaming tends to be in English.

Tahor & Tamme

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

When learning/teaching mishna I tend to translate these as "ritual state A" and "ritual state B" since "pure" and "impure" have other connotations (i.e. "impure" = "bad" or "defiled"). It does help that I tend to learn/teach with geeky types; I'm not sure how well non-geeks would react to this translation.

[cellio]

You're right -- it's the Jargon Problem more generally. Which raises the question of whether and when jargon can be taught. One approach would be to say "we'll always have new people and thus should never use jargon"; the other extreme is to say "they'll just have to keep up"; the intermediate position is to look for ways to teach it gradually.

If you have a closed community for N years and then a newcomer shows up, you have problems -- not just with jargon but also with customs, cliques, and who knows what else. If you have a steady flow of people in (and perhaps out), then maybe there's a natural check on how much jargon you can actually use.

I don't think the answer is to never use jargon, though. Let's consider a domain near and dear to both of our hearts. Should a choir director never use words like "motet" and "suspension" and "perfect time" and "mode", because those terms won't be known to beginners, and always explain things in the vernacular? Or should he choose the ones that are most important for a real understanding of the music the group is doing, teach those, and reinforce that teaching with regular use (and a refresher when a new face shows up)? This does require care, of course, but my gut feeling is that (1) it can be done and (2) it's better in the end if it is done.

If that belief is correct, then the problems to solve are in selection, density, and rate of introduction.

And yes, I realize that the responsibility for monitoring this has to fall to the leaders of a community. The regular participants usually won't notice, as you described. This may mean that the problem is more tractable in communities that have designated leaders -- an SCA choir but not the SCA as a whole, for example, or a worship leader in matters of worship but not for all facets of the congregation. Must think on this more.

(Yes, this is a repurposed SCA rant. Reduce, reuse, recycle! No new ideas were harvested for the manufacturing of this product.)

:-)

[siderea]

Which raises the question of whether and when jargon can be taught.

Er. No, it doesn't.

It raises the question: What trade offs do you want your group to make?

This isn't a good/bad question. This is an A/B question.

You can do anything you want. The question is what optimizes for the consequences you desire. How much new-member alienation are you willing to stake to increase depth of knowledge of the whole? It's not that there's a right answer. It's that there's an answer that is right for you.

And most people, when confronted with this trade off in any of it's myriad forms cannot emotionally bring themselves to accept that it's a trade-off. They want to believe that they can have their cake and eat it too; they want to believe that their group can be all things to all people.

The questions this issue raises are actually far more interesting and far deeper. One such question that is raised by this trade off is who decides what the group will be? Does the leader have a right (in the eyes of their group) to decide to trade authenticity/education against new member accessibility? Or does that decision belong to the group as a whole?

Which in turn raises very deep and cohesion-threatening questions about just what the role of the leader in the group is, and what the purpose and nature of the group is.

The answer to your question Should a choir director never use words like "motet" and "suspension" and "perfect time" and "mode", because those terms won't be known to beginners, and always explain things in the vernacular? is "Well, what is the purpose of the choir?"

Many choirs haven't the slightest inclination to be "novice friendly". They're for experts. That's their purpose. The idea of being novice friendly is wholly in opposition to their purpose. Their entire social organization is about keeping inappropriate people out -- auditions, etc. -- rather than bringing people in.

Some choirs consider their purpose to be recreational, and think furthering education and the use of such jargon terms is a (much) lesser priority than being accessible. You don't need to know those words to sing what is in front of you.

The question before you are: What kind and purpose of congregation is it? Who gets to decide what it should be? What are the advantages of using more Hebrew? What are the disadvantages? Who in the congregation gets to choose which is more important?

[cellio]

It raises the question: What trade offs do you want your group to make?
This isn't a good/bad question. This is an A/B question.

Tradeoffs yes; binary (A/B) I'm not so sure of. It occurs to me, for example, that the answer is different in different contexts within the organization even if they involve mostly the same people. Discussion during torah study, sermons Friday night, and casual conversation after services have different acceptable (and probably expected) levels. Someone raised tamei and tahor; when we discuss those principles in torah study we don't translate them in normal discourse because we can't. The rabbi always asks if there's anyone present who doesn't know those words (something that would be impractical in a sermon and weird in a casual conversation), and if so we explain them.

Err, sorry about the tangent. In general, you're right that it's about optimizing the outcome we want, which means we have to answer questions about what that outcome is and who says so.

How much newcomer alienation do we stake to increase depth of knowledge? Good question, and it has an inverse: how much alienation of learners do we stake to increase accessibility to all? It cuts both ways; someone who never hears anything new may stop coming.

Does the leader have a right (in the eyes of their group) to decide to trade authenticity/education against new member accessibility? Or does that decision belong to the group as a whole?

Last summer one of my teachers made a comment that has stuck with me: congregations are Nimitz-class carriers. Change is always slow, and (in his opinion) that's a good thing, and moreso the larger the congregation is. I agree; we can't suddenly tell our 860-family congregation "we're doing this now" even if the authority question were resolved, but we can plant seeds. We've been working on making music more participatory for close to five years now, and that just means some new melodies and (in the last year) a more musical service once a month. A change in the balance of language would have to be similarly slow. The leaders can plant seeds, but the congregation as a whole will react to those seeds and indicate which ones should be allowed to sprout. (Other congregations may be different -- or might not -- but I'm trying to address mine here.)

"Well, what is the purpose of the choir?"

What if it's a little bit of everything? The only game in town, open to the more casual folks but trying to be serious enough for the more serious musicians? Or are such ventures just doomed?

In the SCA, for instance, most geographical groups can support 0 or 1 choral groups; it's pretty rare that 2 or more can work. So that single group (if it exists) attracts the folks who just want to sing and the folks who want to learn about period music by singing it, and both of them are equally entitled to be there. How do you handle that? I think the usual answer is to provide a few teaching moments, assuming that those inclined can chase links, but to not entirely ignore that aspect. Does it work? I don't know; I think I've seen it work, but there could be other factors that made more of a difference.

The question before you are:

...ones that I will return to in a later post.

[chaiya.livejournal.com]

I think saying things in Hebrew makes them infinitely more "Jewish" for my experience. It's perhaps a dumb reason, but I think that's why I prefer services more on the Conservadox end of the spectrum than the Reform/Reconstructionist.

[madfilkentist]

From context, I could guess that "luchot" had to mean either "tablets" or "commandments." But this had nothing to do with my knowing the meaning of the word.

[cellio]

Yup. And if it were particularly important to know which the speaker could clarify -- or it would become obvious if he then talked about smashing them.