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.)

[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.