cellio | keeping the enslaved down

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keeping the enslaved down

Recently some local congregations have been banding together for yom tov services. Friday's service for the last day of Pesach was pretty unsatisfactory in a lot of ways, but in this post I'm going to write about just one practice, something I have seen in other congregations too and that needs to end.

Most blessings begin with a six-word formula, followed by the text that varies. The morning service contains a bunch of these, thanking God for making us free, lifting up the fallen, giving strength to the weary, and more. (There are 15 of these in a row.) The congregation says these together. In Friday's service, the leader decreed that the congregation would chant these in "Hebrish" -- first six words in Hebrew, then chanting the varying part in English.

I previously wrote about the horror that is chanted English prayer. This isn't that. This "Hebrish" practice, I've been told when I've asked, is motivated by a desire for inclusion: people don't know the Hebrew, the reasoning goes, so this makes prayer more accessible. Sounds admirable, right? But it's misguided and, dare I say, harmful. First off, the transliteration is right there in the siddur next to the Hebrew, precisely to make the Hebrew more accessible. But, more fundamentally, this practice serves to keep people down. How are they ever to learn the Hebrew if we never do it? Are we supposed to settle for the current state and never move past it? How would I have become proficient in the Hebrew prayers if, when I was trying to grow, my congregation had kept me on the English?

The Rambam (Maimonides) famously taught that the highest level of tzedakah (charity, loosely) is to help a poor person to get a job, rather than to give him money. Giving him money sustains him for a time; getting him a job helps him break out of the clutches of poverty (we hope). The Reform movement holds this up as a key value, even placing it in the section of the siddur where we study torah in the morning. Why, then, do we refuse to apply that same principle to those who are poor in knowledge? Why is it better to give them the handout of English prayer instead of helping them to pray in Hebrew?

In the past I have remained silent to avoid the appearance of challenging our leaders. I have tried and failed to persuade leaders who do this to reconsider. Friday, when they announced this and started into those prayers, I said to myself quietly "no more" and proceeded to chant the prayers in Hebrew. The long-time member of my congregation sitting next to me said "good for you!" and joined me. We were not disruptive, but I have high hopes that maybe, next time, he'll be sitting next to someone else and he too will say "no more" and forge ahead, and maybe someone sitting next to him will follow. And maybe, eventually, we'll be able to help people break out of the bonds of illiteracy, instead of continuing to keep them down by catering to their current weaknesses. We've just celebrated z'man cheruteinu, the season of our freedom, and it is time to apply that to our people now and not just looking back at Mitzrayim.

If reading the Hebrew text directly is too challenging for some, the transliteration is readily available. Or they could quietly read the English the way I quietly read the Hebrew. (I do that when I'm at services that are above my level, like last week at Village Shul.) But let's stop telling our congregants that they're too uneducated to handle the Hebrew; that only serves to reinforce the idea until they no longer want to try.

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tzedakah (charity, loosely) is related to tzedek (rightness/righteousness/justice). A (or possibly the) point of charity is making things right for people. Or, to rephrase what you wrote, charity should make things more right, rather than just keeping things as they are.

I love reading your posts about Judaism, and your personal journey, and I'm appreciative that I'm allowed to read them.

That being said, I have a question. I hope you won't think it's impertinent.

Why does the language matter? I understand why it might be important to study the texts in the original language, but why does the language of the prayer matter?

My guess would be the old telephone game, where someone whispers a message to the person on their left, it goes around the room, and everyone laughs about how distorted it became. Be it liturgy or prayer, if instead of asking for forgiveness for your sins you ask forgetfulness for your cents, even a caring and omniscient higher power might consider you to be a fool or spammer. Staying as close to the original source is important.

That said, Latin, middle ages, peasants.. yeah, that worked well. And that said there's a very strong cultural thing (from what I see) between Judaism and Hebrew. But I should really let someone closer say something rather than speculating...

There are a lot of possible answers to this. Very traditional Jews hold that the language the Deity uses is Hebrew, for instance.

I know that for myself, the Hebrew resonates very differently than English. There are synonyms and such in English; in Hebrew, words are in families that evoke not only other words in their families, but also can refer to other places that word is chosen. It goes into my brain differently.

Also, using Hebrew connects to a tradition of a couple of thousand years. Prayerbook Hebrew is not difficult language (not like Shakespearean English).

Thanks for providing this note. (I started to explain the term, then thought it distracted too much, and didn't think to just footnote it.)

Thanks for commenting, and never worry about asking questions. We're all about questions. :-)

There are a few factors. First, by putting those first six words in Hebrew, the people leading the service in this way are already saying that Hebrew is important -- but not important enough to learn. I think I would be less bothered by English-only prayer than I am by this. It seems contradictory. (Mind, I wouldn't continue to pray in an English-only synagogue, for reasons I give below, but I'd be less bothered, I think.)

Second, short and/or common Hebrew prayers are the "gateway Hebrew" to other texts. If you learn the prayers you'll start to recognize some of those words and phrases when torah is read, which may lead you to learn more words, which can eventually lead to an understanding of scripture that is just not possible in translation. I'm not there yet by any means, but because I learned some Hebrew I notice nuances in the torah text that either add meaning or lead me to ask more questions -- and questions are good; they lead to deeper understanding. So by cutting people off from that "entry-level" Hebrew text we're also cutting off all but the most curious from a lot more.

Those are reasons that apply to everybody. Speaking just for myself now, there is quality to the text that just doesn't come through in translation -- a combination of the word-roots feature

magid mentioned, and a meter that lends itself a little more to contemplation (hard to explain, but it's "calmer"), and probably some other factors I haven't yet figured out. Additionally, there is something "connecting" about saying the same prayers (in the same words) that Jews have said for thousands of years. I realize that the Reform movement breaks that in places, but it's still largely intact.

God hears prayer in any language; you don't need to pray in Hebrew to stay in right relationship with God. But working a little harder to pray in our language feels rewarding to me. I imagine that this is similar for Roman Catholics who pray(ed) in Latin, and for Greek Orthodox who pray in Greek, and Muslims who pray in Arabic, and others.

This is important. May I link to it?

Thank you, and please feel free to link -- it's public, and I'd like to see more people thinking/talking about this. (I hope to clean this up and submit something to the Reform Judaism blog later.)

In addition to the points that magid and cellio have made, there's a "reciprocity" benefit. The Hebrew liturgy is fairly standardized --- yes, there are denominational variations, there are regional variations, but these are relatively minor.

But each of the dozens (hundreds? maybe more) of translations are unique.

I can walk into any synagogue, anywhere in the world, and my knowledge of the prayers transfers, as long as they're praying in Hebrew. When I pray, I use the prayer book as an aide-memoire, not as a screenplay.

That doesn't work when one congregation says "Praised are You, who gives to the rooster the knowledge of day and night;" and another says "Blessed art Thou, who giveth the cock discernment to know day from night," and a third says "Blessed are You, who grants the heart wisdom to differentiate between day and night."

By all praying in the same language, we not only connect with thousands of years of our ancestors, but with millions of our contemporary Jews.

This is sort of tangential (as an atheist I obviously have no stake in a discussion about what language is most appropriate for prayer), but I'm often surprised by how intimidated a lot of people seem to be by the idea of working with content in another language.

Between having studied at least a bit of 5 different languages and all the classical choral training, it's no problem for me to try speaking or singing foreign-language content, assuming there is a good transliteration and/or pronunciation sample to follow. I especially enjoy working with side-by-side translations because I can start trying to pick out grammatical structures and vocabulary... yes, I am a dork. But, having seen fellow educated Americans grow flustered at the idea of singing a short piece in French or German, I need to remember that not everyone had the same exposure to multiple languages that I did.

All the other responses so far are very good; I want to add an additional comment. For the most part, the prayers that Jews say every week were *written* by people who were fluent in Hebrew, and who knew the hebrew bible very, very well. When they chose the Hebrew words they did, they consciously (or unconsciously) chose them for resonances with the Hebrew bible, even if their meaning was a bit different in the current context. You lose a lot of that when you translate. You also lose the poetry in the Hebrew text (unless you try to twist the English into the right form, which is another challenge).

Note that I, personally, am far from fluent in Hebrew -- but I still think it matters.

Something I've noticed with Japanese vs. English but I'm not sure if you get with Hebrew vs., is that the sets of things that sound "normal" vs "weird" are completely different. Even beyond idioms and words with no direct translations, there're things where despite being easily translatable, if you say it in J it's fine but E is unbelievably cheesy or circuitous, or E is fine but the J is aggressive or irrelevant, or such. Another language isn't just another coding system--it's like an entire different thought system with different conventions and foci, so it's not unreasonable that it would also affect you differently.

I generally support praying in and working to understand the language the prayer is originally written in. Translation inevitably shifts things, and sometimes drops or misrepresents important bits. (And that even when the translator knows the target language well and makes sure to stick to common meanings. Some parts of the (recently superseded) RC mass you look at the Latin vs the English and it's like, "Well, I guess the English version could be interpreted that way, but any modern speaker would probably read it with a different meaning entirely." The new version is much better IMO.)

There is nothing that stops people from saying the prayer themselves in whatever language they are comfortable with.

What I like about Hebrew prayer is that 1) I can go to shul in countries where I don't speak the local language at all and still follow the service and 2) I feel connected to my heritage. And I am far from fluent in Hebrew, having this odd mix of prayer book vocabulary, things I learned at socialist ZIonist summer camp, and the foreign service text a Hebrew class I took used. So I can say things like, "I'd like you to meet G-d over in the dining room. He's arranging for a new hydroelectric power station."

That makes sense. A language is more than its rules of grammar and word stems; it also has idioms and patterns and nuance. There are some passages that sound lovely in Hebrew and a word-for-word English translation sounds over the top. I wouldn't be surprised if this happens in all languages.

That's a good point; some of the prayer language was almost certainly chosen for its similarity to biblical texts.

That's a good point. I don't have nearly your linguistic breadth and I used to have more trouble singing in (certain) foreign languages than I do now. Given transliteration or a set of rules I can comprehend I'm fine, but it's harder to perform a sequence of random-seeming phonemes than it is to perform text I understand. If you substitute "connect with" for "perform" that could apply to prayer too.

In the Reform movement I have observed a lot of social pressure -- there is little individual prayer and a lot of "we will now read together on page X". You can do something else (and I do), but you have to fight both what you're hearing and the knowledge that you're bucking a trend. It can be hard.

So I can say things like, "I'd like you to meet G-d over in the dining room. He's arranging for a new hydroelectric power station."

*laugh*

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keeping the enslaved down

linguistic note

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