Quandary for Hebrew: How Would Isaiah Text?

[Harold Schiffman]

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August 8, 2008
Jerusalem Journal

Quandary for Hebrew: How Would Isaiah Text?

By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — Some Israelis have described being moved almost to tears
by a rare viewing of the Great Isaiah Scroll, the best preserved and
most complete Dead Sea biblical scroll, on special exhibit this summer
at the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum for the first time in
40 years. The familiar, unfulfilled prophecy of the 2,100-year-old
scroll — "and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their
spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against
nation, neither shall they learn war any more" — undoubtedly arouses
emotion here. But there is also a thrill born of ordinary people being
able to read, and at least partly understand, an ancient Hebrew text.

Two centuries after it was written, Jewish history became one of
dispersal and exile, and Hebrew ceased to be widely spoken for the
next 1,700 years. Its revival is often hailed as one of the greatest
feats of the Zionist enterprise; today Hebrew is the first language of
millions of Israelis, a loquacious and literary nation that is said to
publish an average of 5,500 books a year. But in a country where
self-doubt and insecurity run deep, even a linguistic triumph can be a
cause for concern. After such a meteoric comeback, some worry that the
common language may already be in decline, popularized to the point
where many Israelis can no longer cope with the rich complexities of
traditional Hebrew prose.

"There is a feeling of anxiety," said Ruvik Rosenthal, a popular
Israeli language guru and author of a best-selling dictionary of
Hebrew slang. There is the creeping foreign influence, as urban
sophisticates pepper their Hebrew speech with accented English
affectations like "please," "sorry" and "whatever," along with a
noticeable loss of nuance and relative paucity of vocabulary in
regular use. Israelis can obsess about language. "We speak with
mistakes," Mr. Rosenthal said. "Everyone does, and everyone corrects
everyone else."

But he and other Hebrew watchers point to a potentially more
disturbing trend: living Hebrew has moved at a fast pace, and in the
process, it has become increasingly estranged from its loftier ancient
form. "We used to understand the biblical language better, and our
language was closer to it," said Ronit Gadish, academic secretary of
the Academy of the Hebrew Language, the state's supreme guardian of
the national tongue. "Now, what can we do to keep up the continuity?"

In a country suffused with religious and historical symbolism, the
linguistic link to the past has always evoked feelings of national
identity, vindication and pride. Any erosion is bound to stir unease.
"The Bible," said Mr. Rosenthal, "is first of all our connection to
the land."  Hebrew was never actually dead. It was more like an unborn
child, according to Ariel Hirschfeld, a Hebrew literature lecturer at
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, slowly developing over the
centuries as the language of Jewish letters and prayer. Educated Jews
would read the weekly Torah portion in Hebrew, while sages from Prague
to Baghdad would correspond on religious questions in their only
common tongue.

But the linguistic reincarnation came with the birth of modern Zionism
and was largely driven by one man, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who was born in
a Lithuanian village 150 years ago and immigrated to Palestine in
1881. The classical Scriptures provided words for concepts like
justice, mercy, love and hate, but not for more mundane things like
"office" or "socks." So Mr. Ben-Yehuda started inventing new words,
mostly drawn from ancient biblical patterns and roots. Authors and
poets like the Nobel laureate S. Y. Agnon, Chaim Nahman Bialik and Uri
Tzvi Greenberg, Hebrew revivalists from Eastern Europe, also drew on
the ancient sources to create texts rich in biblical allusions yet
conceptually avant-garde.

"They managed to tie the ancient language with the modern world in all
its depth," said Mr. Hirschfeld, who compares them in importance to
James Joyce. The Hebrew-speaking project took off rapidly in pre-state
Palestine, and was adopted zealously by the Zionist pioneers. By 1914,
a decision was made to teach only in Hebrew in Jewish schools, and by
the time the state of Israel was founded in 1948 there was already a
generation of Israelis for whom Hebrew was their native tongue.

Now the academy continues the quest for new words, trying, with
partial success, to introduce authentic Hebrew equivalents for foreign
terms before they stick. In the country that invented instant
messaging, that can often mean a race against time. So a text message
is now officially called a "misron," from "meser," the word for
message. The proper Hebrew for talk-back, commonly pronounced
"tokbek," is "tguvit," a diminutive of "tguva," response. "When there
was no word for tickle, nobody wrote about tickling," said Gabriel
Birnbaum, a language expert at the academy. "Today, we have
everything."

Mr. Birnbaum is now helping preserve the link with the past as part of
a team writing entries for a historical Hebrew dictionary. The academy
has been compiling material for it since 1959. Asked about a
particular example of Hebrew shorthand often used in laconic online
chat, Mr. Birnbaum was able with a click of his mouse to locate the
earliest use of it — in a Dead Sea scroll.

Mr. Birnbaum, like most of the experts, views what is apparently the
deterioration of Hebrew as a natural process, if it can be considered
degeneration at all. The reality, they say, is not as bad as it
sounds. Rather, the anxiety may stem less from the state of Hebrew and
more from the Israeli state of mind. "It comes from a lack of
security," said Mr. Rosenthal, who was born in 1948 and explained the
linguistic qualms as part of the collective summing up of the past 60
years. "The state of Israel has no confidence in its continued
existence." The language may have moved on since the days of the
prophets, but perhaps the sense of doom has not.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/world/middleeast/08hebrew.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=quandary%20for%20Hebrew&st=cse&oref=slogin

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