One of the highlights of our services every High Holidays has got to be Marc Schneider’s superb sounding of the shofar. Every time he reaches for the heavens with his tekiah gedola – like the cantor with her voice, there is such a buzz in the room. Last week, the day after Rosh Hashanah, a congregant came by and she gave Marc the ultimate compliment. Some of the people watching in her house thought he was playing the trumpet! The sound was just too pure, too refined, to be the wild and uncontrollable bleat of the shofar. I assured her that indeed it was the real thing – he’s just that good. But it reminded me of one of my favorite classic Hasidic tales, and since we’re not going to hear the shofar again for another 24 hours, this will have to tide us over. It’s about an illiterate farm boy, who, for the first thirteen years of his life, he never once entered a shul. On Yom Kippur of his thirteenth year – it was time. All around him the people at the Baal Shem Tov’s synagogue davvened with great passion, but not knowing anything about what they were doing, the boy grew bored. Feeling his sheep-herder’s whistle in his pocket, he asked his father if he could blow on it. Naturally, his father refused. Another hour passed, and again the boy asked for permission to play his whistle. Again, his father refused, and he took the whistle from his son and placed it in his own pocket. As the Neilah service began, the boy noticed the whistle sticking out of his father’s pocket. He grabbed his whistle, took in a great gulp of air, and blew a long and loud blast. Shocked and frightened by the sudden sound, the congregation fell silent. Only the Baal Shem Tov continued to davven, this time more joyously than before. When the service concluded, the man took his son to apologize to the Baal Shem Tov for disrupting the service. “On the contrary,” the Baal Shem Tov said, “there was no disruption. The pure simplicity of the boy’s blowing enabled all our prayers to reach the gates of heaven. I have always loved that story, and for a whole slew of reasons. For one, it spoke to the Hasidic focus on kavvanah, intensity, and focus in prayer, which is more important than liturgical correctness. For another, it spoke to the fact that we are all equal in the eyes of God. A simple illiterate child has just as much to contribute and indeed might save us all. And I loved the idea of that being especially true when speaking of those who are intellectually challenged, as I imagine this child to have been. What a great story. If anyone has a shepherd’s whistle out there, let ‘r rip! But you know what? The Baal Shem Tov was wrong. Well, not exactly wrong, but incomplete. And it took me ‘til now to understand that. I should actually have known it the day I met Mara’s great aunt, Betty, of blessed memory. The matriarch of the family. She had no kids of her own, so everyone was her kid, so when her grandniece brought home a guy who was thinking of becoming a rabbi, well, it was very important that I impress Aunt Betty. So, we walk into her home and that’s filled with beautiful old things – glassware, tea set, things from the old country. Lots of doilies. And before you know it, she says some expression in Yiddish. Now I don’t speak Yiddish. Yiddish is what my parents spoke when they didn’t want me to understand. Like my whole generation. (By the way: How dumb was that? “Let’s kill part of our culture so we can kvetch to each other about our kids”). But my parents’ generation thought Yiddish was a dying language, and they wanted their kids, and their Judaism, to be All-American. Anyway, it was pretty clear pretty quickly that I had no idea what Aunt Betty was saying. So, Betty turned to me, tilted her head a bit and asked, “Do you speak Jewish?” Of course, when she said “Jewish” she meant “Yiddish,” but I had to say to her, “No, I do not speak Jewish.” I wasn’t actually in rabbinical school yet, but still she was dumbfounded, and I got off on the wrong foot with Aunt Betty. “A rabbi who doesn’t speak Jewish?” Spoiler alert, I married her grandniece anyway and Betty, of blessed memory, grew to kind of like me. And so, the question I have for everyone in this room is the one that shook me when Betty asked it. Do you speak Jewish? It’s not enough to hum a few bars – or to take out your shepherd’s whistle and blow. You gotta speak the language. The language of Jewish. But of course, that’s what Kol Nidre is all about: the power of words. Words matter. Vows matter. Once words are said or written, you can’t take them back. They are released out there to the world. Sticks and stones may break our bones – But sometimes words can hurt even more! Words are destructive, but they are also magical and creative. How magical? The expression Abra Kadabra is a translation of the Aramaic for “I create as I speak.” The first key prayer of the preliminary service every morning is ברוך שאמר והיה העולם, “Blessed is the One who spoke, and the world came to be.” Words beget worlds. We create through speech, just as God does. Words have infinite power. Words matter. Words give us our marching orders, they establish order. Words are the key to everything. The word for wilderness is “Midbar,” which is spelled exactly like the word “medaber,” to speak. It is through speech that we make our way from aimless wandering to a purposeful procession. And the key to being Jewish is to be able to speak Jewish words. For the Jewish people to grow and thrive, and for each individual Jew to flourish Jewishly, we need a common language, a basic literacy. We all need to speak Jewish better. That begins with Hebrew. Alan Mintz z’l, a noted scholar who grew up in Worcester, not far from Aunt Betty, writes in his Critical Introduction to American Hebrew Poetry: [The American Hebraists] may have been wrong about Hebrew being the measure of all things…—but they were surely correct in seeing Hebrew as the deep structure of Jewish civilization, its DNA, as it were. Hebrew (is) a bridge that spans many cleavages: between classical Judaism and the present, between religious and secular Jews, and between Israel and the Diaspora. …Any Jewish society that takes place largely in translation runs the risk of floating free of its tether to Jewish authenticity. “What a pity,” Cynthia Ozick writes, “that there is an absence of Jewish literacy in a population renowned for its enduring reverence for learning.” I am a firm believer that we need to be re-tethered to Hebrew. That’s why our services are still almost entirely in Hebrew. It’s not easy to follow, but it’s authentic and praying in Hebrew enables a Jew to feel at home in any synagogue anywhere in the world. Modern Hebrew connects us to other Jews too. You may have noticed that I almost always include Hebrew in my weekly email, oftentimes highlighting the front-page headlines of an Israeli newspaper. And you’ll see a lot of Hebrew in the texts of my sermons, with extensive links leading to the original sources. I’ve always seen it as my mission to reconnect you a to our heritage. Unless we start taking Hebrew literacy seriously again, we will lose that authenticity, and our kids will be untethered to a precious treasure that they never knew was theirs. Hebrew traces its roots way back to the beginnings of language. When people ask me whether Jews believe the world is really just 5,783 years old, my response is that, for me, that number doesn’t go back to the Creation but to the beginnings of civilization as we know it, and that means language. Experts believe Sumerian to be the oldest known language, dating back to about 3,500 BCE. That was just about 57 centuries ago. Sumarian came from the same place as the ancient Hebrews – southern Mesopotamia. One of its key city states was Ur – where Abraham grew up. And then, centuries later, around 1,200 BCE, Cuneiform and hieroglyphic symbols evolved into the oldest known usage of an alphabet, which was discovered in a turquoise mine in the Sinai. That original Canaanite alphabet had letters named aleph and bet – it was basically ancient Hebrew, and scholars believe that all other alphabet systems, everywhere in the world, developed from that one. |
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