20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Hebrew

Hebrew Lewis Glinert H ebrew lies at the heart of traditional Judaism, its principal medium and in some ways an actual mode of behavior. . That the written law, the study of which stands out among other personal responsibilities, was revealed in Hebrew (Gen. R. 31:8) self-evidently makes Hebrew pivotal: no language is an adequate translation of another, and although the law was to be "explained" to ma~­ kind, "it is told that five elders wrote the Torah in Greek for King Ptolemy, and that day was as hard for Israel as the day the golden calf was made, for the Torah could not be adequately translated" (So£. 1:7). But more than this, Hebrew itself is deemed sacred-and not merely as texts for study, prayer, tefillin (phylacteries), or mezuzah (the parchment scroll fixed to the doorpost), let alone as a text in time momentarily sanctified like Mount Sinai itself-but as an organic and developing language in the fullest sense of a langue, a language system, as well as a parole, a body of utterances. In what sense this sanctity is due to the Torah, as its medium, or instead transcends the Torah has preoccupied Jewish thought and halakhah. 326 HEBREW The Bible appears to take the role of Hebrew for granted until its existence is threatened, at which point Nehemiah 13:24 condemns mixed marriages and their issue who know no yehudit (Hebrew). Merely as a distinguishing mark, Hebrew is singled out by the midrash as one of the four redeeming virtues of the Jews in Egypt (Mekh. Bo 5), though by a perennial dialectic the nation itself (ivri, yehudi) is viewed as a religious entity (Gen. R. 42:8). And to his own generation at the turn of the second century C.E., when spoken Hebrew was succumbing to Aramaic, Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi (the Prince) insisted on a combination of Greek and Hebrew for the holy land and demonstrated the point by editing the entire Mishnah in Hebrew. Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague expresses this notion in more general terms: "Just as speech constitutes the form of Man, so language is considered the form of nations; when it perishes, the nation has lost its form." Postbiblically, Hebrew is invariably called leshon ha-kodesh, the "language of holiness," indicating that Hebrew is intrinsically holy (at least as the language underlying the Scriptures) rather than a mere natural language elevated by revelation: "Just as the Torah was given in leshon ha-kodesh, so the world was created with leshon ha-kodesh" (Gen. R. 18:4, commenting on Gen. 3:23, "To this shall be called woman (isha) for she was taken from man (ish)"). This midrash, taken in the sense that the true semantics of existence is a Hebrew semantics, can be related to Genesis Rabbah 1:1: "God looked into the Torah and created the World," Torah being seen as a statement of what is as well as what should be. This semantics, indeed epistemology, of existence relates also to higher worlds: "Said God to Moses: 'speak in Hebrew like an angel'" (Mekh. de Rabbi Shimon, Shemo 1), or as articulated in kabbalah: "All material things have their likeness and root on high; there dwells the essential Hebrew name of that thing, e.g., fire: its essential feature on high is the quality of Gevurah, ... and material fire is called thus by a transmuted name, not a 'metaphorical name' of the usual kind but the letters above descended by the downchaining of worlds from the Ten Utterances and are invested in all earthly things. "1 Unlike natural language, Hebrew has meaning, metaphysically, in its consonants, as classified phonetically by the SeIer Ye~i rah, in the number of units and the numerical value of letters, and in the shapes of its letters: "Open mem and closed mem: an open teaching and a closed [esoteric] teaching" (BT Shabo 104a). "The letter Daled is a holy letter and the letter Resh belongs to the evil side. Behold the differences between their forms is that the letter Yud is added on to the back of the letter Daled. The letter Yud reflects selfnullification .,,2 (By contrast, the distinct pre-exilic Hebrew script, which HEBREW 327 may have been used in the Revelation at Sinai, as suggested in BT Sanhedrin 21b, has no rabbinic sanctity.) Such meanings also inhere in postbiblical prayers composed under the influence of...