The Revival of Hebrew

On Parshas Eikev and the debate over the Holy Language

The accompanying shiur is available on the Orthodox Union's parsha learning app: All Parsha.

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I can type fluently in Hebrew. I can read nearly fluently in Hebrew. But I don’t speak a word.

Maybe I’m just embarrassed by my awful American pronunciation, but even when I am in Israel I have a very hard time speaking the language. It is not something I am proud of.

Growing up in New York, high school students must take the Regents, a state-wide exam. Nearly all Jewish high school students take the Hebrew regents as their language requirement. I did not go to an elementary school that spoke Ivrit B’Ivrit (classes using instructional Hebrew), so I was pretty terrified for my 9th-grade Hebrew Regent. I still managed to get a 99 on the exam—hold your applause—I got stuck on one word during the oral conversational part of the exam. In conversation with our Hebrew teacher, Rabbi Dr. Joseph Ozarowski, I was supposed to ask him for a replacement train ticket. Except I forgot the Hebrew word for “ticket.” Hence a 99 instead of 100. I will never forget my כרטיס again.

But aside from the obvious social purposes of allowing us to converse with our brothers and sisters in Israel, is there religious value in learning how to speak Hebrew?

In the words of Shemah that appear in our parsha, Rashi makes a fascinating comment:

וְלִמַּדְתֶּם אֹתָם אֶת־בְּנֵיכֶם לְדַבֵּר בָּם בְּשִׁבְתְּךָ בְּבֵיתֶךָ וּבְלֶכְתְּךָ בַדֶּרֶךְ וּבְשׇׁכְבְּךָ וּבְקוּמֶךָ׃

לדבר בם. מִשָּׁעָה שֶׁהַבֵּן יוֹדֵעַ לְדַבֵּר, לַמְּדֵהוּ "תּוֹרָה צִוָּה לָנוּ מֹשֶׁה" שֶׁיְּהֵא זֶה לִמּוּד דִּבּוּרוֹ; מִכָּאן אָמְרוּ כְּשֶׁהַתִּינוֹק מַתְחִיל לְדַבֵּר אָבִיו מֵשִׂיחַ עִמּוֹ בִּלְשׁוֹן הַקֹּדֶשׁ וּמְלַמְּדוֹ תוֹרָה, וְאִם לֹא עָשָׂה כֵן הֲרֵי הוּא כְאִלּוּ קוֹבְרוֹ, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר ולמדתם אתם את בניכם לדבר בם וגו'.

Based on the language of the verse, you should teach your children to speak in it, לדבר בם, Rashi states that a father should specifically speak in Hebrew to their young children.

Is it a mitzvah to learn how to speak the Hebrew language? Why isn’t this codified in any halachic works?

To understand the significance of the Hebrew language, let’s explore the incredible modern-day story of its revival.

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Reports of the demise of the Hebrew language have been greatly exaggerated. Some refer to the “revival” of Hebrew as if the language somehow died—it was never dead. Our prayers, the Mishnah, as well as Rambam’s celebrated Mishnah Torah are all written in crisp Hebrew. Hebrew as a spoken language quickly fell out of use after the destruction of the Second Temple. Instead, Jews began colloquially using other languages that relied on the Hebrew script, such as Aramaic, Ladino, and Yiddish.

So, after nearly 2000 years of disuse, how did Hebrew become the language of the State of Israel?

Lewis Glinert’s The Story of Hebrew tells this fascinating story.

Much of the Hebrew comeback is owed to Jewish Enlightenment writers who championed the use of the Hebrew language. These writers were undoubtedly influenced by more traditional Hebrew authors, most notably Rav Moshe Chaim Luzzato (Ramchal) as well as an emergent European nationalistic zeitgeist that placed renewed emphasis on language as an expression of national identity. A movement emerged known as techiya, meaning revival, which was committed to reintroducing the language of Hebrew to Jewish intelligentsia. As Gilbert writes:

The Tehiya was a revolt against both assimilation and traditional religiosity. Its proponents rejected Haskalah for its lack of commitment to Jewish nationhood and its belief in the potential benignity of Gentile governments. They wished to create a culture that was modern, European, and secular, yet at the same time authentically Jewish. Among the movements greatest luminaries were the Zionist theoretician Ahad Ha’am (1856-1927), the poets Judah Leib Gordon and Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934), and the lexicographer Eliezer Ben-Yehudah (1858-1922)

No one was quite as committed to reviving Hebrew as a spoken language as Eliezer Ben-Yehudah who dedicated a fanatical zeal to ensure our spoken ancestral language would return to the Jewish People.

In 1880, Ben-Yehudah wrote an article for Ha-Magid, under his pen name Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, his real name was Eliezer Yitzchak Perlman. He wrote:

Will our language and literature last much longer if we do not revive it, if we do not make it a spoken language? And how can that work other than by making Hebrew the instructional medium of our schools? Not in Europe, nor in any of the lands of our exile, where we are an insignificant minority and no amount of teaching effort is going to succeed, but in our land, the land of Israel.

Not everyone within the Zionist movement was on board with the effort to reintroduce the Hebrew language. Herzl did not speak a word of Hebrew and was skeptical of the entire effort. “We cannot converse with one another in Hebrew,” Herzl said, “Who amongst us has a sufficient acquaintance with Hebrew to ask for a railway ticket in that language?” As someone who personally got a point off on his Hebrew Regent for exactly that word—a train ticket—I find great comfort in Herzl’s skepticism. “Such a thing cannot be done,” Herzl concluded—instead he advocated for German to be the language of the Land of Israel.

Ben-Yehudah, however, was not deterred. A year after his public call for the revival of spoken Hebrew, he set sail for the Land of Israel with his wife Devorah. The following year, in 1882, they welcomed their first child, Bentzion, and made the bold decision to speak only Hebrew to him. Many thought they were out of their minds—Devorah Ben-Yehudah included, as she found her husband’s unwavering dedication to the Hebrew language somewhat oppressive. If she had the chance, she admitted, she would have returned to Europe to escape the hardships of life in Israel. Many others warned them that their insistence on speaking Hebrew would seriously harm their child’s development. In fact, by the age of three Bentzion Ben-Yehudah had still not spoken a word. One evening Eliezer Ben-Yehudah overheard his spouse Devorah singing a Russian lullaby to their young child—he was infuriated! As he was yelling at his wife, his frightened child called out the first words organically spoken in Hebrew in two millennia, “Abba, Abba.”

Despite the opposition, Ben-Yehudah’s position eventually won. His version of Hebrew, however, was not quite as successful. Many new words needed to be invented or designed to properly describe the modern world. Some of those words still persist today such as milon for dictionary and bubah for doll. Other words caused controversy. The word for tomatoes in Hebrew, agvaniot, was considered scandalous, since the word, coined by Yechiel Michel Pines, was derived from the term agavim, meaning lust.

In the traditional Orthodox community, there were graver concerns about transforming Hebrew into a nationally spoken language. Normally reserved for prayers and words of holiness, how could lashon hakodesh, our holy language, be used for common everyday speech?

I remember hearing in the name of Rav Moshe Shapiro an objection to the modern Israeli word used for chalkboard, luach, which derives from the luchos, the commandments brought down by Moshe. They’ve taken the most essential indelible part of Judaism and made it erasable!

Perhaps the most vocal critic of the adoption of Modern Spoken Hebrew was the Satmar Rebbe, Rav Yoel Teitelbaum, a fierce critic of Zionism in general. The third and final section of his anti-Zionist work, VaYoel Moshe, is called Maamar Lashon HaKodesh, and the Satmar Rav cautions about the adoption of Hebrew as a modern spoken language. The essay was originally written in response to a letter from Rav Pinchas Hirschprung inquiring whether young women should be taught Hebrew in school. His answer, which forms the basis of his published essay, was an emphatic no.

Eliezer Ben-Yehudah courted controversy in his lifetime from the traditional Jewish community when he advocated that farmers trying to keep Shemittah no longer rely on the chalukah charitable system. In a series of articles in his newspaper, Hatzvi, a newspaper he founded in 1884 to spread the Hebrew language, he dismissed the need to keep Shemittah—building the land of Israel was more important in his eyes. This later became known as The Shemittah Affair. This began a long sense of enmity between Ben-Yehudah and the traditional community in Israel, and many to this day only speak Yiddish in conversation.

Through his newspaper, however, Ben-Yehudah was quite successful in spreading the Hebrew language throughout the land of Israel. In each edition of the paper, he would publish new Hebrew words to help the public slowly develop a modern Hebrew vocabulary. Of course, the success of Hebrew was not a product of one man—most of the words he coined have fallen out of use—the State of Israel established a committee, known as the Vaad Halashon, the Academy of the Hebrew Language, that continually updates Modern Hebrew to reflect contemporary societal developments.

Hebrew became the window through which many assimilated Jews reclaimed their Jewish identity. Franz Kafka, the acclaimed writer, hired a Hebrew tutor named Jiri Langer—a fascinating Jew in his own right, a Hasidic homosexual who published poetry and mysticism—to teach him Hebrew. He spent 7 years learning the language and became somewhat proficient in Hebrew, a fact only revealed years later, after Kafka’s Hebrew notebooks were discovered.

Speaking Hebrew became a symbol of authentic Jewish identity. As Nathan Sharansky recalled during his time as a Russian refusenik, “I still remember the very first sentence we learned from our teacher: Anachnu yehudim, aval anachnu lo m’dabrim ivrit,”—we are Jews but we do not speak Hebrew.

Once the State of Israel was established, Hebrew flourished even more. Efforts were made, sometimes to the frustration of newly arrived immigrants, to only speak Hebrew in Israel. One flyer cautioned bus drivers to speak to passengers exclusively in Hebrew. If they heard passengers speaking another language they were told to correct them.

Traditional Jews were not the only ones to express concerns about the adoption of Hebrew as the spoken vernacular in Israel. In a 1926 letter to Franz Rosensweig, Gershom Scholem, the famed scholar of Jewish mysticism, wrote about his concerns about building a modern society on the foundation of an ancient and religiously mystical language. Scholem wrote—the letter is so fascinating I will quote it in full:

This country is a volcano! It harbors the language! One speaks here of many matters that may make us fail. More than of anything else we are concerned today about the Arab. But much more sinister than the Arab problem is another threat, a threat which the Zionist enterprise unavoidably has had to face: the "actualization" of Hebrew.

Must not the issue of the holy language be broken open again now, when the language is to be handed down to our children? Granted, one does not know how it will all turn out. Many believe that the language has been secularized, and the apocalyptic thorn has been pulled out. But this is not true at all. The secularization of the language is only a facon de parler, a phrase! It is impossible to empty out words which are filled to the breaking point with specific meanings lest it be done at the sacrifice of the language itself! The ghastly gibberish which we hear spoken in the streets is exactly the faceless lingo that "secularization" of the language will bring about; of this there cannot be any doubt! If we could transmit to our children that language which was transmitted to us, and if we could revitalize the language of the ancient books in this transitional generation, would it not then reveal itself to them? And then, would not the religious power of this language perforce break open again one day? But which generation will bring this about? Is it not true that almost all of us live with this language over a volcano, with the false security of the blind? Won’t we or those who came after us stumble into the abyss when we fail to see again? And nobody can know whether the sacrifice of those who perish will suffice to close the hole and avoid the plunge into the abyss.

Those who initiated the rejuvenation of the language believed blindly and almost obstinately in its miraculous power. That was their good fortune! Nobody with clear foresight would have mustered the demonic courage to try to revitalize a language in a situation where only an Esperanto could have been created. They walked and still walk above this abyss, which remained hidden, and have transmitted this language to our youth together with all the ancient names and seals. Today it seems weird to us, and at times we are scared and frightened to hear a religious phrase quite out of place, in a totally unrelated context. Fraught with danger is the Hebrew language! It cannot remain and will not remain in its present state! Since our children no longer have any other language, they and they alone will have to pay for this predicament, which none other than we have imposed upon them without forethought and without question. If and when the language turns against its speakers, and this has occurred already on bitter and unforgettable occasions when the arrogance of this undertaking has become apparent, will we then have a youth which can exist in and survive the revolution of a holy language?

Language is Name. In the name rests the power of language, its abyss is sealed with the name. We have no right to conjure up the old names day by day without calling forward their hidden power. They will appear, since we have called upon them, and undoubtedly they will appear with vehemence! We speak in rudiments, we speak a ghastly language: the names go in circles in our sentences, one plays with them in publications and newspapers. It is a lie that that is not important, even if a holy force may erupt suddenly out of the shame of our language! Names have their own life! If it were not so then woe to our children, who would be pushed into the void and emptiness without any hope! Each word which is not newly created, but taken from the good old treasures, is ready to burst. A generation which accepts the most fruitful of our holy tradition, our language, cannot simply live without tradition even if it would fervently wish to. The moment when the power stored in the language unfolds again, when the spoken word, the reality of our language, gets form and reality again, that moment will place this holy tradition as a decisive token before our people. God will not remain silent in the language in which He has affirmed our life a thousand times and more. This unavoidable revolution of the language, in which His voice will be heard again, is the only issue that is not spoken about today in this country. Those who called the Hebrew language back to life did not believe in this trial yet they created it. May it not come to pass that the imprudence which has led us on this apocalyptic road ends in ruin.

Jerusalem, 7 Teveth 5687

Gerhard Scholem

Biblical mystical words like chashmal (which originally features in the vision of Yechezkel) become electricity; merkavah, the holy divine chariot, becomes the word for a tank.

Scholem’s concern gets to the heart of the very project of Zionism and the State of Israel. Has the holy been secularized or has the secularized become holy? That remains in the hands of the Jewish People as we continue to pray, in the words of Rav Kook, הישן יתחדש והחדש יתקדש that the old be renewed, and the new becomes holy.

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And that brings us back to our parsha.

The Land of Israel is described in our parsha as the land which God seeks—אֶרֶץ אֲשֶׁר־ה’ אֱלֹקיךָ דֹּרֵשׁ אֹתָהּ.

All of the commentators are puzzled. Why is the Land of Israel specifically described this way—can’t God be found anywhere?

The word דרש does not only mean to seek—it means to darshen, to interpret, and find meaning. Specifically in the Land of Israel does God look into the hearts of the Jewish People, and even those Jews whose according to the plain meaning, the פשט, so to speak, may not be fully observant of Torah and mitzvos, God, so to speak, darshens them and finds their deeper Jewish identity. Only in Israel does our underlying Jewish connection shine through. God darshens us in Israel.

ואולי ס"ל דאין מצוה זו נוהגת רק בא"י ובעת שישראל שרויין על אדמתן משא"כ בגלותינו שהוא דבר שא"א לרוב הצבור לעמוד בו מכמה טעמים, אכן עם כ"ז עדיין לא הונח לנו השמטת זכרון כל עיקר זה.

This explains why our parsha specifically emphasizes the mitzvah to speak Hebrew. As mentioned, this halacha is not codified in Shulchan Aruch—though the holiness of the language is discussed in many sources. But to speak colloquially with a Holy Language can only be accomplished in the Land of Israel where the Jewish People themselves are all explicitly dedicated, in one way or another, to rebuilding the Eternal Nation that is the Jewish People. Only in Israel can even ordinary conversations assume religious meaning. That is why, as Rav Baruch Epstein suggests in his Torah Teminah, it may only be a mitzvah to speak Hebrew in the Land of Israel.

The Jewish People are the text of the Land of Israel and even our mundane conversations are the subject of God’s drashos. Hebrew is the language that uplifts ordinary words spoken in the Land of Israel, transforming them into sacred words that connect every Jew to the spiritual fabric of the Jewish People.

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Shabbos Reads — Books/Articles Mentioned

• The Story of Hebrew, Lewis Glinert

• Theses on the Historical Context of the Modern Jewish Revolution, Benjamin Harshav

• The Hebrew-Based Judaism And Zionism Of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, Saul Jay Singer

• Kafka’s “Blue Notebook” Revealed, Chen Malul

• Kafka’s Gay, Hasidic Hebrew Teacher, Kenneth Sherman

• Mordechai Langer (1894-1943) and the Birth of the Modern Jewish Homosexual, Shaun Jacob Halper

• Ghostly Hebrew, Ghastly Speech: Scholem to Rosenzweig, 1926, William Cutter

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Reading Jewish History in the Parsha has been generously sponsored by my dearest friends Janet and Lior Hod and family with immense gratitude to Hashem.