Shalom

Today we have a visitor from Israel. Welcome!

My Hebrew has rather severe limitations. I learned the alphabet when I was twelve but that had nothing to do with a bar mitzvah. I was (and am) as goy as they come; I just became fascinated with the alphabets in the front of my dictionary at that age.

Some time later a neighbor across the street, Mrs. Hamilton, let me tour the books of her late husband, a Methodist minister. Among them was a two-volume set on Hebrew taught by an inductive method that began with the opening of Genesis. At one point I could recite, with understanding, about half of Genesis 1 and it still floats in the background of my brain.

In college we were required to take one dance course as part of the PE requirement. The choices were ballroom dancing, modern dance, and folk dance. Well, modern dance was too far out for me, ballroom dancing far too much about het coupling, and that left me one option. I fell in love with folk dancing. One semester I took beginning folk dance and the next semester I was helping teach it while attending the intermediate and advanced groups as well. I loved the world music we danced to. Balkan and Israeli dancing were my faves. In the process I learned by rote almost all the songs we danced to. To this day I can sing passages from the Song of Songs. Hot stuff! And beautiful.

A couple of weeks ago I heard familiar music from the choir room. They were singing in English but the tune was clearly "Shibboleth basadeh" and I was singing along with them in the hallway, only in Hebrew. Wish I could remember the dance! I totally love that song.

Thanks to the wonders of google and youtube:


My memory is that we did a much more elaborate dance to this song, though I may well be confusing it with a different song and dance. It has been just over four decades, after all. When folks say "it's the same old song and dance" it just might not be.

In seminary I took one year of Hebrew, just enough to read the easier passages of the Hebrew Scriptures and to have some sense of the untranslated complexities and riches as well as the limitations of language. These are good things to be aware of when trying to interpret texts that are from another time and culture. (No, Aunt Mavis, the Bible was not written in King James English.) This helped me understand better the songs I knew by rote.

Alas, this does not help me understand when I hear modern Hebrew spoken. If they're not quoting songs, I'm lost.

I did have fun trying to read the headlines on Fervarten, the Yiddish paper I saw on the news racks in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles where I once lived. After all, Yiddish is a dialect of high German written with Hebrew letters. Mixed success on that attempt, but fun.

Peace be upon the land of Canaan (how's that for a label to antedate politics of the last 3500 years?). May Israel and Palestine live in harmony as neighbors, with every one "neath their vines and fig trees" living "at peace and unafraid."

We danced "Mayim" also:

Ushavtem mayim besason mi mayney hayeshua - let us draw water with rejoicing from the wells of salvation.

Something more contemporary--young Israeli singers in 2006 performing the song "After elimination of sound and image":


A little visual tour of Israel:


--the BB