Shalom, Rabbi Jonathan Ginsburg. This video is about the languages that you speak. Of course, you listen to English. I am Jewish so that is a Jewish language. What is the history of Jewish languages?
I think it is fair to say that if God has any language it will be Hebrew. After all the Hebrew Bible is written in Hebrew, there are few words from other languages but predominantly it is a Hebrew book.
Now, because the Jewish people were exiled from the land of Israel for 2000 years, Hebrew was not a spoken language but still always the language of our prayer book. Basically, all our prayers are in Hebrew except for a few in Aramaic and Jews pray in the vernacular too like American congregations, many Jews also have some prayers in English.
Hebrew was a language of the Jewish people. All our literature was written in Hebrew basically for the first 2000 years but then around 2000 years ago, the vernacular of the Jews was Aramaic. In fact, the holy book of the Gomorrah, the tractates which explains the mission is part of the Talmud in Aramaic. You can still hear Aramaic spoken among some people, the Kurds for example but basically for Jews the language of discussion of the Talmud.
At the same time, Jews were speaking Greek. In fact, the Hebrew Bible is translated into Greek that translation was called the Septuagint because there was a time when very few Jews spoke Greek. In fact, five are basically wrote in Greek.
And following that the Jews spoke in the language of the place where the Jews lived and for a very long time Jews spoke Yiddish. It was a language that Jews in Eastern Europe spoke for they still speak today. In fact, a man very extreme Jews the Hassidim, Yiddish is often the language of the home.
I have relatives in Israel who speak Yiddish to themselves and believe Hebrew is such a holy language because it is the language of the Bible, the language of the prayer book and even though they lived in Israel today they do not want to speak Hebrew unless it is necessary but besides that the Jews in the sporadic world kind of base their own spans spoke a different language called Ledenum.
We have Jews of course, speaking the language as I said before of the country of which they lived. Jews speak many languages because Jews have lived and live today in dozens and dozens of countries.
Today, for Jews who want to read our sacred literature almost everything significant has been translated into English and so it is widely accessible. Hebrew made a comeback of course, when the state of Israel is revived in modern times and it was actually debatable what the language of Israel should be. Not everyone agreed that it should be Hebrew because many people felt that Hebrew was a dead language like Latin. It could never possibly be the language of a modern country but a fellow name Ben Yuhudah and others argued strenuously for Hebrew of being the language of Israel. Today, it has become the language for all kinds of new words have to be created. A lot of them are based on the Bible words but we have a living language of Hebrew.
So, what is the language of the Jewish people? Well, ask yourself this.
Today, of course I am speaking in English and Jews are speaking whatever language they are speaking, but if you want a guarantee that there is something that you write today or something that is written will be read by Jews a thousand years from now, there is only one language that you could guarantee that it would be understood and that would be Hebrew because that has been the one language since the beginning and that is the language that the Jewish people has spoken. And we believed God spoke to us in a sense that wrote to Torah give the Torah in Hebrew.
Now, Hebrew itself in letters had undergone significant changes. We have texts in Hebrew which we do not really used or recognized today as the letters of Hebrew but the language itself, the word itself are the words of the Bible.
So, Hebrew is of course, always been the language of the Jews, remains the language of the Jews and should be, and so it is really incumbent upon Jews to learn Hebrew. We offer many classes in reading Hebrew. There are other courses around the city of Chicago for example on speaking Hebrew. The best way to go is to immerse yourself in an old pond either in Israel or here to learn Hebrew but certainly Hebrew is the language of the Jewish people.
Now, there is one issue left which is about prayer. The problem is that even if most Jews who come to say, “I really do not know Hebrew well enough to be even read it as quickly as we pray,” and are not able to translate the words—so that is a challenge similar to the challenge of the Catholic church have when they did away with Latin.
So there were experiments done especially by Reform Synagogues in moving to an all English prayer service and it is based for mostly English prayer service based on the origins of the Reforming Germany while it prayed mostly in German.
And of course, to a certain prayers it can be said in the vernacular but then experiment failed. The Jewish people want us to keep it in Hebrew even though they really do not understand that but they want to pray it in Hebrew, and so even on the reform movement now their prayer book happened to be in Hebrew. The service does have more Hebrew in them and our service, which is conservative, is about 90% in Hebrew.
And people we have many different ways in which people can learn and of course if they attend, they will learn the words in the music—but Hebrew is for some reason the heart of the Jews, and we can understand why that is the language they prefer even if they do not understand it.
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