The following was written on Friday, May 24th, 2009
Now in my final week in Israel, I wanted to take the opportunity to share a particularly salient part of the Kivunim experience that has given a level of cohesiveness to the year as a consistent part of our lives and thoughts, while also serving as a concrete basis for distinction as we grapple with the different people, places and ideas that we have encountered. This entry is a note on languages.
Language was a foundational part of Kivunim even before the year began. Because the program didn’t officially start until the middle of October, I had about six weeks at the end of the summer to spend in preparation. Much of the time was spent enjoying my family, visiting my friends at college, following and participating in the presidential campaign, reading some required books for Kivunim, and doing some last minute shopping for life abroad. Apart from all that, because language study would account for half of the academic program in Israel, learning Hebrew became a central focus of my preparation during those weeks.
A little over a month after I decided to go on Kivunim, my father had bought me the Rosetta Stone program, Hebrew edition, for my birthday. For those who are not familiar with it, Rosetta Stone is a wonderful computer program for learning languages. Named for the multilingual Ancient Egyptian artifact that was discovered by Napoleon, and greatly advanced the modern understanding of hieroglyphics, the program takes the user through an intensive series of immersion exercises that develops skills for reading, writing, speaking, and listening to the language of choice. The idea was for me to learn as much Hebrew as possible in order to get the most out of the year in Israel. Every day I would wake up and do about four hours of Rosetta Stone. By the time I received the Hebrew placement exam from Kivunim, it was clear that the work had paid off. Serendipitously enough, the last Rosetta Stone lesson that I completed before I got on the plane to Tel Aviv was about asking for and giving directions—the English meaning of the word Kivunim.
From the time I ordered my drink on the plane to the time I got off and started reading the signs at the airport in Israel, language provided the most basic indication that I had transitioned into a new place and stage of life. When we began studying in Jerusalem we were thrust into a world of intensive language study. We would forge a special connection with the Arab staff of our hostel by practicing our rudimentary Arabic with them. I still remember the first time I read the Arabic on a street sign in Israel.
As my relationship with Israel has developed over the course of the year, nothing has been so indicative of my place and level of comfort in the country as my ability to speak the language. First I was a tourist, ordering food and saying thank you. When I became a regular at certain restaurants, my orders became more complicated. The first time I really felt like a resident of Jerusalem was the day I asked a taxi driver in Hebrew about the new mayor. Perhaps needless to say, nothing made me feel quite as at home in Jerusalem as when I gave directions in Hebrew to Israeli tourists from another part of the country.
Language’s role in my informal Israel experience even transcended Hebrew and Arabic sometimes. I was able to attend a Shabbaton (an organized weekend program) for long-term Israel program participants, and join in the Spanish-speaking group’s discussions. When Kivunim visited the Deaf Museum in Bat Yam, we were introduced to a whole new language community; indeed, every country has its own distinct sign language, which varies and relates to other sign languages, underscoring an interplay between common origin and separate development similar to that which characterizes verbal languages.
It is fitting that half of the academics on Kivunim are dedicated to language study. Learning Hebrew and Arabic together allow us to comprehend the cultural context in which we exist on a whole new level, using the natives’ terminology, which often doesn’t translate so perfectly—a model for the cultural differences that can be difficult to understand but are so fundamental to what makes diversity enriching. When it comes to Israel, language is a striking tool in perpetuating the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, but the more Hebrew and Arabic one learns, the more clear it is that language could just as easily be employed for reconciliation. Hebrew and Arabic are both Semitic languages, and share hundreds of cognates and much grammatical structure. Early in the year we had a session at Givat Haviva, a center for coexistence education in Israel, with a sociolinguist who discussed how language perpetuated the conflict sometimes in ways that the people didn’t even realize, by bolstering stereotypes and communicating values almost implicitly.
Several months ago I moved into a room that faced the Old City of Jerusalem, which sits on the Green Line right next to a structure that has many different names, including security fence and separation barrier. Sometimes between Israelis and Palestinians, when the two peoples live in such proximity nearly on top of one another, it seems that the conditions of the relationship, whether conflict or understanding, rely heavily on the semantics of the borders and events, which are all experienced from many different perspectives. One of the most powerful examples is that in Palestinian communities Israeli Independence Day is known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.”
When it comes to the Jewish world, it is sometimes said that Hebrew is our DNA. Indeed, if there was ever a route to roots in Jewish identity, it would have to include Hebrew, as the grammar and history of the roots, or shorashim, that govern the language tell a story and reveal many basic ideas about the world. There are many examples of words that are connected in Hebrew in ways that forces us to ask questions and confront ourselves. (The following are a few of my favorite examples, brought to my attention by David Leishman, an old friend of my dad’s with whom I spent a good amount of time over the course of the year.) The word for “leadership,” manhigut, shares a root with the word “to drive,” linhog, and also “custom,” minhag. The idea that a good leader is able to keep the rear-view mirror in mind, to relate vision with a sense of history, has theoretical and practical applications, and certainly shows how Jewish values ooze out of Hebrew. Even the word Zionism, or tzionut in Hebrew, shares a root with the word mitzuyan, or “excellent.” The idea that the two-thousand-year-old dream of having a state in Israel (centered on Mount Zion in Jerusalem) does not end with the establishment of the state, but continues in the pursuit of excellence, paves the foundation of much of modern Jewish and Israeli belief in progress—even as so many different, and even conflicting, visions of an “excellent” future exist.
Language is at the heart of Zionist history itself. It is hard to imagine a successful national movement that didn’t have a unified language; before Israel was established, Jews around the world spoke all kinds of languages including Yiddish (Judeo-German), Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Judeo-Arabic, and hundreds of other dialectic derivatives of Hebrew. Today perhaps the most famous street in Jerusalem is named after Eliezer Ben Yehudah, the man who resurrected Hebrew for modern Israeli society. The bottom line is that in Jewish identity Hebrew is not just a translation from one’s first language. To those for whom Hebrew is a first language, these ideas are central to their most basic way of communicating and putting the world into words.
In all our travels this year, just as when we arrived in Israel, our efforts to connect with the local culture during our short stints abroad were fueled by picking up a few phrases in the local language of each place. In fact, our familiarity with the languages usually paralleled our overall understanding of each place. I remember when we were in Greece, I read Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela. When he spoke of the injustices of South Africa during Apartheid, it was clear that language was at the core of the inequality. While Mandela spoke the several languages of his country, the white European community only spoke one; they only needed to speak one. I quickly became very self-conscious of the fact that I only spoke English (however much semi-fluentness I might have in Spanish and Hebrew). In a world where the United States has so much influence, although it follows historical patterns that the less powerful are often more knowledgeable because they have their own culture and the dominant culture to access for success, it seemed to me that English-speakers’ comfort, our luxury to expect subtitles—not just when we watch foreign films, but when we order food in a foreign restaurant or interact with people abroad—is unfair, to say the least. In many of the countries that we visited, English was a required part of the school curriculum, while world language study in my experience was always more of an effort to learn about different cultures than a necessity for success in future work. As we have traveled we have tried to use more and more of the local languages, bringing small vocabulary cards with us on our trips.
Ultimately, outside of Israel we were usually simply humbled when the alphabet changed, but that didn’t change the fact that this year has made many of us more determined than ever to learn more languages, and put language study at the center of our interest in concerning ourselves with the world at large. Even if it would seem that English-speakers don’t have to learn other languages to communicate with people or even work in most parts of the world, in all our travels knowing the local language has felt like more and more of a necessity to entering a culture and getting the most out of one’s time in new places. After all, what gets lost in translation, or what people don’t tell you if they can’t say it in your language, is often the most important part of their story.
The small moments of understanding between us and our hosts in all these countries have been priceless. In perhaps the most storied example of language’s constant role in our travels, Kivunim boarded our train from Greece to Bulgaria with ticket receipts but no tickets. What ensued was a flustered Bulgarian conductor talking to a Bulgarian passenger who spoke a little bit of German talking to a couple of us who spoke a bit of German translating into English for our staff. The crisis was averted, and—on a train to the most foreign place many of us had ever seen—none of us would ever take language for granted again. We have seen Coca-Cola written in many different alphabets. We have even been to the desert in Morocco where they filmed Babel, the 2006 movie about multiple narratives of characters who find themselves plagued by lack of common language—hearkening back to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, when God scattered the people all over the earth and confounded their speech so they couldn’t understand each other. Whether it was speaking with my taxi driver in Spain about Obama, or exchanging small talk with a taxi driver in Turkey until I had absolutely exhausted all salutary questions and answers, including “how much for the ride,” these interactions paved the way for the basis of endearment that I have to the places we have visited this year.
We have found that language, like art, architecture, music, food, clothing, and even nationalism and identity, grows organically with laws that aren’t invented, but create themselves through our hands. Language can certainly be picked apart and studied analytically, but like any other creation of humanity, it has an inspired origin that cannot be altogether explained. In synagogues all over the world we would find prayer books with prayers written in different languages. We would struggle with the difference between Ladino (Spanish written in the Hebrew alphabet) and the English transliteration of Hebrew in our own siddurim; does it show more solid identity to read the spiritual language in your own alphabet or to read your own language in the spiritual alphabet?
In Morocco the fragmented and complicated national identity is modeled by the fact that most people know two or three languages, but only half of the country is literate. In fact, before we went to Morocco, we met a non-Jewish Moroccan living in Israel, who told us how he would write in his journal from left to right as much as from right to left, changing from French to Arabic to English to Hebrew on a dime, often depending on the emotional tenor or content of his thoughts. In Germany hearing the German language was at the heart of much of the struggle that we had with modern Germany; while for some of us the mere sound of it made us think of Jewish persecution, it was also a useful way to get the best beer in town.
When we were in Morocco, I read a book called The Stuff of Thought, by Steven Pinker. The whole book, subtitled Language As A Window Into Human Nature, is a treatise on “the ideas, feelings, and attachments that are visible through our language and that make up our nature.” Pinker’s assessment is that words “are rooted in our development as individuals, but also in the history of our language community, and in the evolution of our species.” It is a wonderful book that also speaks to language’s key role not just in classifying and expressing ideas, but also allowing us to create news ones and teach ourselves to think differently and innovate through metaphors.
This has been at the core of this year, and I hope will serve as an area of consistent curiosity and improved understanding. As hard and rare as it is to travel as Kivunim did this year, it is even more difficult to learn all the languages necessary to really access all the places we saw. The lofty ideals of Kivunim operate with humility towards the complexity of the world that is always presented by language as the most basic and nuanced tool for communication and understanding. Indeed, how can we expect to understand each other without (at least!) a common language, when even people who speak the same language have misunderstandings?
In preparation for the trip to India, we have already learned that Sanskrit has more in common with English than Hebrew. India represents the insight that language offers in ways I can only begin to imagine. Through our education of language as much as culture this year, we have become more conscious of our western perspective; this has been especially highlighted so far by our study of India. The Indian civilization has existed throughout the ten thousand years of spoken language’s history, but in the West we usually deem a civilization viable based on its ability to write, because those are the cultures that left records for us to study. In Arab society too, the written Arabic that was standardized in the Koran is what unites all the spoken dialects of the Arab world. In an embarrassing example of how language can reflect the history and culture of a society, we still often associate the “Indian” label with Native Americans, representing a 500-year-old assumption that the continent most immediately west of Europe was Asia…
As someone who had only traveled to three countries outside the United States before Kivunim, two of which were English-speaking, I hold appreciation for language as one of the most foundational lessons I have learned this year. I have learned to see language as a constant and basic model for so many of the social and scientific processes that we can observe in the world. Therefore, it is fitting that my experience of language this year is symbolic of a larger trend in my education; perhaps no other part of my learning this year speaks as clearly to the trend of my experiences bolstering and further developing my previous intellectual understanding. If you had asked me before Kivunim about the importance of language, I would have spoken to the importance of communication between people. I would have talked about coexistence and intercultural understanding, about how language was at the heart of conflict, and held the keys to its resolution. Yet, in retrospect, after a year of learning and encountering different languages, of course it seems that before this year I barely had a concept of just how essential language is to understanding each other, the world, and ourselves.
For all the times I have written about the importance of things that we tend to take for granted, from food to loved ones to memory and imagination, again language stands as a clear model for learning such a lesson. When it comes to identity—the things with which we struggle that make us appreciate who we are when we enter a room and feel different—there is nothing like language to ignite the flames, and that is something I have experienced over and over again as a traveler this year.
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