{"id":96855,"date":"2022-08-04T17:05:10","date_gmt":"2022-08-04T15:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=96855"},"modified":"2022-07-28T08:22:03","modified_gmt":"2022-07-28T06:22:03","slug":"28-05-74","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=96855","title":{"rendered":"Trapped in Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Trapped in Translation<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

SETH M. LIMMER<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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TABLET MAGAZINE<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

How to explain Judaism in English\u2014a language whose terminology around religion is built on Christian concepts.<\/span><\/h4>\n

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We can\u2019t translate everything. At least not precisely. Concepts exist in certain cultures that are absent, or markedly different, in others. We all know the adage that Eskimos have 47 different words for snow. Whether or not that\u2019s true, it is clear that Inuit and Yupik cultures have a closer connection to snow than do the residents of Tahiti. It makes sense that these cultures would differentiate the many kinds of snowfall according to the many ways that those distinctions affect their daily lives. We even might be able to translate some of these snow words into English: Aqilokoq <\/em>is softly falling snow, piegnartoq<\/em> is snow that\u2019s perfect for sled-driving. We can know what these snow words mean. But unless and until we understand the Eskimo mindset, we cannot truly glean what they signify.<\/span><\/p>\n

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English has words deemed essential for religion: faith, liturgy, Bible, even \u201creligion\u201d itself. None of these words really exist in Hebrew. Certainly, not a single one of these Christian concepts correlates directly to anything that can be considered Jewish. Of course, Modern Hebrew has the vocabulary to translate these English phrases. And, obviously, Judaism does possess ideas and structures that share a similarity with Christian concepts like worship and Scripture. But that similarity all too often masks a vast difference. That difference prevents us from understanding what Judaism is at its essence. But before we examine those differences, let\u2019s go back and examine the origins of the English language.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The furthest back we can trace a distinct English language is to the sixth century, the earliest date for the emergence of Old English. Now, Old English has far more in common with German than any English we know today; most scholars believe it is an utterly distinct language from Modern English. It\u2019s only in the ninth century that Middle English emerges. Coming into its heyday after the Norman conquest of 1066, Middle English, as anyone who\u2019s every struggled to read Chaucer knows, resembles<\/em> our English, but is still a ways away. Most people have never heard of the \u201cGreat Vowel Shift\u201d that marked the transition to Modern English, but with the arrival of Shakespeare\u2019s works and the King James Bible, the language we know today was coming into its own.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Because of the time it took for English to evolve into anything we recognize today, the tongue that shapes most American Jews\u2019 thinking is at most 1,000 years old. Jewish traditions, in even the most cautious of counting, extend back 3,000 years. Until the Greco-Roman period, Jewish thought was expressed in Hebrew; then, Aramaic, a sister language to Hebrew that was the international parlance of its day, became a secondary vessel for transmitting Jewish tradition. By the time Old English emerged around 550 CE, the Torah and the Talmud, the two core texts of Jewish thought and practice, were effectively complete. The great frames and structures of Judaism existed before any Jew ever spoke English.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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English, in contrast, was brought into existence, effectively and exclusively, by Christians. With rare exception or incursion, the island of Britain was Christian before and since the emergence of English. As polyglot language, English has its roots in many places. In terms of religious phrases, Greek and Latin, and therefore, Christian, etymologies dominate. Faith is derived from fidere<\/em>, for \u201ctrust,\u201d religion from religio<\/em>, for \u201ccult, or mode of worship.\u201dBible is from the Greek, ta Biblia<\/em>: the Book. Leitourgia, <\/em>etymon of liturgy, is likewise Attic Greek for public performance. Each of these words, and every English word connected to religion, is born of and steeped in Christian thought.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Judaism is a square peg that refuses to fit in the proverbial round hole of Christianity. Hebrew not only precedes both Christianity and English, but it is markedly different in its vocabulary and concepts. As English evolved, it of necessity coined terms to describe Christian phenomenon. Hebrew, the foundational language of Judaism, had no such need. Students of religion, a discipline that seeks to find parallels in order to appreciate distinctions, might be horrified to find that there is no Jewish word for liturgy, that there is no Jewish word for faith, that there is no Jewish word for Bible, let alone one that can barely be made to fit \u201cScripture.\u201d There is even no real Jewish word for religion.<\/span><\/p>\n

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“Even the most honest attempts to understand Judaism authentically are unconsciously undermined simply because these attempts are in English, are limited by English.”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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In a moment, we will explore each of these important distinctions. But first, we should pause and reflect on the significance of this unfathomable gap between Jewish vocabulary and Christian concepts. Most modern Jews outside Israel (and certainly the audience of this work) are native English speakers. Their worldviews and expectations are formed by the contours of the English language. Sunday morning cartoons depict Bible stories, not Torah tales. Our conversations are filled with faith: Keep the faith, act in good faith, have faith in yourself. Intermediate schools teach comparative religion, subsuming Judaism into a category it doesn\u2019t neatly fit. So when most modern Jews approach Judaism, they come with questions and preconceptions that are Christian. They believe Judaism is a religion; they imagine faith in God is a prerequisite. They want to know about liturgy and worship, and learn all about the Bible (which, in the most obvious acquiescence to Christian English, they usually call the Old Testament). Even the most honest attempts to understand Judaism authentically are unconsciously undermined simply because these attempts are in English, are limited by English.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Most English speakers operate under the false linguistic assumption that Judaism and Christianity run on the same operating system. Nothing could be further from the case. Anyone who remembers back to the days of floppy discs recalls that what worked on a Mac would need to be entirely reformatted for a PC. The analogy holds here: Judaism just has a different source code from Christianity. Its program language is Am <\/em>and Avodah<\/em>, Torah and Talmud. And it hardly suffices to translate these terms as people, worship, Bible, and (fascinatingly) Talmud. That\u2019s not really what these essential Jewish concepts are about. To delimit these millennia-old, remarkably robust ideas with one-word terms born of alien Christianity is simply unfair. To truly appreciate Judaism, its core concepts need to be liberated from their simplistic English \u201cdefinitions.\u201d Judaism\u2019s concepts, and Judaism itself, need to be appreciated for what they are, and\u2014especially for English speakers\u2014need to be distinguished from common Christian concepts.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Let\u2019s start with \u201creligion.\u201d It is only the fifth definition of the phrase in the Oxford English Dictionary that doesn\u2019t use the word religion as part of the definition:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Belief in or acknowledgement of some superhuman power or powers (esp. a god or gods) which is typically manifested in obedience, reverence, and worship; such a belief as part of a system defining a code of living, esp. as a means of achieving spiritual or material improvement.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Now, some might say this definition of religion describes Judaism perfectly: There is a belief, or at least covenant with, Yahweh, which is manifest in a series of commandments that both define a code of life and set a prescribed course for worship. Even though I will argue later that little of that is true, this OED understanding of religion fails to capture an essential element of Judaism: the self-conception as an Am<\/em>, a people. From Torah\u2019s time through our own, there are plenty of individuals who are born \u201cJewish\u201d yet neither believe in nor acknowledge any sort of superhuman power who defines their code of living. Regardless, many of these individuals fully consider themselves \u201cJewish.\u201d Judaism might overlap with certain aspects of \u201creligion,\u201d but it far exceeds the boundaries of such a limiting term.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Proof positive of the failure of \u201creligion\u201d to define Judaism is a phrase I have heard countless times in my career: I\u2019m Jewish, but not religious<\/em>. Early in my rabbinate, I took this assertion as a challenge. I would ask people what they found meaningful about their Jewish life, and answers would include everything from cooking for holidays to doing the work of social justice all the way through\u2014shockingly\u2014coming to Shabbat services. I sometimes sensed that what people meant when they said, \u201cI\u2019m Jewish, but not religious,\u201d was that they loved Judaism\u2014they were willingly engaging with a rabbi, after all\u2014but that they didn\u2019t believe in God. Sometimes, I even tried to convince people that they were<\/em> fully Jewish, and shouldn\u2019t let anything stand in the way of their own self-perception. Over time, however, I realized that these people didn\u2019t have a problem. The problem was the word \u201creligion\u201d itself. It\u2019s a Christian concept that simply doesn\u2019t fit Judaism.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Opening any Hebrew-English dictionary will tell you that the Hebrew word for \u201creligion\u201d is dat<\/em>. In this, there is a double irony. First of all, dat<\/em> is a hardly Hebrew; it\u2019s an Old Iranian loan-word that first appears in the biblical book of Esther, one of the later entrants in the Jewish canon. Secondly, dat <\/em>means \u201claw,\u201d \u201cedict,\u201d or \u201cpractice.\u201d In the book of Esther, dat <\/em>indicates in one instance the edict of the king, and in another the custom of drinking to excess. By the time of the Talmud, dat<\/em> maintained this same semantic range from custom through law. It wasn\u2019t until the revival of Modern Hebrew started by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the 19th century that dat<\/em> came to mean \u201creligion.\u201d And why did this happen? Modern Hebrew needed to compete in the international marketplace of ideas: Modern Hebrew required its own words for phrases that were widespread in other languages, most prominent among which was English. And so this loan-word of antiquity was equated with \u201creligion,\u201d translated as such in a dictionary. Hebrew needed a place holder, and dat<\/em> seemed to fit the bill. But dat<\/em> doesn\u2019t fit the definition of \u201creligion\u201d in any meaningful way. Hebrew really has no concept of religion whatsoever.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The chasm between English and Hebrew is equally deep when it comes to the Bible. For Christians, the Bible has always been a written document. There\u2019s a reason it\u2019s called ta Biblia<\/em>: the book. By the time Christianity arrived on the scene, there were already texts of what they call the Old Testament. The Christian movement was propelled forward by the written word: Gospels authored by individuals sharing the stories of Jesus, and Epistles\u2014literally \u201cletters\u201d\u2014early authorities supposedly scripted and sent to Galicia, Thessalonia, Rome, and more. Christianity began<\/em> with the written word as it foundation. The first chapter of the first Gospel cites the text of the Jewish prophet Isaiah; the last of the Gospels opens with the line, \u201cIn the beginning was the word.\u201d From the beginning, Christianity had a book, the<\/em> book, ta Biblia<\/em>: the Bible.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Judaism has no Bible\u2014at least not in the Christian sense of the word. The earliest name for a collection of Jewish traditions and teachings that come down to us is Torah<\/em>. Over the millennia, Torah has become a most elastic word, meaning either something very specific or something incredibly broad. For our purposes here, Torah simply means teaching<\/em>. This is why Torah<\/em> can be something as narrow as a set of regulations regarding lepers, can indicate a five-volume literary collection falsely attributed to Moses, and also is able to signify the remarkably broad category of \u201call legitimate Jewish learning.\u201d Torah<\/em> is teaching. In the time that the collection we call \u201cTorah\u201d was created, the primary vehicle for this teaching was oral transmission. Yes, the words capturing these teachings were collected and put to parchment. But that inscription and collection happened long <\/em>after the tales and laws were common cultural currency. To the Jewish mind, it matters not that these matters are written. What is important is that the words of Torah are taught, transmitted, from one generation to the next.<\/span><\/p>\n

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“Religion. Bible. Scripture. Worship. The phrases fit Judaism like a hand-me-down outfit from a sibling who\u2019s a different size.”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The same is true of Scripture. Obviously, Judaism has (at least one) sacred text. The Tanakh<\/em>, a term often translated as Hebrew for \u201cBible,\u201d is in fact an acronym of three collections: Torah<\/em> (here, specifically the five books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), Neviim<\/em>\/Prophets (histories from their time and reports of their words), and Ketuvim<\/em>\/Writings (perhaps the world\u2019s most perfectly named miscellany of texts). Tanakh <\/em>as a term originated during the time of the Rabbis whose argument and reasoning are captured in the Talmud. Even though Tanakh<\/em> was coined by the Rabbis, they hardly used it as the word for what we today might call the Hebrew Bible. Instead, they employed an entirely different word: Mikra<\/em>. Mikra<\/em> means \u201cthat which is proclaimed,\u201d or read out loud. Even though, by the Rabbinic Period, Judaism\u2019s earliest sacred text were written down, what was important to that Jewish community wasn\u2019t the fact of their inscription, but the importance of their being pronounced aloud. The Rabbis made mainstream the practice of ensuring that Jewish teaching (Torah<\/em>) was publicly proclaimed (Mikra<\/em>) three times every week. Was this Torah<\/em> written in a scroll? Were the collections of Tanakh <\/em>bound in a book? Definitely, and probably. But the existence of Torah <\/em>in written form was not the important issue; that it was a book or a scroll was of secondary importance (if any at all). Mikra <\/em>mattered to the Jews of antiquity because it was read aloud, performed publicly. Tanakh <\/em>might look like a book, and be roughly parallel to what Christians call the Bible, but in essence an orally proclaimed Mikra<\/em> is something far different from a book.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Scripture and Bible belong to the Christian realm of religion. They do not nest neatly into the Jewish worldview imagined in Hebrew. And neither does worship, one of the great expectations of religion, fit snugly within Jewish thought. Worship of the Christian God is quite distinct from the Jewish conception of Divine Service. \u201cWorship\u201d originates from the idea of attributing esteem, which we see through the usage of \u201cworshipful\u201d as \u201chonorable.\u201d From its early English usage, this honor was quickly connected to divinity: As a verb, \u201cworship\u201d became expressing reverence for God. Most contemporary English speakers roughly equate \u201cworship\u201d with \u201cpraise\u201d: We see evangelicals engaging in \u201cPraise the Lord!\u201d sessions, or see Protestant prayer services replete with hymns honoring God\u2019s good works. Now, as those Protestant hymnals robustly attest\u2014with their ample implementation of Halleluyah<\/em>\u2014Hebrew does have words for both \u201cpraise\u201d and \u201cworship.\u201d \u201cHalleluyah\u201d means \u201cpraise God\u201d: hallelu<\/em> is the Hebrew vocative, \u201clet us pray,\u201d and \u201cYah<\/em>\u201d is a short form of God\u2019s proper name. Likewise, as many who attend Jewish services know, \u201cworship\u201d has its rough parallel in Hebrew. Toward the end of daily services, we read the prayer \u201cAleinu l\u2019shabeach,<\/em>\u201d \u201cit is upon us to attest to the goodness,\u201d of God. Prayer and worship do<\/em> exist in Hebrew.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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However, neither prayer nor worship are essential Jewish categories. The \u201cworship\u201d of Aleinu l\u2019shabeach<\/em> is liturgical language reserved for certain small segments of the service. And while scores of Halleluyah-shouting poems of praise were created by Psalmists, and notwithstanding some of the Psalms\u2019 placement in standard Jewish prayer books, these paeans are not the standard of what many call Jewish \u201cworship.\u201d The Jewish act of regular engagement with our duty to the Divine has a proper Hebrew name: Avodah<\/em>. Hebrew for \u201cservice,\u201d even servitude, Avodah<\/em> was the descriptor of Jewish obligations during the time when the temple stood and such service was effectuated through sacrifices on the altar. As Judaism shifted from its cultic center in Jerusalem to a way of life played out in synagogues strewn across the world, Avodah<\/em> remained the word for one\u2019s service, one\u2019s regular obligations to God. The proper name of our prayerbook is Seder Avodat Israel<\/em>, the \u201cOrder of the Service of Israel.\u201d The thrice-daily series of readings contained in these liturgies are the service Jews are meant to perform for God on a most regular basis.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Service to God is what \u201cworship\u201d is in Judaism. Our service to God is rooted in our Exodus experience: We were slaves (avadim<\/em>) to Pharaoh, and were redeemed, or restored to God, that we might be servants (avadim<\/em>) of the Divine. Jewish \u201cworship\u201d is one of our forms of servitude to the Divine. And while this service certainly contains some praise and some worship, its fundamental building block is entirely other: Most of our sacred service is composed of rabbinic blessings or scriptural citations. Worship and praise are about expressing honor to God; that is part, but hardly all of what passes for worship in Jewish setting. Study, history, and theology are much more a part of a Jewish service than are praise and worship.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Religion. Bible. Scripture. Worship. The phrases fit Judaism like a hand-me-down outfit from a sibling who\u2019s a different size. I could go on at greater length, explaining how \u201cfaith\u201d isn\u2019t a Jewish concept, how \u201ccharity\u201d didn\u2019t exist in Judaism until we encountered Christians, and how\u2014despite what many of us were taught at temple\u2014angels are a huge part of Hebrew heritage. Actually, this last example is the perfect summary of contemporary Jewish existence. Christian culture (and the English language that expresses it) has some powerful portrayals of angels: Archangel Rafael comes to heal, cute little cherubs surround Jesus in Heaven, and fallen angel Satan is evil incarnate. Now, even though Torah and Talmud are filled with angels, melachim<\/em>, or \u201cdivine messengers\u201d in Hebrew, our angels infrequently function in such fashions. Furthermore, while angelology is central to Christianity, it lives on the fringe and mystical territories of Jewish life. Rather than labor at length to explain these vast differences between what we take \u201cangels\u201d to indicate in English and what melachim<\/em> means in Hebrew, generations of Jewish teachers\u2014despite knowing better\u2014have thrown their hands in the air and simply said, \u201cJudaism doesn\u2019t believe in angels.\u201d It is sometimes easier for English-speaking Jews to deny the truths of our tradition than to bother with the limits of translation.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This is the trap of translation: Jews tend to deny essential, or important, aspects of who we really are because of the difficulty of expressing ourselves within and against<\/em> Christian language. It can be exhausting to be an English-speaking Jew. This hardly means Jewish life can only honestly be lived in Hebrew. A vibrant Jewish life is entirely possible in English, even only<\/em> in English. But, in order to create such a life of meaning, we must be honest about where Judaism fits in English, and where it doesn\u2019t. Even in English, we must explain and understand crucial differences between linguistic expectations regarding what are called \u201creligions,\u201d but which we Jews understand as traditions that encompass particular practices, hierarchies of value, understandings of the Divine, folkways and foodstuffs, and, of course, our own language. It will only be when we remove ourselves from this trap of translation that we will be free to understand, to live, and to grow Jewish life in our modern world.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Rabbi Seth M. Limmer<\/strong>, DHL, is a widely published intellectual in the Jewish world, a national leader in the Reform movement, and a vocal advocate for justice in his hometown of Chicago and across America.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Trapped in Translation SETH M. LIMMER TABLET MAGAZINE How to explain Judaism in English\u2014a language whose terminology around religion is built on Christian concepts. . We can\u2019t translate everything. At least not precisely. Concepts exist in certain cultures that are absent, or markedly different, in others. We all know the adage that Eskimos have 47 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96855"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96855"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97088,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96855\/revisions\/97088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}