You Lifted Us from Amongst all the Languages

In the Amidah for Yom Tov, we credit Hashem as the one who “lifted us from among the languages”. Importance is given not just to our nationhood (“You chose us from among the nations”) but also to our bond of common language.

George Orwell made our generation very aware of how language shapes thought by having the fascist state further its thought-control through replacing current English with NewSpeak. I was recently reminded of this idea when someone on the net asked the old question, “Is Judaism a race or a religion?”

On the one hand, your Jewishness is typically inherited from your mother. This would lead one to think of Jewish identity as racial. On the other hand, we accept converts, as would a religion.

As I see it, the problem is caused by the pigeon-holing. Why must it be one or the other? Because English has these two terms readily available, we — without even thinking — try to force this concept into one of these two categories. English, though, was created by Christians, and need not have a term that describes how Judaism views itself. We don’t even notice how the language channeled our thoughts.

(For that matter, the quote that is this post’s title is not translated all that literally for this reason. We refer to ourselves as a “lashon“, a group of people united by language, who were elevated from other such groups. The Arab People are a lashon. In Darfur, Sudan, Arabs slayed numerous Africans. The Arabs shared a religion with Darfur’s Moslems. Genetically, the two groups are indistinguishable. One group speaks Arabic, and has the literature and cultural elements that comes with it. The other does not. The genocide was over leshonos, not religion or ethnicity. Yet English has no equivalent for “lashon“. And so we can ask, how close are its concepts to those denoted by “am“, “kelal“, “adas” and so on?)

Rav Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, in his commentary to this week’s parashah makes a similar observation. Hebrew has no word for “religion”. It’s an alien concept. “Religion” connotes a belief system, rituals, ways of escaping the world into G-d’s comfort. But Judaism is about bringing G-d’s ways into how we act and react in the everyday world.

Another example he offers is “virtue”. In Latin languages the root is “vir”, manliness, virility. The German equivalent, “Tugend”, is from “taugen”, meaning useful. In Hebrew, the word is “mitzvah” a commandment. The Lubavitcher Rebbe zt”l, pointed out how it had also had connotations of the root mem-tzadi-vuv, and could indicate “to aim” or “to focus”. There is no way for a Hebrew speaking person to talk about doing the right thing without some level of his mind getting vague hints that the “right thing” is “doing what G-d commanded so that we may achieve His goals for us”.

The Torah begins the story by telling us “The whole earth was of one language and uniform ideas (devarim)” (Breishis 11:1). The source of the problem was not only that their ability to communicate aided their plans, but it also lead them to being of like mind. One person was able to mislead an entire generation.

According to traditional histories, Avram was 48 when the Tower of Babel was built. He was an adult who consciously chose not to participate in the endeavor. And as a reward, when the other clans were given their own languages, causing them to spread out and become separate nations, Avram was not so punished, and still spoke and thought in Hebrew.

The gift of speaking Hebrew, then, is no small thing. It’s not just exposure to a holier mode of speech. Hebrew gives us the tools to organize our concepts in the way Hashem intended. Instead of asking whether Judaism is a race or a religion, with the connotation of those words, we can look at Am Yisrael, and Adas Yisrael, and the meaning given those terms by the Chumash.

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  1. Sue Bernstein says:

    For depth on the inyon of mi kol lashonos, see R. Nathan Lopes Cardozo’s Between Silence and Speech, Chapter 3 “The Tower of Babel”. Secondly, in Kiddush for Yom Tov we say “mi kol ha AM.. mi kol ha LASHON”, singular. I can find no indication of why the singular, can you contribute to solve?

    • micha says:

      Mikol am… mikol lashon, without the hei hayedi’ah (ha-). But in any case…

      “Am” and “lashon” are being used here in the abstract. Not “elevated us from among all the nations”, but “elevated us from the common notion of nation”.

      But I don’t have a solid idea about how to answer the question I think you’re asking, why does Qiddush have
      אשר בחר בנו מכל עם, ורוממתנו מכל לשון
      but the Amidah has
      אַתָּה בְחַרְתָּנוּ מִכָּל הָעַמִּים, אָהַבְתָּ אותָנוּ וְרָצִיתָ בָּנוּ, וְרומַמְתָּנוּ מִכָּל הַלְּשׁונות וְקִדַּשְׁתָּנוּ בְּמִצְותֶיךָ….

      Thinking out loud, “Atah bachartanu” is a historical statement, and therefore we speak of the nations and language-communities. But when we speak of G-d in principle singling us out, it’s not just in comparison to existing examples of peoples, but in comparison to the concept of ordinariness.

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