Chadron, Nebraska is not exactly a hotspot of Judaism. Tucked away in the northeast corner of the state, a couple of hours due south from Mount Rushmore, this town of roughly 5,000 people is a slice of small-town America - and miles and miles away from even the nearest Chabad, let alone a full-fledged Jewish community. And so you can understand why the following encounter took me so much by surprise.
My wife and I stayed in a beautiful Holiday Inn Express in Chadron on a recent road trip, and after an early morning davening, I walked over to the breakfast area to get a drink. Breakfast had yet to begin, and the hotel staffer charged with setting up, a lovely woman named Melissa, noticed the letters on my tallis bag.
"Do you speak Hebrew?" she inquired.
"In fact, I do."
"Aleikem Shalom!" she replied brightly, if hesitantly.
Recovering quickly from my shock, I responded "Shalom Aleichem - do you speak Hebrew?" Again, I am barely expecting anyone to have seen an Orthodox Jew before, let alone speak Hebrew.
"I'm learning, although some of the vowels still give me problems."
"That's wonderful!", said I. "If I may ask, what inspired you to do so?"
"To get closer to god," she replied...
...and that response struck me like a bolt of lightening. We would continue our conversation an hour or two later when I can back down for breakfast, and it was clear that Melissa was a woman of faith and conviction, who was determined to do what she could to bolster her own personal practice of religion (albeit a different religion from my own).
Our conversation got me thinking - how much discussion do we have in Jewish Day Schools about teaching Hebrew? Beyond simply explicit Ivrit instruction, the place of Hebrew language in our instruction of other Judaic subjects, subjects where the original text is in Hebrew, is and has been a hot topic on and off for decades. Ivrit B'Ivrit, having Hebrew being the spoken language in the classroom of Judaic subjects, is an approach whose time seems to have mostly passed (with a few notable exceptions), but even having Hebrew be the language of written work is often a struggle. There are a myriad of explanations and justifications as to why introducing more Hebrew into the Chumash or Gemara classroom is difficult - ostensibly for the students, but sometimes for the teachers as well - but I wonder if we ever stop for a moment and consider Melissa's message:
Knowing Hebrew allows us to come closer to God.
Hebrew is the language of the Tanach, of the Mishna, of the Siddur. It is the language through which God spoke and continues to speak to His people. It is lashon ha-kodesh, the holy tongue, and we believe that it earns that appellation not only because of what it is used for, but because of its inherent qualities of purity. The better we and our students know Hebrew, the more opportunities we all have to access the divine and to continually come closer to him.
When framed in this way, it becomes harder to justify avoiding Hebrew in our teaching. Yes, it can be a challenge, for us as much as for our students. And, yes, real questions still have to be asked about the trade-offs involved in introducing more Hebrew to an English-speaking population. However, we also have to think about what our goals are in our teaching and what helps us move closer to achieving those goals. Melissa, working in a Holiday Inn in a small town in Middle America, is spending her evenings making the effort to bring herself closer to god. Surely we can at least ask ourselves if we are doing the same.
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