The nun across the table had devoted much of her life to the academic study of religious conversion. “One knows what religion one is meant to be,” she said to me over herbal tea, “When one finds a religious environment where the sounds of the music, the prayer, the rituals and even of the echoes in the sacred space feel like home.” I thought of my synagogue and my cherished Friday night Shabbat service. For decades I heard those familiar tunes, many of them in the reformed Jewish environments composed in the ‘70s and ‘80s by Jewish folksinger Debbie Friedman. If I hear Mi Shebeirach or Lecha Dodi sung in a certain tune, in those sounds I am home.
Those harmonies and melodies are in my blood. Without conscious decision, my body will rise up on tiptoes when we sing the word kadosh, holy. I find myself, without thinking, bending into a shuffling bow at the beginning of the Amidah prayer, or preparing my throat for the high note at the end of the Aleinu, like a long jumper who knows exactly when to launch into the skies at the edge of the runway track. I know the sonic contour of the reformed Jewish Shabbat liturgy very well; I know the sound of every word of those prayers and every sound means something to me. Yes, the aesthetics of this religion, particularly the sounds, feel like home to me.
There is just one big problem: I don’t speak Hebrew. I started trying to learn it as a young teen, took several classes during college, started over in several adult courses throughout my 20s and 30s. With Hebrew, I am always seemingly at the very beginning, always no matter how many hours in study I spend, or how many flashcards I cut, or how many Internet applications I download. I am always seemingly at the beginner stage, as though my brain rejects this language as a language, preferring it always to remain as wordless sounds.
Sure, I picked up some words along the way. Baruch ata Adonai, blessed are you oh God. Melech ha-olam, king of the world. The easy ones, like Shabbat, shalom, Yerushalayim. The names of the holidays and the Hebrew versions of the patriarchs and matriarchs. Over the course of my many trips to Israel, I learned how to ask the crucial questions, like where to find the bathrooms. I can also deliver a perfect Hebrew rendering of the phrase “No, I do not speak Hebrew.” And that’s about the extent of it.
My stubborn Hebrew illiteracy has been very problematic for my Jewish identity. Lacking Hebrew is certainly a barrier to any full immersion into the oldest religion of the famous “people of the book,” for whom the written word, and all of the laws and histories and archetypal portrayals of peoplehood, not to mention the volumes and volumes of commentaries on those words, are assumed to be the cornerstones. A Jew who cannot—no matter what—learn Hebrew is alienated from one of the most central aspects of Judaism, which is the language and all the ways in which it is used to convey the tradition. And for a tradition that prizes tradition, above all the tradition of reading the book about itself, illiteracy is a quick ticket to feeling like a Jewish black sheep.
For that very reason, I’ve always been extremely good at faking my Hebrew. If you stood next to me during services and didn’t notice how completely dependent I am upon the transliteration, you might even think I knew how to read Hebrew. I really commit to that transliteration and to its fluid delivery. Because I have a good singing voice and I enjoy leading a group in song, I’ve been recruited by many a rabbi to assist as a temporary Cantor, standing before a congregation and leading them in confident, well-pronounced transliterated Hebrew. I love to sing: the sounds and melodies of the words soar sublimely together, drawing the collective into unity, in a way that I imagine represent a symphonic godhead, paradoxically and potently diverse and manifold. I sing Hebrew words with the fullest heart that any religion could ask of anybody.
Of course, if a person is working solely off a transliteration, the practiced or mother tongue ear can hear that right away. A very good Israeli friend of mine came to my annual Passover Seder, as cherished and boisterous a ritual as I’ve ever seen, and he declared my Hebrew to be very…sincere.
Nobody can dispute that.
But sincerity of heart is not really the point of Judaism. For a non-creedal religion that famously prizes behavior over belief, I imagine that a much more vaunted pursuit is Hebrew literacy, rather than sincere application of Hebrew sounds.
To that end, I’ve tried for years to get better at reading this language, that still to this day dances before my eyes in lines of beautifully calligraphed squiggles. If you can give me a few minutes to root around in my memory I can tell an Alef from a Bet, but it would probably take an hour and many tiresome errors for me to get you all the way to Zayin.
Let me be clear that I’m not particularly proud of my Hebrew illiteracy. But I’ve come to accept it in myself. Part of the relaxation into my own limits was my decision to apply myself with great enthusiasm to singing out of the English transliteration of Hebrew. I do so not out of posturing or deceit, but rather out of an enthusiasm for my tradition that transcends precision—and out of fatigue from the constant reminders of my total and utter failure to internalize this ancient language.
I spent probably two and a half decades of berating myself for not being able to learn and retain Hebrew, for procrastinating Hebrew, for forgetting whatever I learned with dedicated immediacy. For years, I had sat in services and strained my eyes at the squiggles, hunting for the letters that the congregation raced over. Every time, as soon as I would find my telltale Lamed they would be off to the next Qof or Mem, leaving me in the dust. The services in which I would try to dutifully follow along with the Hebrew, were always the services where I felt most alienated, most incompetent, most frustrated, angriest at myself, stressed out and full of resolutions as to when I might become better at this thing I found to be so impossibly beautiful.
And then, about a year ago, I went to a Shabbat service and I tried an experiment that changed my life. I was tired from a long day, a long week. I was ready to lean into the spirit of Shabbat, the seventh day of rest, to remember and preserve the tradition of stopping all work. I sat down in my chair and reached for my prayer book. As my eyes scanned the squiggles I sighed in exhaustion, at yet another Hebrew language effort doomed to fruitlessness.
Suddenly, an angelic idea alighted upon my consciousness.
Put down the prayer book, the intuition said to me. Just listen to the sounds.
These sounds are your home. Today is the day of rest. Rest, be at home.
I obeyed the intuition. I closed the prayer book, gingerly set it on the seat next to me, and closed my eyes to listen.
Oseh shalom bimromav. Hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu. V’al kol Yisrael V’imru: amen.
What I heard was aliveness, lifted into song. I heard the voices of my friend and community blending into a single note that wavered into crescendos and dips. I heard yearning, and I heard peace. I heard suffering, and I heard gratitude. I heard blessings and I heard hopes. I heard a rainbow of human longings unwinding into blissful rest.
I didn’t hear a word. But I heard so many sounds.
With every passage of prayer, I felt my limbs relax into the slumber that the muscular forces of creation must capitulate to, in order to reinvigorate themselves for the many tasks at hand. I found my voice joining in of its own accord, singing these sounds my muscle memory had internalized so long ago. My throat was free to stretch, and my spirit danced in the song, without judgment, examination, searching, cataloguing, labeling, or performance anxiety—all of which I had begun to associate with Jewish prayer, after so many years of desperately keep up with the Hebrew. In that moment, my being succumbed to the divine directive to rest. And so, rest I did, surrendering my intellectual capacity and longstanding linguistic angst. I allowed my senses to intermingle with the sublime experience of listening and singing sounds.
In the Jewish tradition there is a phenomenon called a niggun—a tune without words. The sounds employed to push these beautiful melodies around are Lai dai dai…. By allowing the entire Shabbat liturgy to become a niggun for myself, I set aside the ideological, political, theological, and most importantly the self-critical aspects of Jewish prayer that had always alienated me from fully connecting to the tradition. Paradoxically, I had to set aside the structures of this tradition in order to connect to the essence of it.
Simone Weil tells a story of two prisoners whose cells are separated by a thick stone wall. They learn to communicate with each other over time by devising a series of scratches and taps through the wall. The wall is both their means of communication and the barrier to their communication. For me, the Hebrew language represents the stone wall between me and sublime revelations, between me and the divine inspiration for restoration and resilience, to which Judaism points.
The Buddha said that we should not confuse the moon with a finger pointing to the moon. Too often, religious people start to worship the pointing finger, the organized frameworks and cultural particularities that pose as revelation. But religion is not revelation: religion is our reflection upon revelation. Religion is not the moon, it is the finger pointing at the moon. The Hebrew language is the finger pointing at the moon. I found myself starved for moonlight.
I know that many Jews who read this article will not agree with me. Once, I shared my revelation of connecting to Judaism in a more profound way after setting aside my self-imposed pressure to master Hebrew, and a woman at my synagogue was extremely offended. She took umbrage that I would dare to ever lead a congregation in song without fully understanding every word that I was singing. I understand and respect her position. I know that I should keep working on my Hebrew. But: my life is full of shoulds. There are a 100 million things I should be doing: I should be a better friend and partner, I should exercise more, I should eat more vegetables, I should understand the Enlightenment better, I should try and think of effective ways to respond to the detention of minors along the United States southern border. Should, should, should. My knees are buckling under the weight of “the tyranny of the should,” a phrase coined by psychoanalyst Karen Horney. I argue that the tyranny of the should is totally incompatible with the command to rest at Shabbat.
This reflection is meant to be a contemplation about prayer and not a political statement. But I would be bereft in my reflection if I did not also note that part of my resistance to comprehending Hebrew prayers is my ambivalence about their literal content. I have read the English translation of the prayers—about God’s mighty might, the greatness of Israel and the defeat of our enemies, and all of the in-group preferences endemic to these ancient texts. As much as I wish to embrace the words of the “people of the book,” it seems that I suffer not only a cognitive challenge to retain the language, but also ideological, political and theological challenges—resistance to voice the words that those sounds translate to, and their attendant tribalism, politicization and monolithic, patriarchal anthropomorphization of the divine.
I write this with respect for those who devote themselves to safeguarding tradition, who identify tradition as the very heart of Judaism, who uplift peoplehood and its instruments. I also acknowledge that an exclusivist notion of peoplehood and inflexible devotion to cultural particularity has delivered human communities into strangled conflicts from time immemorial. I do not intend to defiantly dispense with tradition nor to self-righteously announce that Hebrew is not important to Judaism. That would be a pointless, imprecise, ahistorical protest. I am not here to re-write Judaism or to advocate for Judaism without Hebrew, which would be impossible, just like Judaism without tradition or peoplehood is impossible. There is an indelible cultural particularity to Judaism which includes the Hebrew language. (Although, as a side note, I do sort of enjoy the idea of advocating for less Hebrew-centrality in Judaism, if only as a way to send the Orthodox rabbinate into paroxysms of joyous consternation.)
But I do believe that one of my purposes in life is to grow spiritually, to make efforts to stay in contact with a generative reality beyond my own ego. That reality is bigger than cultural particularity or specific grammars. There are revelations inherent in releasing oneself, with temperance, from rigid structures meant to facilitate religiosity, which serve in the end to obstruct spirituality and stymy reflective personal contemplation of sacredness. Moreover, there is no denying that after 25 years of working on my Hebrew and feeling like a profoundly incompetent Jew, this year for the first time I have reconnected to the beauty and the richness of this spiritual practice in a totally new way—simply by letting go of the Hebrew words and coasting on the breezes of the Hebrew sounds. Now, at Shabbat, I surrender to the diverse unity that communal singing embodies, and I surrender to the diverse unity that the divine embodies. Perhaps someday—perhaps during the work week, as I bravely run the gauntlet of all the things I should be doing, as I bear the tyranny of the should with grim determination—perhaps I will once again rededicate myself to the mastery of the Hebrew language.
But not on Shabbat. And not any time soon, as I continue exploring this extended metaphorical Shabbat that I have applied to my relationship with Hebrew. On Shabbat, Jews are commanded to remember and preserve the sanctity of life. I uphold this mitzvah in my own way, aiming to sanctify life through wordless sound, a bold aim that transcends the particularity of any language, people or creed. As I celebrate this religion that prizes behavior over belief, perhaps I can be excused for setting aside the belief that Hebrew is inextricable from connecting with the eternal, and instead sing out kadosh, kadosh, kadosh, through joyful, wordless sound.