Jul

7

IAO - Day 5 - Semantics and Prayer

July 7, 2007 |

Shavua tov anyone or everyone (I try to be optimistic - can you tell?). Today’s IAO is a tough one. If it seems like I’m making little sense, please forgive me. The reason that it is so difficult to write about is because today’s IAO is about:

Prayer

siddur

For me, prayer is hard to talk about. On the one hand, I go to shul on shabbat and holidays and I pray. On the other hand, I don’t usually pray during the week (good thing my Dad doesn’t read this blog). Like most people who were raised Orthodox, I was taught to pray in elementary school. I was taught the Hebrew prayers the way you teach kids their alphabet. By rote. They sing them to you when you are a child, then they listen to you sing them, and as you get older they make you repeat them over and over again until you know them by heart. I was never taught the meaning of prayer until I was much older and by then I had developed such cynicism about Judaism that learning that prayer can be meditation as much as “Talking To God,” did not do very much for my appreciation of the act of prayer.

I learned the translation of the words of the prayers fairly early on. I had my ArtScroll siddur and I read the translation alongside my daily prayers for many years. On the High Holy Days I mostly prayed directly from the English translation since I wanted my prayers to have meaning. Of course, that was a long time ago. The Hebrew prayers were just words. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes lyrical and often times even poetic, but just words. It wasn’t until today that I experienced something that could not happen to me living outside of Israel.

The prayers made sense.

Not that the words made sense but before they were simply words. I’ve understood the sentiments behind the prayers since I was a teenager. But what happened to me today was something that I’ve never experienced before. I was reading the prayers in Hebrew as I have done many times before. But today, the words read like my actual thoughts. I did not have to consciously meditate on the meaning of the words to understand them. I don’t even know if I can explain that coherently. Let’s try to approach it from another direction.

When I was in college, I studied Fine Art and did my concentration in Graphic Design. As part of the Graphic Design program, you had to do a year-long senior thesis project which consisted of a well-researched thesis paper and an installation work that would be shown at the senior show. My senior thesis was about language. I did research into the way that language takes thoughts and abstracts them into symbols. Language presents a map for people to understand ideas. That is something that I learned by reading brilliant semanticians like S.I. Hayakawa and Alfred Korzybski. The main thing that you learn when you read about semantics is that each language draws a different mental map for the speaker and that until you truly begin to think in a particular language you cannot truly read the map that the language creates.

I’ve lived in Israel for almost 9 years now. I speak a fairly fluent modern Hebrew. Modern Hebrew is different from Biblical Hebrew in syntax and grammar, but the roots are the same. Today, when I was reading the Hebrew prayers, I felt, for the first time, that I was reading from the same mental map that my ancestors read from. I was able to hear the words in my head, not as lyrical, but as conceptual. Not as poems, but as ideas. Without having been exposed to Hebrew all around me, albeit modern Hebrew, I would never have been able to make that mental leap.

Living in Israel has made me think like a Jew.

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Comments

3 Comments so far

  1. yitz.. on July 8, 2007 12:18 pm

    i definitely hear that.. spending a lot of time w/ my wife’s family who grew up with a father whose hebrew rivals many of the greatest hebrew poets, a family who all knows tehillim more or less by heart, it sensitized me to the turn of phrase and expression in biblical/rabbinical hebrew in a way that I could never have experienced otherwise.

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