Hebrew and the Unfolding of the Universe

Point One: Origins 

“Think of it like this.” My grandpa’s straight, pewter hair fell over his thick black glasses, head bent in concentration as he wrote on his napkin. I had to get up on my knees in my chair to see the stick figures at either edge. “These two people are 100 feet apart, and there is a fly,” he drew a fly on the face of one, “flying back and forth,” a dotted line, “between them. There is a relationship,” he looked up at me through his bushy brows, “between the people and the fly. If the fly flies from one to the other and back, how far will the fly . . . fly?” 

“200 feet!” I answered confidently. 

“Ah. Yes,” he nodded. “If the fly flies the shortest distance between the two points. But, what if the people are walking toward each other at the same time the fly is flying? What would you need to know to figure out how far the fly flies?” 

A point is a fixed position in space, and dinner with my grandfather wasn’t about math. It was about the point in space he occupied and the point in space I occupied and math was one line he could draw between our two points. It was one language he taught me so we could speak together. My grandfather was an engineer and a math teacher who loved math and loved me. I was seven. I loved dance, and horses, and telling stories. I did not love math. I did love my grandpa.

Another Point: Guides

Mr. Rogers, my 10th grade geometry teacher, asked us to raise our hands if we thought of ourselves as good at math. A few people did. I was not one of them. He shared, “I’m like all of you who do not have your hands up.” He had felt that he was terrible at math, he said, for most of his life, and he’d hated it. As I remember it, he’d intended to be an English teacher, but then he had a math requirement in college and he had a geometry professor who had also been terrible at math until he fell in love with it, and this professor showed him that math, especially geometry, is really all about the story of relationships. “Geometry,” said my teacher, “is about the measurement and relationship of things. It’s also how we know about fractals, and fractals are just about the most beautiful thing in the universe.” He showed us pictures and in my fractal-patterned brain (no, really, our brains are full of fractals) I saw “Universe” with a capital “U”. “You don’t have to like math,” he said. “Pineapples grow in fractal patterns,” he said. “You are already brilliant mathematicians because you live in this beautiful world.”

The next year I had a certain Shakespeare teacher. You’ve likely heard this story from me in other contexts. Bare bones: He was going to be a Jesuit priest, and then kind of went rogue. Well, one day before we started class I was eating Skittles and he comes up to my desk and asks, 

“Why are you here?” 

“It’s Tuesday?” I responded.
(I mean, I don’t know if it was Tuesday, but you get the idea.)

“Look around at who isn’t here, and come talk with me after class.”

I looked and . . . all of the Jewish kids were absent. Later I came to find out that it was Yom Kippur and I had no idea what that meant.

A Third Point: Language

“It’s not yours, but we will share it with you.” The elder folded her arms in front of herself and waited begrudgingly. I took a seat at the tables, the only white person in the room. I noticed when she saw my Star of David necklace. “Ah,” she nodded. 

I learned Ojibwe for four months when I first moved to Minnesota. I wanted to know what this place sounded like when it didn’t sound like Prairie Home Companion. I don’t remember how to say anything, but I do remember when this same woman asked me about my people and our language. She asked if I spoke “Jewish” which is what my great uncle, my grandpa’s best friend, used to call Yiddish. I shook my head. 

She nodded. 

“There is another language?” 

“Yes,” I said. “Hebrew.” 

“You speak that?” 

“No. Not really.” 

She nodded again. 

“Our language isn’t the language that was stolen from you,” she said. 

The Area

Area is the quantity that expresses the extent of a two-dimensional region in a plane. For example, it is the space that fills the lines of a triangle.

I was seventeen the first time I remember engaging with Hebrew. I’d gone to my first, ever, High Holiday services just weeks before. I’d gone to Friday night Shabbat services enough times that I could sing along with some of the prayers - which I thought of as songs - reading along with the transliteration.That Friday night as we sang Shalom Rav I remember I touched the Hebrew letters. I touched that first one, that “sh” one, all round on the bottom and reaching up with three fingers. I touched the last one, the one that sounded like “mmm” that was a squared-off circle. I didn’t know their names, and I didn’t know that the last one was in its final form. My eyes scurried mouse-like around the page hungry for the morsels of “sh” and “m.” My hand shook. I wanted these letters. I wanted ALL of these letters. 

My home growing up and my experiences with my mom’s parents were deeply Jewish if Judaism stops at ethics and social justice. I thought of my people as nurses, teachers, and social workers. Mine were the people who take in strangers. Mine were the people who tell stories to teach about our responsibilities to one another. Mine were the people who feed people. Body and soul. 

There are childhood photos of me posing lighting a Chanukah menorah. There are also photos of me on Santa’s lap and hanging out with the Easter Bunny. My Jewish grandparents hung lights outside their home in December. My grandpa’s sister made kugel. I remember my grandma calling what she made ‘noodle casserole’. I think for my family maybe Judaism and poverty and displacement and trauma and being white-enough-to-much-of-the-time-be-read-as-“white” (or even being white enough to leave Judaism behind altogether) became so intertwined by the time my mom and aunt were born in the late 40s, the question of Jewish identity was at best confusing. I know it was for me in the 70s and 80s. At seven, I knew my grandfather’s languages of math and adventure and piano playing and the quiet of fishing at dawn. I knew my grandmother’s languages of bandaging scrapes and her stories of her days as a nurse and hopscotch and daffodils. I also knew their language of assimilation. These people were mine. But I didn’t know I had a People. I didn’t know my People had shared languages. 

When I was choosing a college, it didn’t occur to me to ask about Jewish Studies classes, Hebrew language classes, or Jewish community. I went to Grinnell in the mid-90s. When we needed to, we could get together a minyan - ten Jews, and because sometimes we needed to, I learned why it mattered. I was embarrassed by what I didn’t know, and I didn’t want people to find out how little I did know, so . . . I faked it. I’d memorized enough of the sounds over the one year I’d gone to synagogue before leaving home that I could join in well enough. At least, that’s what I thought. I’ve never asked, and it’s entirely possible that others knew what I thought I was keeping secret. In that space of embarrassment, I didn’t learn much Hebrew, but I soaked up everything I could. A friend and I baked challah and made Shabbat dinner every week for our small and mighty band of Jewish students. Over four years I came to learn the smells and sounds of connected Jewish life. I learned to recognize a few Hebrew letters, but still didn’t confidently know the aleph-bet and couldn’t distinguish vowel marks from trope marks - the notation system for chanting Torah. 

I moved to Minnesota for law school, and during law school spent a summer semester in Israel studying minority religions and the law and conflict resolution. I joined Beth Jacob, a Conservative shul, and was asked to teach the youngest children. I was not asked what I actually knew. I was not asked if I knew any Hebrew. I created an artistic representation of the Torah portion every week for teaching, which is how I really learned what was in the five books of Moses. I was responsible for teaching the students seven prayers, prayers I’d memorized years ago by this time, and anyway my 4-year-olds were pre-literate. We learned auditorily. We learned what the prayers mean by feeling them in our bodies: We danced through blue scarves waving around colorful tulle singing Mi Chamocha, we took deep breaths and really listened to each other before the Shema. I anonymously borrowed a Hebrew primer and finally taught myself the aleph-bet and the vowels so I could talk with my students about the wooden puzzle in our classroom. I taught myself in secret, still embarrassed by what I didn’t know.

Within months, I was also teaching 8th grade Judaic Studies at Mount Zion, a Reform congregation, and teaching myself the content two weeks ahead of when I needed to teach the students. By this point, watching and listening, I’d discovered a few things. Almost no one teaching Hebrew actually knew very much Hebrew. I mean, not really. Some were fluent or nearly so, but not most of the teachers. Mostly they knew more than what I’d taught myself, but not a lot more. They could “read” the prayers, meaning they could sound out or decode the words, and they knew some of the vocabulary. They couldn’t translate word for word much better than I could, and they couldn't answer my grammar questions. They couldn’t talk in Hebrew. It even turned out many of us were embarrassed by what we didn’t know. Maybe even most. I watched my Judaic Studies students and youth group kids grow up coming to religious school regularly and then go off to college and come home relying a lot on transliteration because, for the most part, they’d memorized the sounds like I had. Years of supposedly learning Hebrew, but they could not actually read it and didn’t know what it meant. Parents and other significant adults in the lives of our students would often confess to me, in a shamed whisper, that they didn’t know any Hebrew and couldn’t help their kids. 

All of this shame and embarrassment serves no one.

I was in my thirties, becoming pretty well known as a successful Jewish educator and Jewish youth worker, when I finally hired a private modern Hebrew tutor - for one year. That was my first more-or-less-formal Hebrew instruction.
Ever.

I ordered 3 beginner Hebrew books and went through the exercises in all of them to fill in gaps. After that I felt capable of teaching beginner Hebrew, which I’ve done successfully ever since because I can lean on being a really good teacher while I continue to learn the content to stay ahead of my students. I’ve leveled myself up and made my way through more books. I’ve used phone apps with my students, apps like “Write-It Hebrew” and “Drops” and “Biblical Hebrew Vocabulary” and “Quizlet” and “Gus on the Go”, and I also always use them for myself to make sure I continue to know more than they do. I’ve done one year of a group Ulpan class (Modern Hebrew) online through the Rosen School with mixed results, and I’ve done six months of 1:1 tutoring with them with a better outcome. I found a Hebrew grammar book in a free pile not long ago and I’m digging in and learning more.

I’m forty-seven. 

I’ve become more hoarding-dragon than crumb-seeking mouse.
My pile of treasure is messy, and full of jewels, and I love it.
I am still embarrassed by what I don’t know.
After all, I am a Jewish educator and a rabbi and when I’m asked to read Hebrew on the spot I flinch, try to deflect, and offer up prayers that I won’t fumble too much. 

It’s different, entirely different, and even as it is I feel an ancestral resonance with people who in this lifetime endure or endured language deprivation as Deaf children, Native elders who were forced to speak English in boarding schools, grandchildren who can’t talk with their first generation immigrant relatives.

My deeply ethically Jewish recent ancestors who lived and breathed social justice reach through time and demand that I support and fight for language access for everyone in our country from whom it is and has been denied. Everyone who is not us. 

What about us? What about our languages? Yiddish. Ladino. Hebrew. 

And yes, also the language of the cycle of Jewish time and celebration. The language of our history. The language of our folktales. Our languages were burned from us, raped from us, beaten from us, exiled from us . . . stolen from us. And when I reach back farther, I believe our ancestors want that we should seek - and fight - for language access for ourselves, too. Bare minimum, I believe they wouldn’t want us to just walk away.

Hebrew has had to rise out of fire and stay preserved under the dust. Hebrew can tell us within its own limbs that for us there is no peace - שָלום without wholeness - שְלֵמות. Language is the not-always-straight line that connects the moving points in our story and makes them, makes us, more than a random fragment.

Fractals

A fractal is infinitely complex. It is self-similar across different scales. It is without end. Fractals are a geometry of nature. 

Last year I was teaching an awesome group of 4th graders the prayer after the shema - the v’ahavta - and we were talking about ahava - love - being a verb. We were thinking hard about the ways this prayer gives us ideas about how we show our love for the Essence of the Universe by bringing our love out into the world and giving it to others. Love when we walk on our way, for example, maybe could be about bringing food donations to a food shelf. Or just saying something nice to someone. Maybe when we lie down and rise up we are starting and ending our days remembering that being loved and loving others is really why we’re all here. Students had lots of ideas. I need to interject here that it was Cheshvan, the holiday-empty month after the fall rush, which meant it was nearing the end of October. In my world, that is the time for foreshadowing Purim. Therefore, of course, I was wearing a shark costume. My students had on virtual backgrounds and filters and some were also wearing costumes. One was dressed as a hotdog. 

“You know that part about making sure our children know Jewish things?” I asked. “Things like the mitzvot - the commandments, like the stories from the Torah, like about the holidays, and like Hebrew? We’re doing that part of the v’ahavta right now. This right here is part of being in that doing-love. I love who I get to teach and that I get to teach and what I get to teach - and what I get to teach you, it’s already yours. Even before you learn it. These stories, this Hebrew, these holidays? They are ALL YOURS. Once you learn them, no one can take them from you, and when you have an opportunity to teach this stuff to kids who are younger than you, you’ll be hanging out in this v’ahavta love AGAIN. What thoughts do you have about that?”

“Well,” said a student in a witch’s hat, “if you do, and then we do, wait . . . is this just supposed to go on and on and on?”

“That is 100% the whole idea!” I exclaimed, fin flopping on my head. “And on and on and on and on and ON.” The Universe unfolding, I thought. A fractal.

My students were silent. Eyes big. Each one of them focused on their screen. 

“Forever?” asked the one with the puppy in the background.

“God willing,” I nodded. “Forever and ever. L’olam va’ed. Until the end of time and space.” 

I watched my students take very deep breaths.

“That,” said my young witch friend smiling, “is a very long time.”

Truth. 

Years before:

“This is way better than even Donald Duck in Mathmagicland,” Mr. Rogers promised us. “This is the Universe unfolding.”

We shifted in our seats. By this point, we were generally willing to go along with him. Anyway, we had a math teacher showing videos to us as 10th graders. 

Play.

Honestly, I don’t remember very much from 10th grade geometry.

Mr. Rogers was the one and only math teacher who spoke any of my languages, and after nearly failing Calculous my first semester of college I unfortunately never took another math class. Thanks to Mr. Rogers, though, fractals stuck.

The closer we look at a fractal the more we see the same patterns over and over again. If we look at one part of a fractal, we’ll see the pattern of that part over and over again. And on and on and on and on. L’olam va’ed. Ein sof. Forever. Without end. Maybe without beginning. Just as amazing to me, if we go wide, if we put some distance between ourselves and the aspect of the fractal that is the particular piece of pattern, we see that piece and other pieces together creating a bigger pattern - a more complete and complicated story. 

Hebrew is one of the languages, one of the core languages, in which I draw lines between myself and our history and our ancestors and Jewish people around the world and my students. I learn it and I teach it because these lines matter to me. Sometimes I think they are everything to me. Hebrew is one of the ways I move between our fixed positions in space. . . and time. It is one of the ways I get close and see the infinite patterns and one of the ways I get enough distance to see the bigger story. 

Hebrew is a language of my People, and a People need language to be whole.