Growing up in New York in the 1940s to1960s, in a Religious-Zionist family mixed in an odd way with Hashomer Hatza’ir, I was raised on a steady diet of Hebrew. A yeshiva whose classes were conducted “Ivris b’Ivris” (“Hebrew into Hebrew”); a summer camp, Machane Massad, whose language was exclusively Hebrew; shirei ha-Yishuv, Hebrew songs coming out of the pioneering spirit of Eretz Yisrael (amongst my early memories is that of singing the Achdut Ha’avodah hymn, Bialik’s “Techezakna”)—all were part of the rich diet that nourished Jewishness for many in my generation.
Hebrew in America, from the 1930s to the 1960s, was fertile indeed: the network of Hebrew teachers colleges (HTCs), such as the Boston Hebrew College and many others, and Herzeliah and Marshalia in New York; a gaggle of yeshivot, notably New York’s Yeshiva Soloveichik (where I studied), the Crown Heights Yeshiva, the Hebrew Academy of Miami Beach, and Yeshiva D’Flatbush; the Histadruth Ivrith of America and its weekly Hadoar (and the earlier pioneering Hatoren (“The Mast”)), and of course the visionary Camp Massad. All were informed by “Tarbut Ivrit”—“Hebrew Culture”—a movement that crossed religious denominational lines and was fueled by a cadre of dedicated educators, many of whom came out of Europe and had spent some time in the Yishuv in Palestine, and who staffed our yeshivot and HTCs.
What was Tarbut Ivrit? It was much more than mere “Hebrew culture.” As chronicler of Hebrew literature Alan Mintz has written, “`Ivrit in one’s essential identity meant viewing Hebrew not only as the dynamic force in Jewish life but as the living tissue in daily life as well.” Hebrew was the language of our hearts, our religious souls, our minds. Hebrew may not have been pervasive, but it was always somewhere. It was our Jewish DNA.
What happened? Who killed Tarbut Ivrit? To be sure, the inherent weakness of Zionism in America was surely a factor in the weakening of Hebrew. Additionally, the flowering of Jewish studies, virtually unknown until the 1970s, in a counterintuitive way diminished the importance of Hebrew. Hebrew—especially Hebrew literature, which had been the crown of Tarbut Ivrit—became just another academic sub-specialty, and a poor one at that. Sad to report, all too many Jewish-Studies academics were and are simply not fluent in literary Hebrew. And there was also the demographic reality that by the 1960s many of the dedicated Ivrit teachers were aging, and dying.
But there was something deeper. Hebrew was a casualty of increasing “denominationalism” in American Jewish life, especially of the serious fault-lines and fissures that developed within the Orthodox world. Indeed, it was the movement to the “right” in much of the Orthodox community—the weakening of a Modern Orthodox “center”—that severely damaged Hebrew. Beginning in the 1960s, Tarbut Ivrit became enmeshed in the Orthodox struggle. Nobody was paying much attention, but (to take one important example) Camp Massad, which was a key player in Hebrew in America, found itself caught between the Scylla of Camp Morasha (a nouveau Modern Orthodox camp, with increasingly rightist tendencies) and the Charybdis of Ramah (a product of the Conservative movement, and an important progenitor of the Havura movement). Massad simply could not compete with both, especially since the Orthodox Tarbut Ivrit day-schools had been an important source for the cadre of Massad campers and staff.
In like manner, yeshivot informed by Tarbut Ivrit—the Manhattan Day School, Yeshiva Soloveichik, Yeshiva D’Flatbush, the Crown Heights Yeshiva—either folded or altered their religious orientation. Modern Orthodoxy, defensively looking over its right shoulder at Agudath Israel, increasingly wanted to emphasize what made it more religiously “Jewish” than others. Hebrew—at least the Tarbut Ivrit version—was increasingly viewed as being too secular. Long gone were the days that even Brooklyn’s Torah Voda’as and Chaim Berlin yeshivas had serious Hebrew programs. Hebrew did not do well in an increasingly sectarian atmosphere. And as for the Conservative movement, an earlier emphasis on Hebrew language and text declined as well, as the Conservative emphasis on “affective” education—synagogue skills—became regnant in Conservative schools.
The final chapters of Tarbut Ivrit’s demise were the going out of business in recent years of a number of important vehicles for Hebrew. The venerable and long-troubled Histadruth Ivrith of America imploded some ten years ago. Its magazine, Hadoar, long a centerpiece of Tarbut Ivrit, which had been limping along for many years, died in 2005. The Zamir Chorale, which came out of Camp Massad in the 1960s and was a late and highly-successful entry into Tarbut Ivrit, likewise felt exogenous pressures and transmuted itself to something very different from what it was—clearly no longer the carrier of the Massad vision. Finally, the National Center for the Hebrew Language, a superb vehicle for galvanizing the study of Hebrew, was some fifteen years ago inconceivably and unconscionably left dangling without funding by the Jewish Agency, and died as well.
And then there’s ArtScroll. Put aside for the moment the critical questions about the ArtScroll ideology that pervades most of its publications; put aside the occasionally bizarre translations and commentaries. The very idea that everything is translated ought raise some questions for our community. Contemporary Jewish America is the first era in Jewish history—with the possible exception of ancient Alexandria—in which the texts of our tradition are being studied in a non-Jewish language. For whom are these translations? Many ArtScroll consumers are Orthodox Jews, who, one would think, should not need the translations. Sadly, in an era in which, from cradle to grave, every conceivable educational program is offered, we are a progressively illiterate community. This fact ought give pause to the Orthodox world.
There are initiatives aimed at reversing the decline of Hebrew, now in its sixth decade. My view is that, welcome as are these initiatives—and it is clear that they mean something because they are backed by hefty amounts of cash—absent a new Hebrew Zeitgeist in America (in my opinion an unlikely prospect), it is highly questionable whether the trend of decline will be reversed. Two thousand and fourteen is not 1954; societal conditions within the Jewish community are very different from what they were sixty years ago. The demographics of Orthodox Jewish life militate against Hebrew; ArtScroll has become dominant; Zionism is no longer a serious factor (if it ever was) in the broad swath of American Jewish life. And—quae misericordia—English, not Hebrew, has replaced Yiddish as the lingua franca of the Jewish people, sadly even in Israel—witness English as regnant in the Israeli academic world.
What can we do? As we are at the 120th anniversary of the rebirth of Hebrew, there ought be a broad communal response, with coordinated programs in and on Hebrew on the part of JCCs, BJEs, and federations. Every Anglo-Jewish newspaper ought include a regular column in Hebrew—at the least, a “Learn-a-Word” or a grammatical, historical, or literary note on Hebrew. Every Jewish communal meeting should, in its opening d’var Torah, include at least one value-laden line in Hebrew. Jewish communal professionals should be encouraged, with financial and other incentives, to achieve fluency in Hebrew. (The fact that our professional leadership continues to be functionally illiterate in Hebrew is the bleakest of the bleak.) Let us make Hebrew a part of the Jewish communal consensus.
By Jerome A. Chanes
