(This post was written before today’s attack on Israel by Hamas. I have no words, except to say that I’m sending love and prayers to family, friends, teachers and classmates in Israel right now. I will leave it to politicians and journalists to describe what is happening on the ground, but I decided to post this essay, about the joy of teaching Judaism to Jewish children, because that joy is a big part of what keeps me going and I hope it helps others too.)
This year for my synagogue school elective, I’m teaching Yiddish, sort of. More like I’m teaching the kids some of the Yiddish words that have become popular among American Jews, so they can feel like they are part of the club when people around them are kvetching (complaining, whining) and kibbitzing (chatting, gossiping) and kvelling (expressing great pleasure and pride in someone else’s achievements) over a nosh (a snack) of bagels and lox.
The hardest part of planning the class was trying to limit the number of words I would teach them. I mean, you have to do verklempt (choked up with emotion) and schlep (drag something, or drag yourself somewhere) and chutzpah, but how can you leave out farshtunkene (stinking, rotten, contemptible) or bupkes (nothing, literally “goat droppings”)?
At first, I thought I would use video clips of famous comedy routines or movie scenes to help them get a feel for how the words are said, but most of the clips were way too grown up in content, or so chock full of Yiddish words that the kids would have been overwhelmed. So I decided to go with theme days, and have the kids tell their own stories using Yiddish words on that theme. For Chutzpah Day, I decided to leave it at just the one word, because everyone has chutzpah stories: times when they had the chutzpah to speak up or take action, times when they didn’t have the chutzpah to do something they wanted to do, and plenty of times when someone else had the chutzpah to do something crazy nearby. And for Oy Vey Day, of course, we start with Oy Vey, the classic expression of dismay and then plotz (exploding or fainting with emotion) and shpilkes (restlessness, or “sitting on pins”), which pretty much every child in synagogue school experiences everyday.
But I started with Kvetch Day, because I knew the kids would have a ton of complaints that they needed to get out, and the chance to vent, while saying funny words that make you spit or cough, is priceless. They go through so much tzuris (troubles, worries, suffering) in their daily lives, and there are so many times when brothers or sisters are nudniks, interfering with games or bothering them endlessly, and of course when your friend gets a new iPhone for Hanukah and you get socks, which is worse than bupkes, it stings.
My own adventures in Yiddish have been meaningful to me, which is why I wanted to bring it to the kids, at least in a lighthearted way. The language itself is a history of where Jews lived over a thousand years, picking up new words from each new town and city they lived in, a lot from medieval German, but also from Polish and Russian, and plenty from Hebrew itself.
I wish I knew more about Ladino, the language of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, who had to leave during and after the Spanish Inquisition. Ladino is based on an old version of Spanish, mixed with Hebrew, and just like Yiddish, picked up words as the people who spoke it traveled to new homes in Amsterdam, and South America and the Ottoman Empire, again with Hebrew laced through it like the blue thread woven through the tzitzit.
There are so many other Jewish languages, from all the different places where Jews have lived, because the Hebrew from prayer and study bled into the language of the market place automatically as they lived their daily lives.
We’re living through a period, now, where diversity is celebrated, and it’s ok, with most people, that Jews often maintain their own customs and languages as well as becoming full-fledged members of the communities where they live. But historically, that wasn’t the case. Even when Jewish separateness was enforced by the local governments, keeping Jews out of certain neighborhoods and professions, it still bothered the locals that the Jews had their own ways of living, and their own languages in which to do it, because you never knew what they were saying to each other.
But right now, when everyone is allowed to celebrate their unique cultures, of food and music and language and fashion, Jews are feeling freer to celebrate it too, and to celebrate all of the different cultures that have been woven through Judaism over the millennia. There are tons of cookbooks for Jewish foods from the Middle East and Eastern Europe and South America and North America, and Jewish families on Long Island are eating foods from Morocco and Jamaica and Russia and Ethiopia at their Passover Seders, as a way to honor the diversity of the Jewish people, and because they’re really yummy.
What I want most for my students is that they will gradually grow their idea of what it means to be Jewish, so they aren’t limited to what they see in their own communities on Long Island, but can also see that Judaism has existed and transformed over and over again in a million different forms, and therefore there will always be room for them to bring their own unique ideas to the table. And I want them to know that their own stories are just as important as Abraham and Isaac and Jacob’s and Tevye and Herzl and Golda’s. I especially want them to know that the Jewish people have always been complainers, and have grown and changed and lived good and interesting lives as a result of having their say. I want them to know that their voices are to be celebrated and heard, no matter how much phlegm they cough up along the way.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 