IB World Religions 6.3.4. Language: Hebrew, Aramaic and the Vernacular in Prayer Notes

6.3.4. Language: Hebrew, Aramaic and the Vernacular in Prayer

Hebrew as the sacred language

1. Jews call Hebrew leshon ha-kodesh, the holy tongue, and the Tenakh is written in it apart from a handful of passages.
2. Those exceptions are in Aramaic. They include much of the book of Daniel, sections of Ezra, and a single verse in Jeremiah.
3. The Sefer Torah is written in consonants alone, with no vowel signs, punctuation or musical notation, so reading it aloud in the synagogue requires a reader who already knows the text.
4. The missing information was preserved separately. The Masoretes of Tiberias, working between roughly the seventh and tenth centuries, fixed the nikkud (vowel points) and the te'amim (cantillation marks) for printed Bibles rather than for the scroll.
5. Hebrew carries religious status and not only practical use. Rabbinic sources hold that God created the world through speech and treat Hebrew as the language of that speech.
6. The language also carries obligations. Orthodox communities require Hebrew for the Torah reading itself, whatever language the sermon and explanations may use.
7. Hebrew was never quite dormant. It stayed in use for prayer, law and correspondence throughout the Diaspora, and it was rebuilt as an everyday spoken language from the nineteenth century, above all through the work of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda.

Aramaic in the tradition

1. Aramaic was the everyday language of Jews across the Near East for centuries. It entered the tradition because people spoke it, not because anyone held it sacred.
2. The Talmud shows the layering plainly. The Mishnah passages it quotes are in Hebrew, and the Gemara that argues about them is largely in Aramaic.
3. Translating scripture into Aramaic became a fixed practice. A Targum is an Aramaic rendering of a biblical book, and Targum Onkelos on the Torah is the one the tradition treats as standard.
4. In many communities the Targum was read aloud verse by verse after the Hebrew, so that people who could not follow the original still heard the sense.
5. Several of the best known prayers stayed in Aramaic. The Kaddish, recited by mourners among others, and Kol Nidrei, which opens Yom Kippur, are both Aramaic texts.
6. So is the ketubah, the marriage contract, which Orthodox couples still receive in Aramaic with a translation supplied beside it.
7. The pattern is worth noticing. Jews have kept a second language inside their liturgy for well over a thousand years, which complicates any claim that Jewish prayer must be in Hebrew alone.

Translation and its limits

1. Jews have translated their scriptures for as long as there have been Jewish communities that did not read Hebrew.
2. The oldest large example is the Septuagint, the Greek version produced in Alexandria from the third century BCE for Greek-speaking Jews.
3. Saadia Gaon made an Arabic translation of the Torah in the tenth century for Jews living under Islamic rule, and wrote it out in Hebrew letters.
4. Jewish attitudes to translation have been mixed. One rabbinic tradition treats the day the Torah was turned into Greek as a misfortune, on the ground that no translation carries the original.
5. The practical objection is that a translation decides meanings. A Hebrew word with several senses has to become one English word, so the translator has interpreted before the reader starts.
6. Jewish law nonetheless permits vernacular prayer. The Mishnah lists the Shema and the Amidah among the prayers that may be said in any language the worshipper understands.
7. Communities differ sharply over how far to use that permission, and Orthodox practice keeps almost entirely to Hebrew even where the law would allow otherwise.

The siddur in print

1. The siddur is the Jewish prayer book. Its name comes from seder, order, because what it fixes is the order of the prayers.
2. Prayer was arranged long before it was printed. The earliest surviving ordered collection is the Seder Rav Amram Gaon, sent from Babylonia in the ninth century in answer to a question from Spain.
3. Saadia Gaon produced another in the tenth century, with its instructions written in Arabic for the community that would use it.
4. Printing hardened local custom into named rites. Every siddur follows a nusach, and the main ones are nusach Ashkenaz, nusach Sefard and the Edot ha-Mizrach rite of Middle Eastern communities.
5. The modern Diaspora siddur is a bilingual object. Hebrew is printed on one page with the vernacular facing it, so a worshipper may follow either column or move between them.
6. A layer of vernacular apparatus surrounds the prayers, giving instructions on when to stand or bow, notes on what a passage means, and commentary at the foot of the page.
7. Many editions add transliteration, printing the Hebrew in Latin letters so that a worshipper who cannot read the script can still join in aloud.

Hebrew across the movements

1. How much Hebrew a siddur carries is among the clearest markers of where a community stands.
2. Orthodox siddurim are almost entirely Hebrew. The facing English exists for understanding rather than for use, and the service itself is conducted in Hebrew throughout.
3. Reform prayer books run at roughly half Hebrew and half vernacular, and the balance is settled congregation by congregation rather than centrally.
4. Liberal Judaism in Britain uses more vernacular still, arguing that a worshipper should understand every word being said.
5. Conservative communities, called Masorti outside North America, keep most of the Hebrew while adding vernacular readings, which matches their position on halakhah generally.
6. Nineteenth-century Reform went much further towards the vernacular than Reform does now. Later editions restored Hebrew deliberately, and the American Reform siddur Mishkan T'filah, published in 2007, sets Hebrew, translation and transliteration side by side.
7. In Israel the question changes shape entirely, because Hebrew is what people speak there, so praying in Hebrew is no longer praying in a separate language.

New prayers

1. Jewish liturgy is still being written, and the twentieth century added more to the siddur than any period since the Middle Ages.
2. The Prayer for the State of Israel was composed after the state was founded in 1948 and is now printed in most siddurim, though not in every one.
3. It is not said everywhere. Some Ultra-Orthodox communities leave it out on theological grounds, and its wording differs between movements, so one prayer marks a disagreement as well as a hope.
4. New days brought new liturgy with them. Yom Ha'atzmaut, Israel's independence day, and Yom Hazikaron, its day of remembrance, both have services built for them.
5. The Holocaust proved harder to write for. Yom HaShoah has no single agreed liturgy, and communities assemble services from readings, survivor testimony, poetry and the memorial prayer El Malei Rachamim.
6. Older forms were extended rather than replaced. The Yizkor memorial service and the martyrology recited on Yom Kippur were widened to hold the six million.
7. Modern concerns keep arriving in print. Prayer books now carry texts for the environment, for those held captive and for medical crisis, and egalitarian versions name Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah beside the patriarchs in the opening blessing of the Amidah.