Painting depicts a number of well known Rabbis from previous generations dancing with
Torah scrolls on Simchat Torah — the day of rejoicing with the Torah.
Pictured are:
Rabbi Yakov Yisrael Kanievski (known as the Steipler Gaon)
Rabbi Yitzchak Kaduri (known as Rebbe Kaduri)
Chacham Yosef Chaim (known as the Ben Ish Chai)
Rabbi Yisrael Abuchatzeira (known as the Baba Sali)
BibleSearchers is grateful for the following article written by the Haaretz News correspondent, Yoram Kaniuk titled “Hebrew is the homeland” on the amazing story of the preservation of the Hebrew language.
Only those who have seen the reverent role the Rabbanim have taken, even to the fact of loosing their own lives, to preserve the Torah and the language of YHVH imbedded within those sacred texts can appreciate the unfathomable mental focus of committing the entire Torah to memory. It has been they who have committing every second of their lives for its preservation and posterity.
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Yoram Kaniuk – “The Phoenicians may have bequeathed us the Hebrew alphabet, but no one knows anymore how to pronounce their language, and the few people who can write it are students of ancient languages. There are no speakers of Hittite. There are no speakers of Assyrian or Babylonian or Akkadian. There is Hebrew. And Chinese.
How is it that of all the ancient languages in which great works of literature, or in the case of the Phoenicians, tombstone inscriptions, were written, and of all the Punic descendants of the Phoenicians, the greatest of whom was Hannibal - so little has survived? True, many thousands of languages have disappeared. Even Geoffrey Chaucer's English is now a foreign language. But Hebrew lives. As does Chinese, as I mentioned, although the only thing I know about it is that it has survived.
Our ancestors during the time of the Second Temple were not proud of their language. They replaced the wonderful biblical Hebrew with Aramaic, which was a lingua franca of the ancient world. But, wonder of wonders, when a Polish Jew met a Moroccan Jew in later generations, they did not speak the Aramaic they read every day, but rather Hebrew. When they wrote to one another from the ends of the earth, they used Hebrew and not Aramaic, which was closer to the language of their prayers. Perhaps they were angry about the "fall" of Hebrew in the Gemara and in a large part of the Mishnah.
Hebrew survived because it was what glued people together. The great Armenian-American author William Saroyan once wrote: "I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia."
The Orthodox Jews and Rabbis in Study and Prayer at the Wailing Wall at the Temple Mount - Photo by Robert Mock
Hebrew was little spoken but much read for many generations. Changes have occurred in it, and linguistic experts claim that since the contemporary language is not ancient Hebrew, today's children will not understand the Song of Deborah. Perhaps they will not know all the words, and the grammar has changed, but Hebrew is the homeland, the foundation stone of this nation. More than the Temple Mount, it is the rock of Jewish existence - a language people have lived for more than 3,000 years.
Eliezer Ben Yehuda did indeed contribute a great deal to the new Hebrew, but he did not "discover" it, as people sometimes say: He as well as others invented and hebraicized words. We have in Hebrew words from Greek, Aramaic and other languages, but what was "imported" has become an integral part of the language and has entered into usage. Anything that is unsuitable has been pushed out. Every language in the world has been influenced by others; Hebrew, then, has remained a single language with several incarnations.
There are Scandinavian words in the languages of places the Vikings reached; even the word "Russia" (from Rus) was originally Old Norse. Why, one may ask, is Finnish so unrelated to the Swedish, Danish and Norwegian languages? Some say it resembles Hungarian. How did that happen? What was forgotten along the way?
Hittite was the language of a vast empire that arose from a historical void, conquered many lands and defeated the mighty Egyptian army. How did it become an Indo-European language in the midst of a Semitic region?
Ancient Egyptian has been forgotten. Ancient Greek is no longer in use and in its place there is a completely different language. It's true that biblical Hebrew has also changed quite a lot, but what we use today is still the same language. Could it be because for 1,700 years it was a written, and not a spoken language? Maybe, maybe not. Of all the ancient languages, Hebrew has survived - perhaps because the wanderings of the Hebrews gave rise to a language that is the homeland of the Hebrew people….
Click on the link to finish this fascinating article –
As this article closes, we read:
Yoram Kaniuk - “There is a hypothesis that the international mail service was invented by Jews in order to find other Jews, to get answers, to exist. Therefore the language, which was supposed to have disappeared, was the connection. The glue of the nation.
Why so many mighty Semitic languages disappeared I don't know, but perhaps they lacked some sort of loss: Maybe wandering was not the basis of their speakers' existence? Maybe they had no longings for something that had once been, but now existed only in words?
The poor Hebrew our sages neglected took its revenge on teachers and rabbis, for they too had to read the Bible and not just the Gemara and thus had to know Hebrew. Maimonides, the greatest of them all, spoke and wrote in Arabic - although he did write one book in Hebrew: the Mishneh Torah. He wrote wonderful Hebrew and perhaps chose to write the latter in that language because, deep in his heart, he sought to create a nomadic, temporary, transient, peripatetic alternative to the Gemara, one that comes and goes. Perhaps he thought his book would fill the need for a chronicle for the Jews, for whom the Gemara and its commentaries were difficult to grasp.”
By Yoram Kaniuk – “Hebrew is the homeland” – April 8, 2010