I, Thou, and You

Pick
Dec. 10 2014
About Philologos

Philologos, the renowned Jewish-language columnist, appears twice a month in Mosaic. Questions for him may be sent to his email address by clicking here.

Much as vulgar language is acceptable in certain social situations but not in others, different forms of address are appropriate for different situations. Many European languages distinguish between formal and familiar forms of the pronoun “you” (e.g., vous and tu in French). Since English lost this distinction long ago, and Hebrew never had it, Philologos hypothesizes about how they compensate.

I suspect that languages that lack the tu/vous distinction tend to resort to nicknames much more than languages that have it. French, certainly, has nothing like the pairings of William/Bill, Robert/Bob, Richard/Dick, John/Jack, Albert/Al, Daniel/Dan, and so forth that are systematic in English. And Israeli Hebrew, in this respect, is very much like English. There is hardly a name in it that does not have one or more possible nicknames, many of them formed by suffixed endearments that generally come from Yiddish. For Yosef, there is Yosi or Yoske; for Avraham, Avi or Avrum; for Moshe, Moishele, Moshke or Moishik; for Ya’akov, Kobi or Yankele; for Sarah, Sarke or Sarale; for Miriam, Miri or Mirele; for Rakhel, Rokhi or Rokhele, etc. And there are additional suffixes like the Slavic –ushke or the Ladino –iko that can be appended to many other names.

Editors’ Note: This was Philologos’ final column in the Forward. We are pleased to announce that, beginning in January, his columns will appear biweekly in Mosaic.

Read more at Forward

More about: Hebrew, Ladino, Language, Yiddish

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society