Yiddish is the True Judaism: More Tikvah Fund White Jewish Supremacy Courtesy of Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and Mark Gottlieb
David Shasha
Yiddish Is a Language of Faith
By: Meir Y. Soloveichik
Early in 2021, a niche online argument made its way onto the front page of the Wall Street Journal, complete with a catchy headline: “Designing a Flag for Yiddish Takes Chutzpah.” The cause of the disagreement was the announcement by Duolingo, a website for learning languages, that it would release a course for Yiddish. Usually, the symbol for a language would be the flag of its home country: France, Italy, Japan. Yiddish, however, was a language of exile; the Israeli flag would represent Hebrew, not Yiddish. What, then, should serve as its symbol? Suggestions abounded, including that the website should “just put a bagel on it,” or that it should feature a “fiddler on a roof.”
The contretemps is intriguing because it inspires the inquiry: What makes Yiddish unique? If every language has its individual character, what exactly characterizes Yiddish? Jews give many answers to this, but not all are equally correct. The Journal reports that one suggestion for the Duolingo symbol was the word “kvetch” surrounded by a circle; this reflected the thesis put forward by Michael Wex in his bestselling Born to Kvetch, which argues that Yiddish provides a way of “seeing the world in cataract-colored glasses.” But does “kvetch” truly capture Yiddish? It is true, of course, that Yiddish is a magnificent language for anyone who wants to say something unkind. As Leo Rosten noted, “little miracles of discriminatory precision” exist in the difference between a nebekh, a shlep, a shmendrik, a shlump, a klutz, a yold, a shnook, a Chaim Yankel, a bulbenik, a shoyteh, a shlemazel, and a shlemiel; all of these terms describe pathetic people, but there are different reasons as to why they are pathetic.
Yet to reduce Yiddish in this way is to commit a calumny against a language that is not about negativity. Isaac Bashevis Singer was surely correct when, in his Nobel Prize address, he argued that there is in Yiddish “a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love.” The most insightful summation of Yiddish’s character was put forward by Max Weinreich, the 20th century’s greatest scholar of the language, who argued that Yiddish embodies the Derekh HaShaS, or “the way of the Talmud.” By this he meant not that the Talmud was written by Yiddish speakers, but that Yiddish trains its speakers to see the entire world from a Talmudic perspective, so that every aspect of reality is described in similes and metaphors that refer back, in some profound way, to the life of halakhic Judaism. Wex more accurately captures Yiddish’s essential nature when he focuses not on kvetching but on the fact that “the Talmud is nothing less than Yiddish in utero. The Jews who initiated the transmutation of German into Yiddish were those Jews most deeply connected to Jewish law, people for whom the categories and mental processes of halokhe, of Jewish law, were practically second nature.”
A plethora of idioms in Yiddish reflect this, and Weinreich notes many of them. If one wishes to express that something happens often, one says that it occurs Yeder montig un donershtig, every Monday and Thursday, because the weekday Torah readings take place on them. In contrast, something that occurs rarely happens every “year and a Wednesday,” reflecting the tradition of the Talmudic age that a wedding would take place a year after a betrothal, and that Wednesday was considered the best day for the ritual to occur. Since every married male Jew among the Ashkenazim wore a tallis, a prayer shawl, a statement in Yiddish that “our town has thirty talleisim” means that there are thirty families.
Most Jews, of course, were not learned in the Talmud; their everyday experience of rabbinic Judaism came from the liturgy of its rabbis. Thus the siddur, the prayer book, became a primary source of similes. If one wishes to express that he is fully conversant in something, he might say klor vi a yid in Ashrei—“clear as a Jew saying Ashrei,” the central psalm of the morning prayer, because that was one everyone knew by heart. One who is at the end of an endeavor is called arriving tsu aleinu, in reference to Aleinu, the last liturgical passage of the daily service. A “yes man” is called an amein zoger, one who says “amen,” the standard refrain in a service, and to express deep regret, one might say shlogn zikh al khet, which is a reference to the beating of the chest that occurs during penitential prayers. Thus if there is a heart to Yiddish, it is the tendency to endow all of reality with holiness by referencing a Talmudic touchstone.
The linguist Guy Deutscer famously and controversially argues that how one experiences the hue of the world is affected by one’s language. He says some tongues distinguish between blue and green, whereas others describe them as shades of the same color. “As strange as it may sound,” he writes, “our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.” Whether this is true or not, it provides us with a poignant parallel. In Yiddish, Jews spoke a language that allowed to see reflections and refractions of Judaism everywhere, of the Sabbath and holidays everywhere, of the Torah and Talmud everywhere.
Here, then, is the terrible irony. The suggestions that Yiddish should be represented by a bagel, or a fiddler on a roof, or, as others have suggested in a different context, a Chagallian goat playing a clarinet, reflect the fact that many modern Jews seek in Yiddish a source of Jewish identity that is a replacement of faith. They hunger for a touchstone of cultural Jewishness that is devoid of the Divine. But such an understanding of the Yiddish reduces it to what might be called “tikkunolamitude”—advancing a version of Jewishness that is utterly consonant with the zeitgeist. Yiddish originated with Jews who viewed reality through the perspective of daily liturgy and daily rituals that embodied the origin of the phrase tikkun olam: the aspiration to “fix the world through the kingship of God.” Yiddish is the tongue of a community that viewed reality through the perspective not of abstract pursuits of the good but through daily liturgy and daily rituals that were, and are, life-affirming.
In the end, the symbol wisely chosen by the Duolingo Yiddish team was the Hebrew letter alef along with the vowelization known as a kometz. In a wonderful interview with Jonathan Silver, Meena Viswanath, one of the course’s organizers, noted that the symbol references the beloved song known as Oifen Pripitchik, “On the Hearth,” made famous to a new generation in Schindler’s List. The song describes a teacher in a heder, a Jewish school, who teaches his students to pronounce this letter with love. The song’s lyrics also illustrate the soul of Yiddish, as the teacher instructs his students:
Learn, children, don’t be afraid
every beginning is hard.
Lucky is the Jew who studies Torah.
What more do we need?
Some languages thrive and some do not. Yiddish provides a terrible and rare example of a language that had millions of speakers who were suddenly murdered. The world of Yiddish was physically destroyed by the Nazis. We, therefore, must be very careful to not deny its soul. What we remember about the Jews of the Yiddish-speaking world is not merely their culture but their faith, and the language’s way of seeing reality, of endowing the Pale of persecution with a resplendent sanctity. Most of the Jews of that world were annihilated, but if one can learn to see the world through their eyes, then, for a moment, those Jews live again.
Meir Y. Soloveichik is the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City and the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.
From Commentary magazine, June 2021
Review Essay: Mere Judaism
By: Mark Gottlieb
Moshe Koppel, Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures, Maggid Books, 2020
Seventy years ago, the European émigré Chaim Grade (pronounced “GRAH-deh”) published a short story that would secure his place in the pantheon of great Yiddish writers of the twentieth century. “Mayn krig mit hersh rasseyner,” usually rendered in English as “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner” but just as easily translated as “My War with Hersh Rasseyner” (as in the German Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war”), depicts a decades-long rivalry between the eponymous Hersh, a traditional Jewish scholar looking to unmask the false pieties of the secular West before and after the Holocaust, and Chaim, Grade’s proxy and the ambivalent stand-in for cultural accommodation in an increasingly godless world.
A new book by Moshe Koppel, an Israeli computer scientist and conservative think-tank founder, restages the Hersh-Chaim argument. Shimen, a Holocaust survivor living on the Upper West Side, is the faithful practitioner. Heidi, a composite of Koppel’s Princeton colleagues, is the accommodationist. Ironically, in this version tradition’s triumph occurs in social-scientific and evolutionary terms. Orthodoxy is celebrated because it works—it perpetuates itself, creating a morally balanced and broad life for its adherents. Cultures devoid of tradition, by contrast, atrophy and die. Think a hypothetical, C. S. Lewis–inspired Mere Judaism without rabbinic reasoning, theological demonstration, or standard apologetics. Koppel defends tradition with the very modern tools of social psychology, behavioral economics, and analytic philosophy. These perspectives are utterly alien to the book’s tradition-minded hero, Shimen. They sit uneasily with the outlook Koppel seeks to defend. And yet Koppel’s book is an important and powerful brief for orthodoxy, Jewish and otherwise.
Other recent books on the worldly advantages enjoyed by traditional religious communities tend to treat their religious subjects sympathetically, if somewhat sterilely. Even Eric Kaufmann’s 2010 Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, the finest of these books, lacks the vividness and specificity that would come from firsthand knowledge of his subject. Koppel, by contrast, offers a rich portraiture of orthodox Jewish life with all the concreteness and detail that only an authentic member of the community can provide.
In perhaps the most innovative section of the book, Koppel asks, “How Do We Decide What Is Right and What Is Wrong?”—or more pointedly, how do Jews actually resolve questions of ritual and morality? This issue of religious authority is compounded in the modern West, where members of the community of faith lack the fortifying features of government legislation and enforcement characteristic of more traditional societies. And Judaism, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, for example, does not have a formal, hierarchical structure to settle large and small disputes. What emerges from Koppel’s discussion of the mechanics of religious authority and decision-making is nothing less than a rich and original phenomenology of Torah development and transmission, with a level of sophistication rarely equaled in either academic or traditionalist circles.
In unpacking the religious worldview of the book’s protagonist, Shimen, Koppel makes clear that much more hinges on the mimetic nature of Jewish faith than on epistemic comprehensiveness or philosophical justification:
Shimen has no interest in justifying his stringencies or leniencies, or in convincing others to accept them. He’s completely comfortable in his own skin. He has no interest in sugarcoating Judaism to make it more palatable to those of refined taste. In fact, since for him Judaism is defined by tradition, the very idea of “fixing” it is inherently incoherent to him.
Koppel realizes that this somewhat naive definition of tradition (so far) leaves open the question of who fixes the tradition, and how.
With the question of tradition’s consistency and reliability still an issue, Shimen’s rival Heidi opts for a policy of expertise and, ultimately, the administered justice of a managerial state. Since halakha, Jewish law, “lacks a mechanism to overcome old traditions,” Heidi concludes, “it must inevitably become stale and outdated.” And in the absence of a unified authority, halakha is in danger of losing its integrity and coherence. Finally, halakha’s reliance on communal norms and folk practices opens it up to charges of systemic bias and false intuitions. It is in response to these charges against traditional halakha levelled by Heidi—to say nothing of her more progressive and radical kin, Amber—that Koppel makes his most powerful contribution to contemporary Jewish apologetics.
For Koppel, the key analogue to a healthy, organic legal tradition is a living, developing language. To deepen this claim, Koppel draws on Alasdair MacIntyre’s discussion of “First Languages” and “Second First-Languages” in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. For Shimen, traditional halakha is analogous to a living language because both are practiced intuitively, and both are communal phenomena. “But,” Koppel wonders,
for the typical American yeshiva student of Heidi’s generation [that is, one or two generations after Shimen]—call him Yitzy—the analogy between language and halakha is perplexing. Yitzy learned halakha from books, he practices it by navigating an obstacle course of seemingly arbitrary rules, and he is irritated by the propensity of his parents’ community to get so many things wrong.
Koppel’s resolution is an elegant one: For Shimen, halakha is a First Language, for Yitzy, halakha is only a Second Language. And halakha, in its most authentic and natural form, is meant to be spoken as a First Language, not a Second Language.
Thanks to Koppel’s own enculturation in Jewish learning and practice, his ability to speak the language of halakha as a native, he can adduce numerous examples from traditional Jewish legal and narrative sources to support his argument that the blend of bottom-up and top-down developments in Jewish law is well-suited to keep it supple and stable over the generations, fueling purpose and creativity. Heidi’s reliance on expertise and social engineering fails on both counts. Her essentially Rawlsian worldview
gets to march under the banners of liberty and public welfare but constitutes thin gruel to build a life around. In the end, a culture built on resentment of others’ moral traditions can arouse, but it can’t fulfill.
A pillar of Koppel’s argument is the priority of actions over beliefs, of concrete forms of life over grand narratives. Of course, he acknowledges the interdependence of these things, but as a matter of principle and practiced experience, he privileges behaviors as the decisive factor in religious decision-making. Preempting a possible objection to his nearly behavioristic account of the viability of traditionalism over cosmopolitanism, Koppel wonders whether he should be talking about Shimen’s and Heidi’s respective beliefs, not their lifestyles:
After all, aren’t the disagreements between Shimen and Heidi about how to live merely second-order differences that follow inevitably from their irreconcilable beliefs about nature, history, and theology?
Koppel insists that this conclusion gets things exactly backwards, because “virtues and traditions are primary and beliefs are derivative.” To illustrate, he offers a more-than-plausible account of our protagonist’s formative etiology:
Young Shimen didn’t contemplate nature and history and conclude, like our Father Abraham, that there must be a “ruler of the castle” [here Koppel alludes to a famous rabbinic midrash about the philosophical precociousness of the patriarch Abraham and his discovery of God]. He was raised to honor particular virtues and traditions long before he had the most rudimentary ability to contemplate the stuff of belief. And among the traditions that he honors is the affirmation of certain claims about the world.
Koppel acknowledges that Shimen was raised at home and heder (the primary school version of Yeshiva) to believe certain things. The most foundational of these include God’s revelation of the Torah to the Jewish people at Sinai, a system of reward and punishment expressing God’s ubiquitous, if not always transparent, justice, and the promise of a redeemed world at the end of history. But for Koppel, these affirmations coalesce into the single belief that Judaism is a “directed process linking the Jewish past with the Jewish future.” The rest, Koppel says, is commentary.
Now, it’s fine for a philosophical mathematician like Koppel to abstract the multifariousness of Jewish practice and belief into one pithy formula, but the learned game theorist is making a bolder, perhaps more controversial claim. Stated baldly, it’s this: The real subject matter of Jewish belief is Jewish practice. Koppel elaborates by saying that
the principles of Jewish belief . . . are about the unfolding of Jewish tradition and the destiny of the people committed to that tradition, so that Jewish belief is empty without some prior definition of Jewish practice.
And Jewish practice (like the beliefs that encode that practice) is a self-regulating, self-reinforcing system, which does not stand or fall on the evidentiary record or on the veracity of the historical events on which the faith is founded.
Make no mistake: Koppel is not denying the historicity of Sinai or Genesis; he is saying that “for those who experience Jewish life as instinctively as Shimen, assent to codified Jewish belief might frame and intensify the experience, but is not the basis for the experience.” Just as Shimen’s memories of his angelic (maybe they were, maybe they weren’t?) martyred children are not made more meaningful or real by historical or scientific corroboration, so, too, his religious beliefs don’t need the kind of verification that simply doesn’t belong—or work, really—in this kind of intimate, existential, and foundational space.
Knowingly or not, Koppel’s arguments here draw from a long line of anti-historicist thinkers including Kierkegaard, Barth, and Rosenzweig, and more directly from the contemporary philosopher of religion Howard K. Wettstein, whom he cites. But his application of these themes to Judaism, with its emphasis on the practiced forms of theology over more abstract, “Hellenized” or hyper-rationalized varieties, makes for an especially convincing case.
Koppel concludes his book with a bleak question: Where have all the Shimens gone? The real Shimen (on whom the character is based) was an older acquaintance of Koppel’s who lived on the Upper West Side and left no surviving children—both a biological tragedy and an emblem of the end of an entire way of life. Are there still Jews who speak the language of halakha as a First Language? Is Shimen’s way of life—the traditional Jewish way of life—any more viable today than Heidi’s cosmopolitanism or Amber’s progressivism?
Though he feels the force of this question, Koppel remains confident of two things. First, with tolerance and reason crowding out the broader palette of moral categories, the equilibrium so central to durable civilizations will never be realized in our late modern culture of Heidis and Ambers. Second, it is in the orthodox communities of Israel, rather than America, that Koppel sees a promising, if not uncomplicated, future. Israel surely has its challenges, including the fact that there aren’t too many Shimens around there now, either. But over the long term, Israel is more likely to produce “a cadre of people like Shimen who are guided by a clear-eyed and internalized trust in [Judaism’s] viability.” Koppel’s pessimism about the prospects for orthodox Judaism in America is sad but realistic. For Israel, the reality of Judaism as a majority culture holds the key to its promise of reviving a vital Judaism, a Yiddishkeit in its fullness and authenticity, a Yiddishkeit Shimen would recognize.
Koppel has written a suggestive, smart, and philosophically compelling primer for modern men and women who are more impressed by adaptive social practices and functionalism than by pristine theological commitments or the phenomenology of worship. Of course, Jews throughout history generally didn’t think in neo-Darwinian or utilitarian terms when justifying their faith. But neither did they doubt that the truth of their distinctive beliefs comported with a way of life that was good and durable. Koppel’s focus on the everyday expression of orthodox faith—sidestepping the usual theological staples of God, the soul, and redemption—shouldn’t obscure the power of his ambitious arguments for our contemporary age. Koppel’s Krieg, unlike Grade’s earlier and more ambivalent tale, is a real rout.
Mark Gottlieb is senior director of the Tikvah Fund and a trustee of the Hildebrand Project.