Hebrew Voices #169 – What I Can’t Control

Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #169 - What I Can't Control, Nehemia and Nelson discuss how young Israelis are coping with the stress of genocide and war. (Translated image included).

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Transcript

Hebrew Voices #169 – What I Can’t Control

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I'm Nehemia Gordon and I'm here with Nelson Calvillo, who is a research assistant at the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research. Nelson, you just spent something like a month-and-a-half or more in Israel, at an ulpan at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, before the war started. Tell us about what your experience was like doing the ulpan.

Nelson: Absolutely, thank you Nehemia for inviting me on. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here with you, especially during these difficult times. Yes, I was at Hebrew University throughout August and most of September at the Rothberg International School. I was enrolled in a Hebrew ulpan course. For those who may not know, a Hebrew ulpan is basically an intensive Modern Hebrew course for people who are starting to learn Modern Hebrew. They might know a little bit, but they're really starting to learn the language.

My experience was incredible, it was beyond what I had hoped for. I had two incredible teachers, and I met a lot of incredible young students from all over the globe. I had students mostly from Russia, a couple of classmates from South Korea, a few Americans like myself, and there was even someone from Germany.

Nehemia: Wow. So, we're going to take this opportunity to exercise some of those Hebrew skills you developed at ulpan. We're going through a very difficult time right now. Anybody who cares about God's people must be going through a very difficult time. We've been through difficult times in the past. We went through the Holocaust. We had a Holocaust that happened on October 7th. The Holocaust began with what was called the Einsatzgruppen, the special units. They followed the Wehrmacht, the German army, into the Soviet Union, and whenever they got to a place with Jews, they rounded up the Jews. They went door to door, collected the Jews, lined them up in a row, and mowed them down. Did other horrible things; killed, in the end, about something like one-and-a-half million Jews. The more famous death camps, like Auschwitz, were only developed into death camps once they realized, "This is inefficient. It's using a lot of bullets."

Well, what Hamas did on October 7th was exactly what the Einsatzgruppen did; they went door to door killing Jews. In these difficult times, I know I need some encouragement. And I saw this post on Israeli social media; I saw it all over the place and I want to share it with the audience. I want to look at it together with Nelson. It's in Hebrew; it was made for native Hebrew speakers, for Israelis. It has a circle, and there are things inside the circle and outside the circle. And you may have seen similar things like this in different support groups in English; that’s what it’s based on.

But it really blew me away. Some of the things here… because this is designed specifically for people who are going through these difficult times in Israel. It's in cursive, so nobody freak out. The titles are in what's called the square Hebrew script, but most of the things are written in cursive. The reason it's written in cursive is, I think, that appeals more to Israelis because that's what they write in. You know, it's like when you write English, you don't write the G with those little two little circles with the little horn coming out of it, right? You write a handwritten G, whether it's cursive or print. So, this is handwriting. Technically you might not call it cursive, but it’s not connected, but it’s what’s considered to be Modern Hebrew cursive.

So, it says at the top, inside the circle in square letters, "be’shlitati", and outside "lo be’shlitati". So, with your Hebrew skills… this is a bit of a test for Nelson as well. So, what does the word "be’shlitati" mean?

Nelson: Sure. Before I do that, just real quick, if I may say, when I was at the Hebrew ulpan, every day… I learned how to read and write square Hebrew script when I learned Biblical Hebrew, and that's the script you see at the top here towards the top right, and the word at the very top inside the purple circle. So, I was already familiar with this script.

Nehemia: And so, you're talking about this word over here. I hope they can see my screen, and this word here… these are square, and all the rest, everything here, is what we call rahut, which could be translated as cursive. In this case, it's not cursive. In the Middle Ages, this would have been called medial script, but we won't split hairs about that. In modern terms… and this is the way that Israelis actually write.

Nelson: Yes, yes. Now, the square script, they still use it in Modern Hebrew. You see it in emails, in newspapers, and even digital content like this. And then you can even see another form of the square script at the very bottom right corner.

Nehemia: Oh yeah, you're right. It says there… “hashtag” yamei milchama, days of war. So, this is a kind of a diagram to help people get through these days of war, and at the top, it says be’shlitati. What is that, Nelson?

Nelson: So, with Hebrew… you know, in English we have so many different components that make up words and ultimately sentences. Here, in Hebrew, you have a number of components, and they all come together to make one word. So, if I can break this down, at the beginning of the word, that Bet there, is a preposition. And then you have the main word right after that, which is shlitat, “control of”, and then at the very end, you have the Yud, and that is what we call a pronominal suffix. And it's essentially like a pronoun, a suffix that denotes the pronoun. In this case, it's me, so be’shlitati would mean "in my control".

Nehemia: Right. And really, it means "under my control", in this case. Be is “in”, you’re right, but the prepositions don't always translate one to one, so it's be’shlitati, under my control. And then we have lo be’shlitati, not under my control. So, all the things inside the circle are under my control, and the ones outside are not under my control. And this is a kind of a way for people who are… I call it the circle of control here; the way people are trying to cope with this difficult situation.

We're at war. We just experienced a mini-Holocaust. And I only say mini because of the scale, right? It was around 1,400 people, or something like that. So that was like a bad day for the Einsatzgruppen, or maybe they came to a small shtetel, and that's how many people they killed.

So, let's start looking at some of the things that are under my control and the ones that are not under my control. And it really blew my mind what these things were, because these are the things that people in Israel… and I just got back from Israel, are coping with. But what really struck me is that the handwriting here is the handwriting of, like, a teenage girl. Right? That's at least the impression I get; it's a very neat, clean handwriting.

If I wrote it… it wouldn't look anything like this in my handwriting. And this is appealing to both males and females as we can see, because Hebrew is a gendered language. But people are going through difficult times, and what we can ask those out there who… well, some of them may benefit from having something like this for themselves, but also, people need your prayers. That's what they need, and they need your support.

So, let's read some of these things. So, what's not under my control? Matzav ha’chatufim, the status of the kidnapped. So, as of today, as we're recording this, it's believed that somewhere around 220 kidnapped Israelis have been taken to Gaza. They, the Hamas terrorists, just released an 85-year-old woman who describes how, when she was kidnapped from her little village on the Israeli border, she was beaten with sticks… an 85-year-old woman and forced to march for miles through underground tunnels.

And so, a lot of people in Israel are like, "How can I go on with life?" And I felt this. I took a bath this morning, and when my thought was when I took the bath, was, number one, I was stinky. But I was also thinking, "How can I enjoy a bath when there are little children who were kidnapped, taken to Gaza? Old people who were taken to Gaza, kidnapped." But that's not under my control, the status of the kidnapped.

Another word here is az'akot. What is az'akot, Nelson?

Nelson: I learned from you recently. Az'akot is the plural, az'aka would be the singular, and az'akot means sirens.

Nehemia: Right. And it comes from the Hebrew za'ak, which is scream. It's actually onomatopoeia, a word that sounds like the noise it makes. Like “woof, woof” is an onomatopoeia, but also in the Hebrew the word for bottle is bakbuk. It's called bakbuk because when you turn a bottle on its side it goes “bak buk bak buk” because there's a little air trapped in there because of its shape. By the way, it's an ancient word. The original bottles weren't glass, they were made of pottery, and they have that shape that made the noise.

So az'aka, or za’ak, in ancient Hebrew is an onomatopoeia. And then we were discussing this when I showed this to you, and we're looking in the Tanakh here. So, let's see how the word is used. It's quite interesting. “A long time after that, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites were groaning under the bondage, and they cried out.” And they cried out, va’yiz’aku, which is the same root as az'aka, or az'akot, which is sirens.

So, why is a siren from the word “crying out”? So, there are different conjugations in Hebrew. This is the Qal conjugation. If you look at the Nif’al conjugation, it says, "All the troops in the city gathered to pursue them," and the word isn’t “gathered”, it says va’yiza’aku. “And they responded to the cry.” So, lehiza’ek, the Nif’al, niz’ak, is to respond to someone who's crying. And what are they crying? They're crying, “Help, we’re at war! You have to come and join the military! You have to come and join the army, we're being attacked.” They didn't have standing armies in ancient times, so it was someone’s job to go through the villages and the towns and shout at the top of their lungs, “We need your help! We need to defend ourselves!” And that's from the word za'ak.

And so, that's where we get the Modern Hebrew az'aka. It’s a siren that goes off to warn people about the rockets that are coming in. So az'akot here is sirens, but what it really means is, when there's a siren in Israel, depending on where you are, you have anywhere from a few seconds… in Jerusalem I had 90 seconds, to run to a bomb shelter or to a secure room. A secure room is just a bomb shelter that's one of the rooms in your apartment. Every apartment built after 1993, every house built after 1993, has a bomb shelter room. It's usually one of the kids' bedrooms.

So az'akot means the sirens that lead us to run into the bomb shelters. Next one here is harada she’ola le’or hamatzav. Which is, "anxiety that comes up in light of the situation". And we're talking about the word harada. So, you know that word from a common word that we hear in modern Israeli society, what's that word?

Nelson: Haredi or Haredim.

Nehemia: So, what's Haredi/Haredim? In English will sometimes say Hareidim or ultra-Orthodox. So, what does it mean? Well, I just told you what it means. But it actually comes from a verse in the Tanakh. There's a group of Jews in both Israel and overseas who call themselves Haredim. Harad is the word that means to shake. "Isaac was seized with violent trembling", and the word is vayeherad, “…and he shook.” That's what harad means. And from that, we get the word Haredim, which is actually from a verse in the Tanakh which I'll find in a second here. And the verse is, "Hear the word of Yehovah,” and in the English, “you who are concerned about His word." In the Hebrew it’s haharedim al dvaro, “Those who tremble towards His word,” right? So, they hear His word, it's towards… it’s even directional, and they tremble with awe when they hear it. And by the way, that’s Haredim here, from the singular hared, one who shakes. But then they derived another form, which is Haredi it’s called in Modern Hebrew, that's the singular, from that plural in Isaiah 66:5. So harada is the word for anxiety.

Nelson: Could you go back to Accordance and go back to the very first verse that came up when you did that search? It illustrates one of the things I love about Hebrew, the language in general. And the JPS translation says, “And Isaac was seized with a very violent trembling.” Can you explain where they get the idea of violent trembling. How did they know it was violent? Or if there was some kind of intensity to it.

Nehemia: So, it says "Vayeherad", "and he shook, Isaac shook, trembled", "hareda g'dola", "a great trembling", "ad me’od", "until very much". That's literally what it says. So, they're like, "Well, how do we translate that?" Because that's a very Semitic expression, a very Hebrew expression. It doesn't translate perfectly. "And Isaac shook, a great trembling until very much." So, he's shaking violently, is what it means, right? So, they're kind of paraphrasing it. Yeah, it's definitely a very vivid image in Hebrew.

Nelson: And even in Modern Hebrew you do this, where you use words with the same roots very close to each other, right?

Nehemia: Oh, absolutely, for sure, that's another Semitic form of… this type of repetition is very common in Semitic languages. So, harada she’ola le’or hamatzav is anxiety that comes up, literally trembling, but it's the word for anxiety that comes up in light of the situation.

The next one is im tihiye haslama. What is that, Nelson?

Nelson: I believe we had said that the word there, haslama, means like an intensification…

Nehemia: Right.

Nelson: If it escalates or things escalate.

Nehemia: Escalation. Yeah, it's escalation in a military sense. So, what does that mean “if there will be escalation”? And look, if you didn't know the context here, you'd be like, "What is this teenage girl upset about? Who were the hatufim? Who were the kidnapped? What are these az'akot?" It doesn't say az'akot, sirens, from the ambulance, which it could be, by the way. Or somebody breaks into your car, it's also an az'aka.

No. Here's a beautiful example of you have to know the cultural context. And if you had published this a month ago in Tel Aviv, nobody would know what you're talking about. What hatufim? There are no kidnapped. What az'akot? We don’t have that; they have that in Sderot, we don’t have that Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. So, it's the cultural context of a very specific moment in time, and hopefully it's a short moment in time, I hope and pray.

So, haslama here is escalation of the situation in northern Israel. Israel is at full-out war with Gaza. In Northern Israel, we have a terrorist organization, a Shiite terrorist organization, called Hezbollah, which takes its orders from Iran. And they've been firing what they call Nun-Tet, which is anti-tank rockets, neged-tankim [N’’T], at our buildings, at our people. They've killed civilians, they've killed a lot of soldiers. And we're responding with very pointed, “Okay, you fired from that spot, we attack back at that spot.” And why haven't we invaded to take out all these attacks, these people are attacking us? Because we don't want to escalate that into a full-scale war while we have a full-scale war with Gaza. It may happen in the end too. I pray it doesn't, but it may anyway.

So, escalation is a term that's just part of the daily vocabulary today in modern Israel. Hatufim, kidnapped, is part of the daily vocabulary. Az'akot, sirens, it's part of the daily fiber of life today in Israel, and as we're recording this in October 2023. "Ma ihiye ba’medina?" “What will be in the country?” And medina is literally "the state". It means, what will be in the state of Israel? What's the future going to hold? That's not under my control.

Hahlatot hamemshala, decisions of the government. By the way, here's a beautiful word that, if you read Genesis 1, you know the word memshala. Do you remember that, in Genesis 1?

Nelson: The word memshala? So, I know in Modern Hebrew memshala is government.

Nehemia: Right. But we have this in Genesis 1. It says, "And God made the two great lights, the greater light," or literally "the great light", "lememshelet hayom," "to rule over the day," "ve’et hama’or hakatan lememshelet halaila." "And the small light to rule over the night and the stars." So memshala here, memshelet in the smikhut, the construct form, means a government in Modern Hebrew. But in Biblical Hebrew it's the dominion, the ruling over, of the sun and the moon.

And let's see some other examples of the word. I love when you look at the word in Biblical Hebrew… Oh, this is beautiful. This is about Solomon, "And of Solomon's garrison towns, chariots, towns, and cavalry towns, everything Solomon set his heart on building in Jerusalem and Lebanon throughout the territory, vekhol eretz memshalto, all of the land of his reign,” meaning everywhere where his reign extended.

So, it's not exactly the same as in modern Hebrew, because in Modern Hebrew, memshalah, government, means what could mean in general the government, and it could also mean the current reigning government. Like right now there's a unity government in Israel, with different parties. In any event, we have these Biblical Hebrew words, and the words are still used sometimes with a slightly different connotation, but the words are still around. I mean, we've been having a lot of discussions on social media where I've been posting things, my wife Lynell has been posting things, and we get these people saying, “Oh, well, you're a colonialist invader in Palestine.” I just brought you a word from 3,500 years ago that was written in what you call Palestine… not you, those people, and it's the same word the people who you call colonialist invaders still speak. Now, you speak a different language, the Palestinians, you speak Arabic; that came from the Arabian Peninsula. The Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel.

Nelson: If I may say, Nehemia, the third one that we brought, which was ha'harada, the trembling that intensifies, that we saw in Genesis, when Isaac trembled, in that case it's the exact same word. The word harada.

Nehemia: Right, right.

Nelson: So, we don’t just have words that are associative, but it's the exact same word, letter for letter.

Nehemia: Now, the connotation has changed, right? Nobody spoke of anxiety 3,500 years ago, because that's a word from modern psychology. They were more vivid and descriptive. Okay, he's actually shaking. He's so upset, he's shaking. Are we so concerned and disturbed, right? He wasn't necessarily upset there; he was like, “What? I just gave the blessing to the wrong person. Oh no!"

All right let's go to the next one. These are the things that Israelis are concerned about on a daily basis, especially young people, it seems, but I'm sure everyone. Kamut ha'harugim, the number of the killed. Now, the word kamut, you probably know that word from the word kama. What is kama?

Nelson: Kama means a couple of things, but I think its main meaning is “how much” or “how many”.

Nehemia: How many, right. So, kamut is the quantification; it means quantity. So, "the quantity of those killed", what does that mean? So, on October 7th, when they invaded our country, they killed over 1,400 people and that number is rising. We don't even know what the final number is. And the reason we don't know the final number is we don't know how many people were actually kidnapped. And so some of the people who are missing might be dead in a ditch somewhere or they might be in a tunnel in Gaza, or they might be one of the unidentified bodies. I don't think I'm going to go into the detail of why they're unidentified bodies after almost two weeks, no, more than two weeks, because I think there might be kids who are listening to this. Go ahead, Nelson.

Nelson: I would just say, even, what are we at now, 17, 18 days after the attack? There is a reason the number of those who were murdered and even the number of hostages still fluctuates, and why they're still updating these numbers.

Nehemia: Right. And again, in this recording, because I'm hoping that there's some young person who gets benefit from this, we won't go into the details about that.

Nelson: Right.

Nehemia: Haregashot she’olim li le’or hamatzav. The emotions that come up for me in light of the situation. By the way it's very similar to here, hareda she’ola li le’or hamatzav, anxiety that comes up for me in light of the situation, and haregashot, the feelings, emotions, that come up for me in light of this situation.

And by the way, this is really interesting. There's a feminine ending, regashot, so it's a feminine plural noun with a masculine plural verb. So, why is that so? We have two different words in modern Hebrew, hargasha, which is feeling, and regesh, which is more of a psychological term. It means emotion. And the plural of regesh for some reason is regashot. Why does it have a plural ending even though it's a masculine singular? And it's actually masculine plural, it just has a feminine style ending. Nelson, what's the answer?

Nelson: I heard this answer many times in two months; the answer is “kakha”.

Nehemia: Which means?

Nelson: Just because, that's the way it is.

Nehemia: That's just actually a really important principle, that a lot of things in language are arbitrary. There's nothing about the word dog that makes it mean dog, other than that it was at some point decided that should be the word for dog. Now, there's an exception to that. There are two exceptions that I know about, maybe somebody will post in the comments other exceptions. One exception is onomatopoeia, which we talked about before, like the word woof-woof. There is something about the word woof-woof that makes it the sound a dog makes. There are people who think it sounds like that. Now in Hebrew it's not woof-woof, it's hav-hav. Do you know what it is in Spanish?

Nelson: Not the onomatopoeia. I don't, I'm sorry.

Nehemia: Okay, alright, I know someone will post it in the comments. So, in different languages, there are different onomatopoeias because people hear different things. Like in Hebrew, instead of a sheep saying baa, it says meh. Why is that? I don't know, it's what we hear. I mean, that part is a little bit arbitrary, how we interpret that, perhaps, but it's based on something we're hearing.

The other example is the basic words that children can speak. Like mama, baba, papa. That's based on the physiological ability of a child to produce certain sounds at a very young age, so that's not arbitrary. But the rest of language is “kakha,” it's just because.

The next one that's not under my control is matai ze yigamer? “When will it end?” So, let's go over to be’shlitati. And look, I'll be honest with this, I'm not a teenage girl, but I saw this and I read it, and it actually comforted me. Because I have been obsessing about… like I said, I'm taking a bath and there's somebody who's kidnapped in Gaza. There are people who were murdered. There's my family members. Many of my loved ones are dealing on a daily basis with these az'akot, with these sirens. That part's not under my control.

So, what's under my control? Lehitamekh u’levakesh ezra, “to be supported and to ask for help.” And that's beautiful here; this is in nifal form, “lehitamekh”. So, tamakh is to support something. He supported. And lehitamekh is to be supported.

Bechirot shemetivot oti, “choices that benefit me.” And I want to look at this word here, bechirot. Bechirot is choices, and that's a word we can look up in the Tanakh. Not in that exact form, but the word. Genesis 6:2, a weird verse: "The divine beings, or sons of Elohim, saw how beautiful daughters of men were and took wives from among them, those that pleased them." But in Hebrew it says "mikol asher bacharu", "from all that they chose". So, literally it's a choice. Bechirot are choices, and the verb here, bachar. "Vayivchar lo Lot", "Lot chose for himself the entire plane of the Jordan."

Let's look into another example here of bachar… So, we see this a lot in Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy loves the word bachar. "And because He loved your fathers, He chose their heirs after Him. He Himself and His great might lead you out of Egypt," and chose is vayivchar, the same word as in Modern Hebrew. Here with essentially the same meaning, except this is a verb, and that's a noun derived from a verb. "For you are a people consecrated to Yehovah your God, of all the people on earth, the Lord Yehovah your God chose you to be His treasured people." And the word is bachar. He chose. So again, 3500 years later, it’s the same people speaking the same language in the same land.

So, this myth of the Jews are the colonial invaders… You know what's so evil about that? The atrocities that were carried out on October 7th by Hamas require dehumanizing the people that they carried out these atrocities on. And part of that dehumanizing is to say, "Well, they're foreign invaders. They're colonialists." That's the way of dehumanizing to justify murdering them and doing other things that I can't speak about in the program that children might also watch. I'll talk about it at a different time perhaps.

Alright… ha'yachas sheli el atzmi. What do we have here, Nelson?

Nelson: So, ha'yachas is the relationship. Ha'yachas sheli, my relationship. El atzmi, my relationship towards myself, or with myself.

Nehemia: Yeah, to myself. And so, we have this word atzmi in Biblical Hebrew… I love it! You could take the word, sometimes, like I said, [it has a] different connotation. So where do we see this word first? We have, “And Adam said hapa’am etzem me’atzamai” “this time a bone from my bones", "u'bassar mib'sari", "and flesh from my flesh", "le'zot ikreh isha", "this shall be called isha", "ki me’ish lukacha zot", "because she was taken from man". And etzem me'atzamai, “a bone from my bones,” and in Modern Hebrew it means myself. So, think about it. You have the word etzem, which literally means bone, and then atzmi is "my bone", myself. So, it's kind of a modern adaptation of that meaning, or another variation. It actually does appear in some earlier sources. So, "the relationship of myself to myself". And we looked at the word yachas in biblical Hebrew, it refers to genealogy. So, it's relationship, in like a familial sense, but here it's the way I treat myself, the way I relate to myself.

Let's look at this one here, because it also has yachas. "Ha'yachas sheli la'regashot sheli." "The relationship of myself to my emotions." I can't control my emotions, but how do I respond to those emotions? That may be something I can control. This one, I think, is really important for me, and I think it's important for a lot of Israelis. And I don't think it was an accident that whoever made this… I have no idea who made it; whoever made it, please post in the comments, and we'll give you full credit. I just found it all over on social media in Israel. Israeli social media.

"Kamut ha'zman she’ani tzofeh bachadashot." So, we had kamut before, which is a quantity, "the quantity of time that I watch the news". Now, the word chadash is a word that people know from Biblical Hebrew, or Christians will know from the word Brit Chadasha, the New Testament, or the New Covenant. And here, chadashot which means "the news".

So why is this important? Because Israelis are obsessed with the news in a way I don't think I ever understood until October 7th. When I first moved to Israel in 1993, it was after what they called, and they actually call it this, they called it the era of existential wars. Every war Israel had involved the question of would it survive that war, in a way that no other country ever has to deal with. If Ukraine doesn’t survive the war with Russia, it won't mean the death of every Ukrainian man, woman, and child. It will mean that Ukraine is no longer an independent nation. It might mean the end of the separate Ukrainian language because Russia might try to stamp out that language. I don't know. But it won't mean the death of every last Ukrainian man, woman, and child. Israel has had numerous wars that if we lost those wars, it meant the death of every last man, woman, and child.

And the last of those wars, until now, was 1973, the Yom Kippur War. And we are now in another existential war that, if we lose, could mean the end of Israel. And so, there becomes this obsession of watching the news. What's going on? What's going to happen next?

There was a joke during the Yom Kippur War, and the joke was, "The last one out of the country, please turn off the lights." We're now in a situation again where we are facing an existential war, where there's literally people trying to wipe us out. Could they succeed? There's never been a time since 1973 where that looked realistic. I hope it doesn't happen, I pray it doesn't happen, but it is possible. I won't go into details here. So, the amount of time I watch the news, it's difficult. I can spend hours, Nelson, watching the news. And you learn what's going on.

You said you too?

Nelson: Yeah, me too.

Nehemia: Yeah. And I'm watching the news, and I watch the news on Channel 12 and Channel 13. You can watch them over the internet in Hebrew, and you're getting things that I don't think you're hearing about in America, or you're hearing about them days later, or not at all. So yeah, it's difficult. And I learned this in the 90’s, there was a terrorist attack at a place called the Dolphinarium, where there were a lot of young people who were dancing; it was like a music hall, a dance hall. And there was a bomb that went off and it killed… I want to say dozens of people, I don't remember. And it was before the era of the 24-hour news cycle, at least in Israel, and they were repeating the same thing over and over on the news. And I remember watching it for like 8 hours or 12 hours, and I realized how traumatizing it was to continually watch this.

And a horrible thing had happened, but I couldn't control what happened. What I could control is whether I subjected myself to that repeated… they call it vicarious trauma. And on the other hand, I need to know what's going on, right? I don't think until October 7th people could appreciate this, but I used to go out every year on the Aviv search. We’d get in a car, and we’d drive around Israel, and one of the places we went was the border of Gaza. And I would open up the news and find out what was going on. And it didn't matter if I looked last night. And it didn't matter if I looked at 6:00 a.m. what the news was. When I was approaching certain areas in Israel, I needed to know what was going on. Because we could have been in the middle of the type of thing that happened on October 7th. It never happened on that scale, but there were, you know, riots and things like that where they attacked Jews. So, I needed to know if I was driving into a war zone. And there were times when I was, and I chose to do things a little bit differently.

Nelson: Can I say something about that real quick, Nehemia?

Nehemia: Yeah, please.

Nelson: I think what's important… what you just said is extremely important for someone like me. I knew you would go out on the Aviv search, sometimes by yourself, sometimes with a group of people, but I think it's important for people to know that when you went on the Aviv search, you were in Jerusalem at the time, but you weren't just going to places around Jerusalem or staying close to that part of the country. You were driving out everywhere, looking at the stages of aviv throughout the country. And I think that's important for people to know; the extent to which you and the other people who are with you were going searching for the aviv, so that we, who are not in Israel, all of us could know and we would be able to know when to start the biblical New Year.

Nehemia: Yeah. And the people are still doing it; it’s what we call avodat kodesh, holy work, and there's a certain amount of risk involved with it. The two areas that are particularly dangerous are the Jordan Valley, which is part of the West Bank, and the border of Gaza, even more so. I mean, the border of Gaza was always… I shouldn't say always, but the last few years that I did it, there were rockets flying.

I remember driving through Sderot on an Aviv search and saying to one of the people, "Well, you know when the rockets are fired, they only have 15 seconds to get to a bomb shelter. And they don't have sirens because it's too traumatizing for the people; they lived with it for… I mean now, for over 15 years in Sderot. They have this soft, calm voice that says "tzeva adom, tzeva adom", "the color red, the color red". And I was telling this to some people as we're driving through Sderot, and the windows are down, and the guy said, “Like that, right now?” I said, “Ha-ha, very funny.” He's like, “No, seriously.” And we stopped the car in the middle of the road and ran into a bus stop bomb shelter. I don't remember what year that was, but...

Okay, I've got a few more here. Under my control, be’shlitati. "Hatkhanim she’ani nechsaf/nechsefet eleihem". So here nechsaf is the masculine and nechsefet is the feminine. So, you could be male or female and use this. “The contents that I am exposed to them.” And what does it mean by "contents"? It means media content, social media contents. Do I watch videos of atrocities being carried out against Jews on October 7th, which are up there on the internet? Look, and some of them were put out by the Israeli government because we just went through a Holocaust, through a genocide, and we have Holocaust deniers in real time saying, “No, that didn't happen.” What's crazy to me, Nelson, is we're hearing two voices. One that says, “No, it didn't happen,” and the other says, “and you deserved it.” And sometimes it's from the same people.

Nelson: That's amazing, isn't it?

Nehemia: It really is, yeah. Last one. "Shehiya be'makom batuach be'zman ha’az'aka", "spending time in a safe place during an air raid siren", meaning an incident when the air raid siren goes off. You're supposed to wait 10 minutes until... they don’t even do an “all clear” anymore, there’s just too many air raid sirens. It used to be that there was an air raid siren, which was up and down, and then there was a flat one, that was the all-clear. They don't even do the all-clear anymore because they'd be doing all-clears all day long.

So, you hear the siren and you're told to wait 10 minutes. By then the rocket will have fallen and killed someone or been intercepted and not have done damage. So, spending time in a safe place during the az'aka. And we looked up the word shehiya, which I didn't think was in Biblical Hebrew, but there is a variant of it. So, it's Genesis 24:21. “And the man, meanwhile, stood gazing at her, silently wondering whether Yehovah had made his errand successful or not," it's the servant of Abraham. And the word there mishta’eh, which is a hitpa’el form of Shin-Alef-Hey. And for those who know Hebrew, you might be saying, “How could it be hitpa’el? The Shin comes before the Tav.” That's one of the examples of metathesis, which is part of the language. Whenever you have a Shin, you say le'hishtamesh, the Shin and the Tav switch places.

Interestingly, in Moabite, which is a language very similar to Hebrew… which isn't that surprising, because the Moabites were cousins of Abraham. I mean, Lot was a cousin of Abraham, and the Moabites came from Lot, according to the Tanakh so, in the Moabite language, it's always hifta’el. The position of the first letter of the root always comes before the Tav. In Hebrew that only happens with… there are five examples that are exceptions. I think I learned this in high school, Zayin, Shin, Tzadi... I want to say Tet, Dalet, Tav have assimilation, right?

Nelson: Yes.

Nehemia: So yeah, you have something like five exceptions, right? I think maybe there's more than five from what I just said, but… The ones with metathesis, the switching the letters, is like hizdaken, hishtamesh, mitzta’er, which is a common word you hear all the time, so it's Tzadi, Zayin, and Shin. And I suppose with Samekh, you'd have the same thing and Sin, right? So, I guess more than five technically, but they're all kind of related.

All right, so, I thought this would help somebody. I hope it helps somebody. Look, this is the type of thing that you'll see, like I said, if you're in a support group or a 12-step program or something. There are things under my control and things not under my control. It’s actually the Serenity Prayer. What is the Serenity Prayer? Which is, by the way, based on a prayer by a rabbi in the Middle Ages named Levi Ben Gershom, from what I understand. He was also a great mathematician, that rabbi. It’s, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” There are things that I can't change. “The courage to change the things I can.” I can change how much time I watch the news, unless I'm like, maybe I'm a prisoner somewhere and they're forcing me to watch the news or make bad decisions that don't benefit me. “The courage to change things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” And that last one's really important; the wisdom to know the difference. So, I thought this would help somebody. And Nelson, would you end with a prayer? And then I'm going to end with the Serenity Prayer in Hebrew.

Nelson: Certainly. Yehovah in heaven, we thank you and we bless Your holy name. We are so grateful that You allow us to come together to congregate, and to meditate on the things that allow us to realize that there are always more things in our control than we realize. Yehovah, we ask for Your guidance. We ask for Your leading, to help us mine through all those things that we can't control; the people, the noises, the news. All those things that distract us from You, Your goodness, Your grace, Your word, Your provision, and most of all, Your love. We just ask that Your word, as light, shines through in these dark days, and that You continue to rise up and fight for Your people, Israel. That you are with all Israelis, whether they're Jewish, Arab, Christian, Muslim. All the people who are in the land that You call the apple of Your eye, may You continue to watch over, guard, and protect them. And may You lead the IDF to victory, over all those who hate Your people, but also hate You, God. You are the one who are always in control, and we thank You that You will continually sit on Your throne and reign supreme as the God of heaven and earth. Amen.

Nehemia: Amen. Eli, ten bi et ha'shalva lekabel et ha'dvarim she’ein be'yekholti leshanotam, et ha’ometz leshanot et asher beyekholti, ve’et ha'tvuna lehavdil beineihem. Yehovah, Creator of the universe, I ask You that You bring peace upon Israel, a lasting peace, and that You protect all of those who have stood up to defend Your people. Amen.

Nelson: Amen.

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VIDEO CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
01:36 Holocaust
03:00 Encouragement
06:45 Circle of Control
08:10 Not under my control
26:00 What’s under my control
31:05 Existential war
34:30 Aviv Search over the border of Gaza
41:25 The Serenity Prayer
42:15 Prayers

VERSES MENTIONED
Exodus 2:23
Genesis 27:33
Isaiah 66:5
Genesis 1:16
Genesis 6:2
Genesis 13:11
Deuteronomy 7:6
Genesis 2:23
Genesis 24:21

RELATED EPISODES
Israel War Episodes

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The post Hebrew Voices #169 – What I Can’t Control appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.