May 10 will be Yom Haatzmaut, Israel’s 63rd Independence Day Anniversary.
It is hard to believe that Jews are the only people capable of returning to their ancestral land after a 2,000-year hiatus. It is true that there has always been a Jewish presence in the land of Israel, albeit very small at times. Yet, no one nation has been able to achieve such a feat. In fact, not only have Jews been able to return to Israel but we speak almost the same language. If in a similar situation to the comedy “Encino Man,” where a frozen caveman comes back to life after being thawed, if an ancient Israelite returned to Israel today, he or she would be able to understand and be understood almost perfectly by any passerby in the streets of Tel Aviv. Furthermore, if he walked into an Apple store and saw a computer, he would understand what that machine does because the word for computer (machsheiv) implies a machine that thinks for you.
Jews have never abandoned their original language and Hebrew writings have existed throughout history even as Jews spoke other languages. They have also developed their own dialects like Yiddish or Ladino. Minimally Hebrew was kept as a language of prayer and scholarly religious writings. In medieval times, the knowledge of Hebrew allowed Jews to be translators and to be intimately involved in voyages of discovery. Whereas an Italian traveler such as Marco Polo had no hope whatsoever to be able to communicate with someone in China, as well as on the countries he would have to transverse in order to get there, he could count on the almost certainty that having a Jewish translator with him would make communication easier as they would encounter other Jews along the way that would speak Hebrew alongside their countries languages.
Modern Hebrew is not exactly the Hebrew of the Bible. The biblical world view and sense of tense (past, present, future) is quite different from ours. Also there are many words required for modern communication that do not exist in the biblical lexicon. Thus, modern Hebrew had to be “invented.” It’s inventor was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (born Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman in 1858 in Luzhki — present day Belarus). He was a great linguist and scholar who immigrated to Palestine in 1881. He was determined to revive Hebrew as a language for everyday communication for Jews that spoke the different languages from the countries they had come from and had a hard time communicating.
Ben Yehuda was such a believer in the Hebrew language that he decided to raise his son, Ben Zion (the first name meaning “son of Zion”), entirely in Hebrew. He refused to let his son be exposed to other languages during childhood. Ben Zion was the first child raised solely in the Hebrew language. An anecdote is told that exemplifies the commitment Ben Yehuda had for his cause. Apparently Ben Zion must have had some kind of learning disability or developmental delay because he only began to speak at the relatively late age of four. Ben Yehuda and his wife took the boy to the best doctors, who “diagnosed” the problem as being the parents fault for only talking with the boy in a “dead language.” I can only imagine how much flack he got from Mrs. Ben Yehuda and yet he persisted! Ben Zion, who later changed his name to Itamar, grew up to be the first native speaker of Hebrew in almost 2,000 years!
