The joyful days of the 'equality of burden' issue, which ritually return every few years, and the Torah attack on the Haredim who are unwilling to serve, contribute, and even work, God forbid, lead almost instinctively to the good old secular accusation of the Haredim's ignorance, their unwillingness to integrate into the public sphere, and in other words, their lack of desire to become Israelis. The process of 'Israelization' that various elements are trying to apply to the Haredi street also includes, inevitably, the attempt to impose the Israeli language, discourse, and style on the young Haredi.
But even if Zionism succeeded in instilling the modern Hebrew language in all elements of Israeli society - it is difficult to find Jews in the State of Israel today whose Hebrew is not their 'mother tongue' or at least their everyday language - the internal language, however, specific and unique to each group and subgroup in Haredi society, still remains different and distinct.
Let's take, for example, a young man, shortly after his bar mitzvah days, who enrolls in a classic small yeshiva. His world of terminology, the speech patterns to which he is accustomed, undergo a huge change. Concepts that he was not familiar with at all, and a style of speech that also includes 'yeshiva slang', now become part of his everyday language. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this huge change, or the uniqueness of this haredi-yeshiva language. Words that to the classic Israeli would sound illogical, to say the least, are now the basic structure of the adolescent boy's language.
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Secret language
And this language, as mentioned, has its own codes and interpretation, to the point that to an outside observer it may appear to be a hidden language.
Here are three examples of borrowed or broad use of familiar words. Already in the boy's first days in his new small yeshiva, he may repeatedly hear the term "holding" in its many inflections:
- Are you holding it like that?
- What is he holding?
- They hold on to doing this and that, and even - Do you hold on to suing him? And so on.
The literal translation of the word 'Ochaz' in Hebrew is to seize or hold. In Yeshivite language the meaning is completely different. When someone asks his friend if he 'holds' like this, what he means is whether he thinks like this, whether his perception is that way things should be seen, whether this is his intention. This is a completely different meaning.
The same is true when using the term 'sheikh'. The simple meaning of the word sheikh is an expression for attributing ownership of any object. In Haredi - Yeshiva dialect, the meaning is completely different. 'Sheikh' is a positive connection between two subjects. Practical examples:
- 'He has no reason to go to the supplement during these terrible times, he doesn't belong in the affair at all.'.
- And also: 'Do you think that so-and-so is suitable to be a rabbi in a large yeshiva? He has no affiliation with it at all'!
Are you listening or are you not of age yet?
When a yeshiva student says that he is 'hearing', he does not mean only the physiological sense that allows him to perceive voices and sounds, but that he is ready to accept the words of his interlocutor, or at least understand them, as is also the case when it is announced that a certain woman has begun to 'hear' matchmaking proposals. Other examples are the excessive use of the words 'corrupted' and 'corruption' for every exceptional case, the replacement of the concept of public opinion with the word 'public', the meaning of the term 'strengthening', and the verb 'gave a lesson' instead of 'gave or gave a lesson'.
The above examples, which join dozens or hundreds of other Haredi idioms, acronyms, and colloquial expressions, constitute good news for the Haredi public. The Zionist concept sought to instill the renewed Hebrew language in the entire population that immigrated and settled in the country. This was not the acquisition of a 'system of symbols with legality that allows for the encoding of information and communication between people' as the dictionary defines it, but rather an attempt to negate the image of the diaspora Jew, one of whose characteristics was his outdated, diaspora language.
The Israeli Hebrew language, the Sabra, was intended to symbolize the new Jew, of the finest breed, capable of creating his own culture, his own army, and of course his own language. The anti-Diaspora ethos was instilled into the hearts of the new immigrants through Hebrew literature, a call to use the Hebrew language, and negation to the point of demonizing the Diaspora Jew and his language.
In this respect, Zionism was similarly unsuccessful. It did indeed bring about the transition from foreign languages to the Hebrew language among the Jewish residents of the entire country, but it failed to penetrate the depths of Haredi Hebrew. The gap between the two societies is, it turns out, greater than their commonality, and the secular Hebrew language and its values did not replace Haredi discourse and dialogue.
A yeshiva student who is rooted in the tent of Torah may be able to understand his secular counterpart, but when they both describe a situation, their text will be completely different. In other words, we may speak Hebrew, but we are not yet Israelis.
