This article was originally published in Hebrew in the literary journal Ho! and was translated into English, including the Bible verses, by Galit Hasan-Rokem and the author.
Hebrew Is the Language of Creation
According to common knowledge, creation was accomplished through speech: “And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.” (Genesis 1:3) Thus, he said and it was.
“And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens” (Genesis 1:14); “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that moveth, and let fowl fly above the earth,” (Genesis 1:20) and so on. God says, and the thing is created.
In Hebrew, God Created Us and Our World
I have always considered it a great privilege to argue as a lawyer for the rights of those who were created in the language of their creation. In the very same language in which God created humans, animals, and nature, I defend them, verbally and in writing, against harm to them. They were created in Hebrew, and now one of their brothers in creation defends them in Hebrew.
In one of his interviews, Amos Oz told a foreign, non-Israeli audience that, thanks to the years of dormancy of the Hebrew language and the fact that modern Hebrew is an intentional revival of the ancient, and not a dialect that developed through a gradual process as happens to any language when it is spoken and in daily use, Hebrew speakers are unique in that they are able to understand the ancient version of their language. A modern Greek will understand almost no word of ancient Greek and an Italian will not feel at home in Latin without intensive study. But a contemporary Hebrew can read the Bible and other Hebrew texts that are over two thousand years old. Thus, for example, a speaker of modern Hebrew is able to appreciate a biblical text without mediation, which no speaker of another language can do, having to read the Book of Books not in the language in which it was written but in translation.
For example: that the Bible does not begin with the first letter of the alphabet – aleph – but rather with the second – bet; that its first word, Bereshit, begins with the word “created,” bara, and only ends with the word “beginning,” reshit; that only in the third word, which finally begins with aleph, does the Almighty – Elohim – appear before us; all of this leads us to the insight that the act of creation precedes even the very “beginning,” that is, it is “before the beginning,” and that God’s importance is that “He” created, for which “He” was honored to enter the book, and even then only after the word “created” appeared twice - “In the beginning God created...” (the order of the words in Hebrew is: “In the beginning created God...” Genesis 1:1).1
This is how I write legal briefs and how I present oral arguments, having at my disposal not only laws and rulings, legal principles, and rhetoric, but also a language and grammar that reflect a world of values, a language and grammar in which it is said: “And God created man (the human) in his image, in the image of God created him; male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1:27)
What a sentence! Three times “He created,” twice “in the image of,” and male and female each unique and special. And what is this “in His image” about? In His likeness, following the contour of the metaphorical shadow that “He” himself casts. The author of the Bible is a linguistic virtuoso. And what does “male and female “He” created them” mean? This is the egalitarian version of the act of creation: together they were created, in one moment, without hierarchy, and they complement each other in the human creation.
It is convenient and pleasant to make humanistic claims in a language whose coding contains the glorification of the importance of creatures and their rights, in a language that was the communicative medium for instilling the basic moral prohibitions between humans: “Thou shall not steal,” “Thou shall not murder,” “Thou shall not covet” and so on.
I know, there is no need to draw my attention to the fact that Hebrew is also the source of another creation story that is not egalitarian, where woman was created from man’s rib and “as a helper for him” and immediately resorted to inciting him to break the covenant with God; that in the Bible there is Jewish racism based on the idea of the chosen people, and a speciesist worldview based on the perception of man as the tyrant over flora and fauna. I know all this, but the intensive use made of the humanistic angle of the Hebrew moral code, setting it as one of the bases for Western humanistic morality, and most importantly – its granting of the idea of the inherent value that every human life has, because every person was created “in the image” of God, and perhaps also Jewish history, full of persecutions, pogroms and racism that sharpened this aspect of Jewish morality, all entrenched a humanistic harmony in Hebrew.
This is how I wrote legal briefs and how I presented oral arguments. With the feeling that the language I use enables and even gives a tailwind to messages of respect, equality, and freedom. They sit comfortably in it, like feet in old slippers.
But No Longer
Hebrew is no longer just the language of the Bible and the sacred language of the people who were exiled from their homeland to all corners of the world and then was revived as a common language after two thousand years, a language in which a moral universe of humanism was articulated. The image of Hebrew is no longer dictated only, or mainly, by the fact that it is the language that conceived and gave birth to the revolutionary commandments at the time, at the core of which is respect for the other: the concrete — “and you shall love the stranger” (Deuteronomy 10:19), and the general — “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:34). Nor is it revered these days for the its grace of yore, for being that language in which “justice” and “charity” were created from the same letters — tsedek and tsedaka — as sibling expressions that connect communal decency with personal generosity.
Hebrew today is not all of these, certainly not only all of these.
Hebrew today is the language in which the orders to destroy the Gaza Strip were given.
It is the language in which the plans to starve its two million inhabitants were discussed.
In Hebrew, politicians and journalists, internet influencers and rabbis have incited and continue to incite at the time of writing, to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, and to commit genocide. Hebrew is the language of the prime minister and his ministers, of Channel 14 (a right-wing Netanyahu-supporting channel), of the soldiers taking selfies in Gaza, and of the Israeli mainstream media that is glorifying the war and concealing the suffering in Gaza.
In Hebrew, the minister of national security wrote on social media: “To destroy, to demolish, to cut down, to erase, to crush, to shatter, to burn, to be cruel, to punish, to destroy, to crush. To destroy!”2
In Hebrew, the prime minister coined the phrase “total victory” to justify and enable the complete destruction of Gaza and the unimaginably cynical abandonment of the hostages, of his own people; in Hebrew, a linguistic act of abuse was committed against the concept “humanitarian,” when the minister of defense chose to call his plan to establish a detention camp to “concentrate” hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the south of the Gaza Strip a “humanitarian city” and when the army defined the Mu’assi area in the dunes, to which the residents of the Gaza Strip were ordered to move and where they were not safe from harm and hunger, a “humanitarian zone;” and in Hebrew, a duo of singers roared the hit of the war on Gaza, which included the lines:
“We brought the entire army upon you and swear there will be no pardon\ Phew, you sons of Amalek!”3
No longer old slippers but tough army boots and a language whose current significant use is crime through concealment and deception: in which innocents are “uninvolved,” forced displacement is “population movement,” and deportation is “voluntary migration.” A language in which lawyers who studied at the same law schools where I studied, perhaps even with the same teachers, roll on their tongues terms that serve as lubricants for violating the fundamental principles of the laws of war, that make it easier to undermine the reason for the existence of these laws, which were designed to protect civilians in times of war. Thus, they measure the proportionality of a shelling, which is a condition for its legality (the ratio between military benefit and expected civilian harm), in numerical units that they call “incidental damage” — and not, for example, in units that are more commonly used in other languages and measure “human lives destroyed,” or “children made orphans.” And they circumvent the prohibition on targeting civilians (called the “the principle of distinction”) by “criminalizing” them as “involved,” which may sound like a process in which their involvement in fighting is proven beyond any reasonable doubt, but is in fact nothing more than the product of artificial intelligence that found, for example, that some civilian came and went from some building that itself was “criminalized,” or “implicated” by another artificial intelligence machine that found that there were indications that the building had been used by the enemy at some point. Thus, a country that does not have in practice (yet) the death penalty executes “implicated” civilians. Thus, the speech of my friends and colleagues in the military prosecutor’s office is deadly speech. And it is done in Hebrew.
Let’s tell the truth, the change in the tone of Hebrew did not begin in Gaza. After all, in Hebrew we have conquered and expelled, in Hebrew we have dispossessed and colonized, and in Hebrew we have oppressed and boasted and discriminated and humiliated. Hebrew as the language of power and superiority was not born in Gaza after the massacre that the damned murderers slaughtered us on October 7, the change in it began much earlier. But until Gaza, Hebrew still knew of this and that, and like iron it forged into both swords and ploughshares. Then, in Gaza, Hebrew was nationalized and its main avenue was diverted to the production of swords only. Iron swords.
Therefore, in Gaza, and not before, the verbal mark of Cain was cast on Hebrew, which became the language of vengeful and merciless destruction. Since Gaza, foreigners who do not speak the language but hear its sound cannot help but think of what was done through it. Of the nakedness of destruction and of the children without limbs, of destroyed hospitals and infants dying of hunger. The verbal mark of Cain was imprinted on Hebrew and accompanies it like a shadow, and this time not the shadow of God but rather of His rival.
You will say: Language is not to blame, language is a tool, and humans are to blame for the actions they perform with the tools they possess. Language has no ideology, nor intention, it is oral clay in the mouth of the speaker. And I will answer: True, just as lead is not to blame, because it did not choose to fill the bullet that was fired from a gun and penetrated the heart and stopped its beating, and just as lead could instead have filled the pencil used by the poet who extols the goodness in the world — so too is language. But as we know, detectors are placed at every airport and every shopping mall to detect lead in the bags of passersby, because lead is immediately suspect due to the habit that man has developed of using it badly. So is language. What is done with it dictates its public relations. Go out into the square of a foreign city and speak Hebrew loudly. You will immediately feel that those around you notice the sign of Cain thrusting out of it.
So, how will I write legal briefs and how will I present oral arguments? Is advocating human rights in Hebrew after Gaza impudence? Is it chutzpah? I try to say: “Your Honor, approving the outline plan for the settlement expansion is a blatant expropriation of the poor man’s ewe lamb. Even though Bedouin and Palestinian communities have lived in the area for decades, the plan completely ignores their existence and needs, discriminates against them, and violates their rights. The planners of the plans preferred to serve future residents from distant places over those who already live there, the main thing being that they be Jews.” But my words, which used to sound clear and sharp, are now accompanied by a whisper. I clear my throat and try again, but the rustle doesn’t stop. My words sound like they’re coming from an untuned radio.
This is the effect of the verbal mark of Cain that signals: Hebrew has become murky and needs to be purified so that expressions like “discrimination,” “fundamental rights” or “human life” can once again receive the clean sound they deserve, through it. At this point, my words are bland, naive, ridiculous.
“In spite of everything, it [the language] remained secure against loss,” wrote the Jewish-Romanian poet Paul Celan about the German language in which he wrote and in which his parents were murdered: “But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.”4
Hebrew has not been lost. But it must pass through and emerge from the thousand darknesses of deadly speech. Such a process will begin only after the killing and destruction cease and are replaced by a process of soul-searching and recognition of what has been done. In the meantime, it is our task, the speakers and writers of Hebrew who are concerned for its future, to preserve a channel that makes an incessant effort to emit a well-tuned sound, while we know, borrowing the sad words in which Judge Mishael Cheshin described the rule of law in times of war: that the voice of humanistic Hebrew these days, like the voice of the piccolo, is pure and innocent but drowned in the pandemonium.5
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