The Elkdog Men

“ Specifically in linguistics, Apollonianism is manifested in justifications for the use of a word and in the craving for meaningfulness. Consider the perception of naïve young Israeli readers of the name דוקטור סוס dóktor sus (cf. Dr Seuss). Many Israelis are certain that he is ‘Dr Horse’ since in Hebrew סוס sus means ‘horse’ - cf. the etymythology that this arises from the prevalence of animals in Dr Seuss’s stories.

—

Wiki

THEY FOUND A WAY TO MAKE DR. SEUSS EVEN MORE ADORABLE.

“Hebrew for “Master of the Universe.”

We weren’t sure if this was directed at Hebrew-speaking thieves, to warn them of divine intervention, or if it was to fool non-Hebrew-speaking thieves into thinking they had another security company.”

Professional cantor Myron Schenkelman sings Rosh Chodesh Nusach to his infant son.

(Source: youtube.com)

God Full of Mercy

God-Full-of-Mercy, the prayer for the dead.
If God was not full of mercy,
Mercy would have been in the world,
Not just in Him.
I, who plucked flowers in the hills
And looked down into all the valleys,
I, who brought corpses down from the hills,
Can tell you that the world is empty of mercy.
I, who was King of Salt at the seashore,
Who stood without a decision at my window,
Who counted the steps of angels,
Whose heart lifted weights of anguish
In the horrible contests.
I, who use only a small part
Of the words in the dictionary.
I, who must decipher riddles
I don’t want to decipher,
Know that if not for the God-full-of-mercy
There would be mercy in the world,
Not just in Him.

- Yehuda Amichai

El malei rachamim shokhen ba-m’romim ha-m’tzei m’nuchah n’khonah tachat kanfei ha-sh’khinah b’ma’alot k’doshim u’t’horim c’zohar ha-rakiah maz’hirim l’nishmot yakireinu u’k’dosheinu she-hal’khu l’olamam. Ana ba’al ha-rachamim ha-s’tirem b’tzel k’nafekha l’olamim u-tz’ror bitz’ror ha-chayim et nishmatam. Adonai hu nachalatam v’yanuchu b’shalom al mish’kabam v’nomar amen.

God filled with mercy,
dwelling in the heavens’ heights,
bring proper rest
beneath the wings of your Shehinah,
amid the ranks of the holy and the pure,
illuminating like the brilliance of the skies
the souls of our beloved and our blameless
who went to their eternal place of rest.
May you who are the source of mercy
shelter them beneath your wings eternally,
and bind their souls among the living,
that they may rest in peace.
And let us say: Amen.

“ Growing up, [Amos Oz]…wanted to be not a writer, who, he observed, “could be killed like ants”, but a book, because however much you try to annihilate a book, there is always a chance that a copy would survive in some out-of-the-way library.

— Review: A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz | Books | The Guardian

Bereshit (first chapter of Genesis) inscribed in Hebrew on an egg in the Israel Museum.

“

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I’m concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I’m concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.

—

“A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention.”

by Yehuda Amichai

Flowers have no names: the revival of Hebrew as a living language after two thousand years was no miracle

But much more was required for Hebrew to become a living language. The American Yiddish poet, linguist, and lexicographer Yehoash (Solomon Blumgarten), already at work on his translation of the whole Bible into Yiddish, came to Palestine in 1913. Walking in the settlement of Ekron, he saw a girl of fifteen or sixteen sitting in the window of her home, above a beautiful flowerbed. He asked her in Hebrew: “What is the name of these flowers?” To which she replied: “Flowers have no names.”

Very long and interesting article.

EDIT: also I want to post especially this quote:

None of it was easy. As Shlomo Lavi, who came with the Second Aliya and later became one of the founders of the first Kibbutz Ein Harod in 1921, recalled, “It cannot be appreciated how much it costs a man to go from speaking one language to another and especially to a language that is not yet a spoken language. How much breaking of the will it takes. And how many torments of the soul that wants to speak and has something to say—and is mute and stammering.” And the spiritual leader of the labor movement, Berl Katznelson, who read a great deal of Hebrew literature, reminisced: “In the first days, I had a hard time with Hebrew…. When I came to Eretz-Israel, I couldn’t make a natural sentence in Hebrew and I didn’t want to talk a foreign language. I decided I wouldn’t utter a foreign word. And for ten days, I didn’t speak at all; when I was forced to answer—I would reply with some Biblical verse close to the issue.” Nevertheless, in a short time he became one of the finest essayists in modern Hebrew.

“ He knew five languages, but when the stroke hit him
he was paralysed, struck dumb in all five tongues.
I want to cleanse his death notice of all the other news on the page
the way archaeologists scrub a clay pot, or the way
a dead body is cleansed of every impurity.
I want to advertise his life—false advertising
for an item that’s out of stock, you can’t get it anymore.
I want rites of mourning, rending of clothes, shoes slipped off
lightly, easily, like cursing, because curses are light.
It’s the blessings that weigh you down.

— Yehuda Amichai, from “Names, Names, in Other Days and in Our Time”, Open Closed Open.