Satell Teen Fellowship Israel Trip 2007: Day 8
June 28, 2007
Tammuz 12, 5767
Israel, Day 8
Mifgash / Israeli Encounter
We visited Pinat Shorashim at Kibbutz Gezer this morning. Pinat Shorashim is an inspiring private garden built by the teens and adults of the kibbutz. The founder of the garden, David, spoke to us about words and how often times your first assumption about their meaning may not be correct; you have to dig deeper to really figure out what people mean when they use language to communicate. He called this process of searching for a second meaning ‘double clicking.’ He told us we were going to look at text and examine it to make it textured.
Words, especially in Hebrew, are often closely related, and this can add to their meaning. We talked about three types of roots – a tree’s roots, for example, a person’s roots, their family and heritage, and a word’s roots and origins. When someone says the word root, one of these three meanings immediately comes to mind, but sometimes that is not sufficient – you have to think a little to discover the intended meaning.
He asked us some hard questions to make us start thinking. We were sitting outside at an outdoor sanctuary with a mosaic clay bima and ark in front of us. But then he had us close our eyes and listen and the only sounds were birds. Originally it was a religious sanctuary but he had us ‘double click’ and it became a nature sanctuary. He had an interesting and creative way of making us think about things differently.
We were on a beautiful kibbutz and David walked us through a garden-like place and we periodically stopped.
David wanted us to discover the importance of Israel in the lives of Jews such as ourselves because we are a people of the land, and that you cannot separate Judaism and Israel. He spoke about Zionism and how the conventional understanding of Zionism is the desire to return to Zion, or Israel. This, he said, is incomplete – Zionism really means returning to Israel and building something great, hence the root of the word metzuyan, or excellent. Those two words are drawn from the same root, teaching us the ideals of Zionism, that we not only need to return to Israel, but we need to build something excellent here. Thus, post-Zionism does not exist because we are not finished with Zionism, nor can we ever be finished.
He talked primarily about words and the connections and meanings you can find when you double click, think twice. When we say Hamotzim prayer, we thank G-d for the bread of the earth. The literal translation of the prayer has to do with taking wheat from the ground. The next step in the thought process, the double click, is that the root of the word bread is the same as the root for war. So when we thank G-d for allowing us to take bread from the land, we also thank Him for taking war out of our lands. When every one has enough to eat there will no war. I personally find these ties within language to be remarkable and altogether too often overlooked. I found it inspiring and it made me want to learn more Hebrew and discover more of these connections.
David also spoke about intent and how an action can be meaningless – it is the purpose that matters. The words for kiss and for gun have the same root. Like a gun, a kiss can be used as a weapon to hurt. The action itself is nondescript without intention – a kiss given with the intention to wound is entirely different than a kiss given with the intention to show affection.
Another example is history – we say that we study the history of Israel and the history of the Jewish people, but there is no word for “history” in Hebrew. Instead, the word to remember is used which has an entirely different connotation than history – instead of recording a series of actions, we are creating memories. We as a people have to remember our past in order to create to the present.
Additionally, the words for lip and for language share the same root. For lack of a better word, this is really cool and it opened my mind to a whole new level of understanding. It shows me that there is intention not just in speaking and writing but in the language itself as well. Everything is related and these connections can help us glean greater meaning and intention from what we say and hear.
Love,
Jill Greenfield