Bialik writes: “All the flow of life, all its content, is nothing but a continuous effort, an unremitting toil to be diverted. Every moment spent “in pursuit of” is at the same time a “flight from”, and light, and flight alone, is its wages. The wages of pursuit is flight. At every moment the pursuer finds his momentary happiness not in that which he attains to, but in that which he escapes from, a fact which gives him a momentary shadow of security. “For to him that is joined to all the living that is security” (Bialik 2000, p.23).
I quarreled with the Hebrew language. It is not clear when and how we would make our peace.
I grew up in a bilingual home. I spoke English with my father and Hebrew with my mother. Hebrew came first and was my mother tongue in the deeper sense of the word. My mother remembers me saying “what daddy says”. My mother sang me lullabies in Hebrew. I read books in Hebrew (I was forced to read English books as a child and didn’t like it, but was later grateful for this bilingual education I had had). I was such a fast reader as a child that I had to be taken to the public library every day to change books.
In Hebrew.
I matriculated and completed two university degrees in Hebrew.
Then I traveled to Oxford. There, for 13 years I wrote, read, thought and dreamed in English. Among other things, I edited an English version of Bialik’s beautiful text,
Revealment and concealment in language.
When I came back to Israel, nearly four years ago, I suddenly felt that I was thinking more easily in English. And naturally writing more easily in English. I found myself translating myself from English into Hebrew as I talked. It made me angry. I felt inarticulate. And mute.
But for the past year I have felt not only my own helplessness in Hebrew which still feels foreign in my inner dialogue, but actually strange. I feel there are so many horrible things happening around me, things that happened to a people who guarded its Hebrew for so many years in exile, and suddenly does the same things itself and advocates them in Hebrew. And the language feels too poor to express it. I feel this heavy muteness, and a great silencing, and silence hovers around me as a cloud. Suddenly Bialik’s text feels very up-to-date, even prophetic. I feel that we are all making small talk, every day, like someone rolling lentils around. For the thing that lies under us, of which we cannot speak, and which we cannot keep silent, has vanquished the Hebrew language.
It seems strange. After all, pogroms and genocide are no strangers to the Hebrew language. That same Bialik wrote Upon the Slaughter (1903) which many hurried to quote after October 7th, especially the words Such vengeance of a small child / Even Satan has not created...
700 children under the age of one year have been killed in the Israeli assaults on the Gaza Strip.
At least 3,100 children under the age of five have been killed in the Israeli assaults on the Gaza Strip.
In total, over 13,000 children have been killed by Israeli assaults on the Gaza Strip.
And their death is our revenge. We are Bialik’s Satan.
I feel we live between times, between languages. We have no words to understand what is happening to us, and what we are doing. These days, the deepest significance of language is when it presents us with facts.
Over 45,000 people have been killed in the Israeli assaults on the Gaza Strip.
732 people have been killed in the Israeli assaults on the West Bank.
17 communities in the West Bank have been violently expelled in the process of ethnic cleansing.
Many of us prefer to stay in the world of yesterday. A world in which genocide and pogroms are done to us, the eternal victim. But the significance of these words in 2024 has changed. In the whole world, when the word genocide is uttered, one no longer thinks of Auschwitz, but of Gaza. Language rolls around from one place to another, from time to time. We cannot yet grasp the full meaning of the words in our own life, now, as we stand on the wrong side of history.
In these times, especially, testimonies have a significant place in creating a new range of language. A new place from which it could develop, change. It is very easy to be seduced into silence. Easy to be pushed into a place where we do not even try to articulate what is done in our name, the great pain, death that does not even have the space to grieve, the abyss into which we do not manage to look. But first and foremost, we must continue to speak. We must continue to bear witness, in the name of the silenced and those who keep silent. We must continue to speak in the name of those whose voice we have cut off too soon. We must continue to document every life cut off, collect statistics, never mind how hard a time we have continue them.
“So much for the language of words. But, in addition, “there are yet to the Lord” languages without words: songs, tears, and laughter. And the speaking creature has been worthy of them all. These languages begin where words leave off, and their purpose is not to close but to open. They rise from the void. They are rising from the void. Therefore, at times they overflow and sweep us off in the irresistible multitude of their waves; therefore, at times they cost man his wits, or even his life” (Bialik 2000, p.26).
I have quarreled with the Hebrew language. The language in which I had always thought of humanism, people’s dignity as such, now feels like the wind hovering over an abyss. We must continue to use to bear witness, remembering what everyone wishes to forget, if we ever want to be resuscitated, and not lose our mind and be lost to the world.
Dedicated to Adi Ronen-Argov, and everyone doing documentation work when the world wishes to turn a blind eye.
Dr. Dana Mills is an activist and political theorist
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