(Jewish Group) Trapped in Translation: How to explain Judaism in English

Trapped in Translation
How to explain Judaism in English—a language whose terminology around religion is built on Christian concepts

We can’t translate everything. At least not precisely. Concepts exist in certain cultures that are absent, or markedly different, in others. We all know the adage that Eskimos have 47 different words for snow. Whether or not that’s true, it is clear that Inuit and Yupik cultures have a closer connection to snow than do the residents of Tahiti. It makes sense that these cultures would differentiate the many kinds of snowfall according to the many ways that those distinctions affect their daily lives. We even might be able to translate some of these snow words into English: Aqilokoq is softly falling snow, piegnartoq is snow that’s perfect for sled-driving. We can know what these snow words mean. But unless and until we understand the Eskimo mindset, we cannot truly glean what they signify.

English has words deemed essential for religion: faith, liturgy, Bible, even “religion” itself. None of these words really exist in Hebrew. Certainly, not a single one of these Christian concepts correlates directly to anything that can be considered Jewish. Of course, Modern Hebrew has the vocabulary to translate these English phrases. And, obviously, Judaism does possess ideas and structures that share a similarity with Christian concepts like worship and Scripture. But that similarity all too often masks a vast difference. That difference prevents us from understanding what Judaism is at its essence. But before we examine those differences, let’s go back and examine the origins of the English language.

The furthest back we can trace a distinct English language is to the sixth century, the earliest date for the emergence of Old English. Now, Old English has far more in common with German than any English we know today; most scholars believe it is an utterly distinct language from Modern English. It’s only in the ninth century that Middle English emerges. Coming into its heyday after the Norman conquest of 1066, Middle English, as anyone who’s every struggled to read Chaucer knows, resembles our English, but is still a ways away. Most people have never heard of the “Great Vowel Shift” that marked the transition to Modern English, but with the arrival of Shakespeare’s works and the King James Bible, the language we know today was coming into its own.

Because of the time it took for English to evolve into anything we recognize today, the tongue that shapes most American Jews’ thinking is at most 1,000 years old. Jewish traditions, in even the most cautious of counting, extend back 3,000 years. Until the Greco-Roman period, Jewish thought was expressed in Hebrew; then, Aramaic, a sister language to Hebrew that was the international parlance of its day, became a secondary vessel for transmitting Jewish tradition. By the time Old English emerged around 550 CE, the Torah and the Talmud, the two core texts of Jewish thought and practice, were effectively complete. The great frames and structures of Judaism existed before any Jew ever spoke English.

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A long read, but quite interesting.