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Wednesday, June 13, 2007

“Gay?  Yes, I’m Very Happy!” (chortle, chortle, yuk, yuk)

Perhaps the most interesting element of the Gay Pride Parade, both the one that already happened, and the one planned for June 21st, is that it is billed as the mitza’ad haga’avah, a rough, Modern Hebrew translation of “pride parade”.  Although it was much more in keeping with Zionist ideology to make sure that all words entering the Israeli lexicon received a Modern Hebrew equivalent, over the last few years I have noticed that, increasingly, it has become trendy to just use the English term.  I have heard commercials on the radio for all-purpose cleaner where that seemingly omnipresent Israeli radio voice--which itself sounds like a pack of cigarettes--announces the virtues of the product: “???? ?? ???--magically!” (it cleans everything--magically!").  The Sabra telephone monolith Bezek, now has as its official logo an enormous letter ‘B’; while you are waiting for the operator, you can hear the chorus sing, “B-Bezek”.  There are brand names like Super Class, Pelephone, Orange; supermarkets are called “super”.  I once went into a pharmacy in search of a humidifier.  I didn’t know the word, and I tried to explain it to the salesman as a machshir lechut l’avir, “a machine that produces moisture in the air”.  The salesman nodded and said, “humidifier”.  It brings to mind America during the 1970s, when it was cool to pepper French and Italian words into the commercial marketplace, i.e. “LeCar”, “Ciao”, the band Chic, etc.

Pizza Hut here features ?’?? ?????--"cheesy crust”.

Along these lines, it seems that the Gay Pride Parade should have been called mitza’ad hapride, using the English word “pride”, which would have accomplished its purpose better by associating the Jerusalem march with similar events worldwide.  Given that the parade is a near-perfect symbol of the secular/religious divide in Israel, I want to suggest that this is borne out by the very linguistics of it.  Historically, the word ga’avah, in the lexicon of Judaism (as opposed to Modern Hebrew), is a poisonous word that means “haughtiness”, a trait that has been singled out by nearly all Jewish ethicists as a completely abominable trait when possessed by human beings.  The Psalmist says (Psalms 93:1) “God will reign; He will don ge’us (grandeur)”.  It is only God alone, Who may have ga’avah.  Maimonides (Yad, Hilchos De’os) writes that ga’avah is one of two character traits about which a person has to go to the utmost extreme to avoid and/or suppress. 

On the other hand, the word ga’avah in Modern Hebrew simply means “pride” in the sense of “self-esteem”, hardly a pejorative term.  It is but one of many examples where a word in Biblical, Mishnaic, or Medieval Hebrew was essentially stripped of its original meaning when the architects of the Modern Hebrew language were in the process of “reviving” Hebrew as a spoken language.  The process is called transvaluation, where the meaning of a word changes over time, sometimes going from pejorative to positive and vice-versa.  It happens in all languages.  An English queen once said to a church architect that his building was “awful and artificial”, which at the time meant “awe-inspiring and artistic”.

The difference is that, when the Modern Hebrew language was “under construction”, its builders subjected the Holy Tongue to a lot of secularization, both ideologically neutral, and ideologically manipulative.  The Hebrew revivalists were themselves ideologues, wanting to do away with Diasporism (which included religion), and therefore words that originally carried one connotation were reconditioned to have another in their new world.  Words like tarbut, “bad rearing”, and letz, “wicked, insolent person”, are today innocuous if not positive words such as “culture” and “clown”, respectively.  The word list of virtually the entire array of utensils used in the Holy Temple is, today, used to denote a regular table setting.  Since we are no longer at the drawing board, the ideological motive is no longer detectable in Modern Hebrew, and its speakers do not have any agenda-driven intentions when they choose words.  Those who gave the Gay Pride Parade its title did so innocently, whereas if Eliezer ben Yehuda had been one of its chief organizers…

To be continued…