A Dream Come True

Eliezer Ben-yehuda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367007577
• eBook ISBN: 9780429719851
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858-1922), a Russian Jew, was the leader of the movement to revive the Hebrew language-the only attempt we know of that succeeded in restoring an archaic language to use in everyday speech. This memoir is an account of his life until 1882, a year after he settled in Jerusalem, it contains a description of his early life in the

First Period

1

I dreamt a dream.

About forty-three years have passed since that wonderful moment in my life when the vision was suddenly revealed to me for the first time, one night in the darkness of the Diaspora; only forty-three years or so, not even a complete jubilee, yet already I am seeing it come true.

This realization, which I am privileged now to witness with my own eyes—this realization of my dream is so wonderful, so radiant with splendor and beauty, that there are moments when a dreadful thought comes into my mind: Perhaps it isn't happening, perhaps what seems to me the realization of the dream is itself nothing but another dream ...

But a feeling of the actuality of it quickly intensifies and dispels all doubts. Unless everything is a dream—unless all the frightful events of the last four years, which we have witnessed with our own eyes, are a dream as well—the realization of the dream that I dreamt almost a jubilee of years ago, which we are all witnessing now, is no dream, either, but a reality. The words that Balfour wrote to Lord Rothschild in the name of the British government were indeed written.

No! This is no dream, but the coming-true of my dream.

As this feeling of the reality of the event intensifies and impresses itself upon me, so my thoughts wander back and I reflect on the forty years that have passed between the dream and its realization. Many memories rise from the depths of my mind, among which not a few seem worthy of being put before the public now, at this great moment when the dream is beginning to come true.

But by way of introduction, I must describe in a few lines how the events of my childhood led me to the dream that I dreamt.

All my life I have been inconsolably grieved about two things.

I was not born in Jerusalem, not even in the Land of Israel.

And my speech, from the moment I was able to utter words, was not in Hebrew.

From the moment my feet trod on the land of my fathers, I tried with all my might to become a native part of it. I embraced its dust with affection, breathed in its air thirstily, and gazed in delight at its mountains and valleys, at the glorious changes in the colors of its skies, at the rising and setting of its sun. I listened with a feeling of sanctity to the murmurs of its rivers and streams, and I can say that I feel myself to belong altogether to this land, to be a Jerusalemite. I have severed every link between myself and other countries, and I feel love for one land only, the Land of Israel. I love not only the country itself but also its very hardships, its ailments, and its fevers.

Even so, I must admit that there are moments when childhood memories grow strong, when longings for my birthplace awaken secretly, and then suddenly before my eyes there appears a vision of places not in the Land of Israel; and these places speak to me in a language of hidden love. Then I realize that I was not born in the Land of Israel and that I shall never be able to feel for the land of our forefathers that deep affection which a man feels for his birthplace and his childhood.

As with the land, so too with the language.

I believe that all my friends who hail from the Diaspora and have settled in the Land of Israel during the past forty years would admit that I lead a more deeply Hebrew life than they do. Not, Heaven forbid, that I exceed them in the love or knowledge of the language, but merely in time and quantity. I started to speak Hebrew many years before them and I speak Hebrew every single day much more than they do. I speak Hebrew and only Hebrew, and not only with the members of my household, but also with every man and woman who to my knowledge understands Hebrew, more or less; and in this respect I pay no attention to the rules of etiquette towards either men or women, so my bad manners have earned me a good deal of hatred in the Land of Israel. Hebrew has already become my language not only in speech but also in thought. I think in Hebrew by day and by night, awake and in dreams, in sickness and in health, and even when I am racked with pain.

Even so, I must admit once again: At times my mind sinks into thoughts, especially of days that are past, days of my childhood and youth, and frees itself for a moment, without my sensing it, from the Hebrew yoke that I have imposed on it firmly for so many years. Then suddenly I realize that for a moment I have not been thinking in Hebrew, that from beneath the thought in Hebrew a few alien words have floated to the surface, words of Yiddish, Russian, or French! Then I realize that even for me Hebrew is not the mother tongue, that my first utterances were not in Hebrew, that I did not suck the sounds of the language in with the milk from my mother's breasts, that my ears did not hear them when my mother put me to sleep in my cradle. I sense then that, with all my love for Hebrew, I have never known the taste of that endearment to the language that a person whose ears have heard it from the day of his birth, and who has spoken it from the moment of his first utterances, feels for it.

Every time I ask myself to whom I am most indebted for the fact that I am nonetheless both a resident of the Land of Israel and a Hebrew-speaker; who brought me to leave my alien birthplace and my alien language, and depart, as many as forty years ago, to settle in the land of my forefathers and begin to speak their language; every time I ask myself these questions I see before my eyes the face of one of the teachers of my youth, Rabbi Yossi Bloicker, the head of the yeshiva in the city of Polotsk, in Russia.

When I came to that city to learn Torah in the great yeshiva there, in order to become a rabbi, I happened to meet a student there who urged me not to go to that yeshiva, where the number of pupils was very large, but to the new small one, which had fewer students and whose principal, Rabbi Yossi Bloicker, though still a young man, was very learned and had a sharper mind than the principal of the old, large yeshiva. The student succeeded in persuading me, and at the end of the Sabbath, immediately after evening prayers, he took me to the home of the principal of the yeshiva. I shall never forget the sight that greeted me when I entered the house or the effect it had on me. In a spacious room—one that was rather splendid for a rabbi in Russia in those days—a man of about thirty-five was walking up and down. He was tall and thin, with red hair and beautiful eyes, and was clad in an expensive silk garment. With a divine look on his face, he was singing, in a lovely voice:

Elijah the prophet, Elijah the prophet, Elijah the prophet,
Elijah the Tishbite, Elijah the Tishbite, Elijah the Gileadite,
May he speedily bring to us the Messiah, the son of David.

I stood next to the student, hardly breathing, and did not take my eyes off the head of the yeshiva who, to tell the truth, looked to me like an angel of the Lord of Hosts. My soul was captivated by his appearance and the beauty of his singing.

After about a quarter of an hour, when the rabbi had finished the hymns for the end of the Sabbath, the youth went up to him and told him who I was and what I wanted. The yeshiva principal turned to me with a look of pleasure and asked me in a friendly way what topics I had studied previously, then said that he was willing to admit me into his yeshiva, and told me to come the next day to be examined by him.

The examination went well, and Rabbi Bloicker chose me to be a tutor-companion to one of his other students, the son of a rich man from a small country town. Not only did I and this wealthy fellow-student have lessons with the rabbi in the yeshiva and at his home, but in a show of favor the principal invited me to come to his home every Sabbath before dawn to study with him the Sabbath laws in the Turim and its commentaries, Beit Yosef and Bayit Hadash.

Naturally this invitation filled me with pride at the great honor that had been conferred on me. But more than that, I genuinely wanted very much to study with such a rabbi a book so advanced—one that even great scholars are not very familiar with—and I did not miss a single one of those Sabbath sessions. It was winter, but even on nights of snowstorms and bitter cold I made a heroic effort and got up and went to Rabbi Bloicker's home. At first it was a little difficult for me to get up so early, but the synagogue beadle used to go around every Sabbath waking the sleepers with a call that was partly in the holy tongue and partly (the words in parentheses) in Yiddish, delivered in a sorrowful singsong: "Israel, holy nation (remember the) Creator of all, (arise) to the service of the Creator."

This call, prevailing even over the howling of the wind, tore the sleep from my eyes and gave me the willpower to leave my warm bed to go and learn Torah with the yeshiva principal, whom I adored.

Thus I increasingly became the principal's favorite pupil and grew closer and closer to him, till one time when I came for my lesson in the Sabbath laws, I found open on the table, in place of the large, thick tome, a small, thin book. Then the principal started to talk to me about the holy tongue and about something called "grammar," and told me that the small book was a grammar book entitled Tzohar ha-Tevah, and that, besides teaching me Torah, he wanted to teach me Hebrew grammar, which, apart from anything else, was essential for an understanding of Torah,

Step by step and adroitly he started to reveal to me that there were books written in a beautiful style in the sacred tongue, and once, as I was sitting in front of him learning some Talmud, with no one else in the house, he brought out from under his seat a small book. He opened it, gave it to me, and told me to read it to him.

The book was The Crucible of Affliction, a Hebrew translation of the story of Robinson Crusoe.

I had not read two pages when there was a knock on the door. The principal snatched the book from my hands and hid it under the seat again, and we returned to a discussion of the topic in the Gemara that was open before us.

That was the beginning of my "enlightenment." I don't know whether the spirit of the enlightenment might well have taken hold of me even if this yeshiva principal, Rabbi Yossi Bloicker, had not drawn me in. But it was my destiny to get my first taste of enlightenment from someone who was both a great Torah scholar and a wonderfully agreeable person. From then on, the fire of love for the Hebrew language burned within me, a fire that a flood of worldly concerns afterwards could not extinguish, and it was this love for Hebrew that saved me from the danger that lay in wait for me on my new path in life.

2

The danger that I mentioned in the previous chapter was also born in the home of one of my teachers, and similarly at a late hour after midnight, although this time the teacher was one who taught me secular knowledge, not Torah.

This teacher was one of the pupils at the government secondary school in the city of Dünaburg (that was its name then, though it is now called Dvinsk), a member of an important Jewish family in one of the cities of Lithuania, and his name was Voytinski. About two years after the principal of the yeshiva, Rabbi Yossi Bloicker, opened my eyes to the light—during which time I was drawn more and more by the seductive heresy of the enlightenment, even though I still attended the rabbinical seminary diligently and plunged ever deeper into the study of Gemara, commentaries, Tosafot, and Posekim by day and by night—there happened to me what was bound to happen eventually, and what happened to most Jewish youths in those times after they had tasted enlightenment: I abandoned the rabbinical seminary; I forsook the Torah, the Gemara, the Tosafot, and the Posekim. I also left behind me the Guide for the Perplexed and the Book of Principles, even The Fundamentals of Mathematics and Comet by Hayyim Selig Slonimski, as well as that storehouse of knowledge, Tzvi Rabinowitz's Encyclopedia of Natural Science—all those books which I had secretly pored over at night, believing wholeheartedly that they contained all the wisdom that the human intellect is capable of attaining and with which I would reach the highest level of human knowledge and happiness, just as had been written and expounded in the Guide for the Perplexed. I left all this and departed from the house of my uncle, a rich landowner who had hoped that I would become a rabbi and a source of pride to him, and I trudged to the city of Dünaburg, in order to enter the government secondary school there. My mind was firmly made up: After finishing secondary school I would go to the capital of Russia and enter the university there to study medicine, both for my own benefit and to become, "through my knowledge and my wisdom, a blessing to the Jewish masses walking in darkness"—all this in line with the style of the intellectuals of that generation.

But though a man may plan his route himself, a hidden hand will direct his steps. Just as the lad whom I had met in Polotsk became a harmful influence, as a result of which I was trapped in the heresy of the enlightenment by my first teacher, the principal of the yeshiva, Rabbi Yossi Bloicker, so another lad whom I met in Dlinaburg, in the first house I entered in that city, was responsible for my becoming a "nihilist" through the influence of my second teacher.

This lad brought me to the Jewish student Voytinski, whom I mentioned above, and this Voytinski was kind to me and looked after me for a whole year, supplying me with all my material needs as well as teaching me all I needed to get into one of the higher classes in the secondary school. Once, when it was already an hour after midnight, Voytinski—who had just finished explaining some topic in mathematics, which he was teaching me for the statutory examination for entry to the fourth form of the secondary school—took out, from under the cushion of his seat, a Russian book, still unbound, and whispered its name to me in Russian: "Forward." He told me that the editor of this collection was a great Russian writer called Lavrov, who had fled from the tyrannical regime in Russia and lived abroad, together with many others who had dedicated their lives to the struggle for the freedom of the Russian people. He read me one of the articles in the collection, headed by the Russian words "Golod! Golod! Golod!" (Hunger, hunger, hunger): Hunger here, hunger there, hunger in all of Russia, the peasants are dying of hunger, and all this is due to the tyrannical government, and so on and so forth.

This is not the place to describe the powerful effect, like a glowing fire, that the article, and other articles which my teacher read to me that night till daybreak, had on my mind. But in short I would say that just as a new world, the world of enlightenment, had opened before me on that night at the home of my teacher Rabbi Yossi Bloicker, when I studied grammar for the first time from the book Tzohar ha-Tevah, instead of studying the laws of the Sabbath in the Turim, so this late night in the house of my teacher, the student Voytinski, was the beginning of a new life for me. Not many days passed before I became a nihilist in all respects, like most of my school friends, particularly the Jewish ones. Without much hesitation I, too, vowed to dedicate my whole life to the people—that is to say, the Russian people! To serve the people, to suffer for it, to offer all my future on the altar of freedom for the people: all in the manner of the nihilists in Russia in those days.

There is no need to say that the more nihilism captivated my soul, the farther I drifted away from the Jews and from all the concerns of the Jewish community, which seemed to me so small and insignificant in comparison with the great Russian people. Slowly, nearly all the threads that connect each individual Jew to the Jewish people snapped within me, one after the other. Nothing in Jewish life interested me any more, and I felt myself—or at least it seemed to me that I felt myself—to be completely Russian.

But one thread still remained, and no device of nihilism could sever this thread.

This thread was my love for the Hebrew language.

Even after everything Jewish had come to seem strange to me and almost repulsive, I was not able in any way to forsake the Hebrew language, and from time to time, whenever and wherever I came across a work of the new Hebrew literature, I did not have enough willpower to overcome my desire to read it. True, it sometimes happened that after reading two or three sentences of one of these books I would immediately abandon it with a feeling of anger. For the truth is that the Hebrew literature of the time excelled neither in content nor in form. The subjects that were dealt with by those "writers" in that "literature" were so trivial and insignificant, and the form was so far from being beautiful, that even now, when I am inclined to treat this literature more leniently and the Russian literature of that time somewhat more harshly, I cannot be enchanted with that Hebrew literature. I was even less likely to find anything in it in those days when the "greats" of Russian literature like Pisarev and his circle had so much prejudiced my opinion, as they had prejudiced the opinion of all the Russian youth of that generation. Moreover, the style of most of the "writers" of that time not only could not endear the Hebrew language to me, but had just the opposite effect, helping to extinguish the last remaining enthusiasm that still smoldered in my soul. This was the time of the general disillusionment of the maskilim in Russia with the Hebrew language, the time when Moses Leib Lilienblum himself pronounced a death sentence on it, declaring in Rodkinson's journal Ha-Kol that the era of the Hebrew language had already passed, that it no longer had any role at all to play in the life of Jews, and that if he and his friends were still writing articles in Hebrew this was only because there were still some Jews who knew no Russian and could not achieve through Russian the education that everybody required; therefore the Hebrew writers were not very accurate in their diction and did not strive to improve it. They used a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Russian because to them Hebrew was not an important language, seeing that eventually it was going to be abandoned.

These were the words of the Hebrew writers themselves, and I, who had almost gone beyond the point of no return, what could I find to attract me in this literature and this language? Certainly in the end I would have forsaken the literature, and the language it was written in, had it not been for Peretz Smolenskin's Ha-Shahar, in which my ears perceived more vitality and in which I found more problems that a person of our times should grapple with. Of course Smolenskin's stories were, in my view, no match for What Is to Be Done? by Chernyshevski. Nevertheless I read them willingly because they had a contemporary meaning and were foil of life. In every single line of Lilienblum's "A World of Chaos"—about Mapu's The Love of Zion—I noticed a crude imitation of Pisarev's criticism of Eugene Onegin, by Pushkin; nevertheless, I was delighted that modern things like these were being written in Hebrew. As for Smolenskin's articles, such as "A Time to Plant," although the very question...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• First Period
• Second Period
• Notes
• About the Book