Category: Hebrew

  • Humility

    Following yesterdays larger bit of translation, here is another, smaller bit from “Nisayon” by Yair Caspi this time about humility: A study of humility requires overcoming a popular objection to it: at the beginning of the 20th century the socialists claimed that humility is a conspiracy through which the rich wish to train their workers…

  • A Modern & Critical View of Judaism

    The following is a rough and unedited (my) translation of a chapter from a book called “Nisayon” by Yair Caspi. I hope to provide more context about Yair Caspi in future writing. As I read it and recognized my place in an inherited identity I have actively rejected most of my life, it I felt…

  • Understanding in Hebrew

    For Dan and “The Understanding Group” 🙂 What follows is a flow of thoughts about “understanding” in the Hebrew language … my knowledge of language (both Hebrew and English) is more intuitive than formal … so some of this stuff may not be “exactly true”! Hebrew is built upon root words which typically have three…

  • Ambitions and Exhales

    The Hebrew word for Inhale (she-ifa) also means ambition … and so it is that after ambition comes exhale.  

  • Soul & Soil

    Just noticed how close the words “soul” and “soil” seem to be. In Hebrew the root word for man is אדמ “adam”. The feminine version of that word is אדמה “adama” which means earth. Unlike english the word for soul נפש “newfesh” does not seem to be directly related.

  • Rain

    Andreea and I were having a conversation about a vision-statement for a new website we will soon be launching to support her Doula-training work in Romania. The direction we were heading in would translate roughly as (a) every woman has a right to choose how to give birth; (b) every woman has a right to…

  • Hebrew

    Though it was my first mother-tongue, for most of my life I hated hebrew. It is a difficult language and, like many other things, most of its vibrance was systemically destroyed by my teachers. I encountered difficulties in both language studies and bible studies (a “not–quite-religious-semi-historic-and-yet” discipline that is part of the core curiculum in…