Hebrew (Part II)

Hebrew (Part II)

When we left off, my study group and I were congratulating ourselves over our ability to pronounce lengthy groups of Hebrew words, but with the recognition that we had absolutely no idea what the sentences meant or—in fact—whether the sentences made any sense at all.

The following day we were introduced to vocabulary.  For the next two weeks each day was spent creating flash cards for new vocabulary, ranging from 15 to 25 words per day.

Right now you are thinking:  What?!  Flash cards?!!  Isn’t that what my son/daughter used to make in the third grade?  The answer is “yes!”  Over the course of those two weeks, I made flash cards; reviewed them; shuffled them; reviewed them again…… 

While my practice of law required that I remember events, names, dates medical jargon, deposition testimony, etc., it was not required that I keep any of that information in my head past the trial.  Also, there was no prohibition against looking back at my notes during a deposition, during a trial or at any other time during the pendency of a case.  You can imagine my chagrin when I learned the Hebrew professor frowned upon the practice of reviewing notes and lists of translated words while taking the exam.  As a consequence, I was forced to actually memorize words. 

Then, I learned that the Hebrews had the audacity to attach stuff to the front or back of words that make them plural, past tense, past present perfect, feminine, etc.  (I learned that these things are called “prefixes” and “suffixes.”)  “But wait, there’s more”—I found out that the Hebrews, not content with these changes in number and gender and tense, decided they didn’t want to use separate words for prepositions such as:  “to”, “from”, “with” and so on.  Nope, they decided:  “Hey, let’s not waste the space on our tablet (or papyrus, or whatever they were using to chisel or write upon), let’s just add a couple more of these squiggly things on the front of these other squiggly things.”

All of that seemed okay, but then some other Hebrew decided:  “Wow, we can save even more room if we just drop off some of these squiggly things when we add those other squiggles.  But, to make it really fun, let’s just do it randomly!”  Obviously the response was:  “Great idea, but if we want to make it wicked cool fun, we just add some squiggly stuff here and there as well!”

And that’s what they did.

I asked my Hebrew professor “why” those fun-loving Hebrews came up with this game and his response was:  “To confound the wicked!”  While the answer was not exactly satisfying, what really stuck with me was the look he gave me when the word “wicked” came out of his mouth. 

All of this memorization and pondering about why those Hebrews had it in for some guy from Alabama took place as my first exam in over 35 years was approaching.  There was some concern on my part about whether my resurrected study skills would work after the moth balls had been removed.

Exam day came last Monday, August 29 and, yes, I did have some unpleasant dream about the exam in the nights leading up to it.  I am happy to report that the results are in and I passed—no doubt to displeasure of those Hebrews who never wanted their language spoken with an Alabama accent.

The rest of the week was taken up with Multi-Cultural training.  (It was much more interesting than anticipated and may be the subject of a later post.)  Next week we start the regular academic schedule and while I will still be taking Hebrew, it will be much less intense.  Better still, my other courses look favorably upon reading and writing in English.