Officially twenty years here, and oh how my Hebrew vocabulary and Israeli mindset has expanded and exploded in just one.
Words I never thought I’d need, words I figured would take another while to come across.
Or words that have completely changed meaning in the course of a day.
If I mapped my aliyah in word groups, you’d see the bursts of bureaucracy with first employment, rental contracts, bank statements. You’d find the rise of marital bliss, the bumps of car ownership, the buckets of humor from the supermarket to the TV commercials. The jagged edges of elections, so many elections, and politics. You’d scan the hills of pregnancy, birth and child rearing, the valleys of funerals, army terms and, indeed, war.
But new expansion packs gained in 2023-2024 are not ones any of us would have subscribed to otherwise.
I present a selection of the words that have become situations.
חטופים – Honestly, a noun/verb shoresh I never would have imagined seeing/hearing/using on a daily basis for over a year, let alone wearing הלב שלנו שבוי בעזה around my neck. A word that stands for way too much, but lately, it hits with me a new feeling, a new word, a new context – perverse. Perversion. Not only of justice but of… our whole western society. Of how people are, how people can turn away, how people can speak carelessly in the face of invisible pain. Perversion in our midsts.
נשק – Once upon a hazy time, neshek was a word thrown around, maybe with a lil smile, when I’d walk into malls or office or government buildings, and when they would ask my 160cm frame if I was carrying, I’d smile at them and shake my head. No, silly.
But a year ago I got my license and my weapon and that’s just not something I’d have ever, ever imagined – a range of shooting vocabulary I never thought I’d be picking up in a shooting range surrounded by male citizen gun owners and a trainer who looks like the Zohan’s hotter cousin.
The guards now smile. Kol hakavod lach.
קדיש – Imagine a boy becoming a man, taking on ownership of mitzvot, and instead of waiting decades to say his first mourner’s קדיש it’s weeks.
Standing at his father’s funeral in a military cemetary, voice cracking – puberty or grief? Agony, all of it.
When I hear mourner’s kaddish now it’s a moment of flinch.
מאבק – This word has floated around but now it leans heavy on our backs, whether we frequent protests or get politically active or just, honestly, read the headlines about other people taking up the struggle for a change of status quo – regarding hostages, regarding government, regarding how fucking frustrating everything is because we are somehow both empowered and powerless at the same time.
Schrodinger’s power struggle.
I’d love to go on, how it’s twenty years and I’ve entered/am on the precipice of new vocabularies – developer humor, judicial overhaul legalities, teenage pop celebrity, army tzavs, family making aliyah, but, I’m exhausted.
Perhaps on a better day ahead.
Whadya got: