you why.”
Adam went to the white board and drew a square root sign. “The Hebrew language is based on roots that are built from two or three consonants. The root gives the basic meaning of the word, but we get the specific meaning and a lot of grammar from vowels. The trick is, vowels weren’t part of the written alphabet in early Hebrew. For the most part, they still don’t appear in a Torah scroll. There’s no punctuation there, either. So you often have to make inferences about who is speaking and in what tense before you can even pronounce the words. Where one sentence ends and another begins is also up to the reader to determine.”
Adam gave the students a couple of moments to absorb what he had said before he continued. “Here’s an example,” he said. He wrote the word qds under the square root sign. “This root, qadash, has to do with separation or holiness.” He saw the students, most of them, anyway, copying his words into their notebooks. Next to the root, Adam began writing a column of words down the board. He was falling into a rhythm. He could feel the rising energy of the class.
“All these words appear the same in a Torah scroll and in ancient documents, but the vowels give them very different meanings,” he said. “Qadosh means holy. Qadesh means to be separated out for a sacred purpose. Be careful how you use it, though: the same word pronounced with a longer ‘d’ sound refers to the male prostitutes who worked the Canaanite shrines.” Some of the students laughed, not sure if he was serious. Adam put up the Boy Scouts’ salute and continued. “Qidush, with the long ‘d’ again, is either the wine drunk on festivals or the blessing over the wine. Qadish, the sanctification of God’s name, is the traditional prayer of mourning. If any of you took Professor Esposito’s composition course last year, you read Ginsberg’s “Kaddish”. That’s the same word.”
He stepped away from the board and walked toward the students in the front row. “I haven’t even touched on another aspect of the problem: let’s say I decide based on the context that the word means ‘sanctify.’ Is the text a command to make something holy? Is it a description of something a man did in the past? You can often make a sensible call, but just as often there are a number of choices that have different meanings. The rabbinic commentators played with this a lot. They saw this ambiguity as a virtue of the language, not a deficiency. They believed that by using Hebrew, God was able to impart multiple meanings in each word and in each phrase. An engaged and clever reader could discover something new on every reading, but that requires judgment and interpretation. Despite what many fundamentalists claim, there usually isn’t one plain meaning for a passage in the Hebrew Bible.”
A student raised his hand and Adam called on him. “Did the rabbis ever explain why God didn’t just reveal scripture in a language people could understand?” A few people in the class laughed.
Adam smiled. “What qualities would you expect to find in the language of a sacred text? A computer language is perfectly clear and subject to only one interpretation, but it is very limited. Hebrew is a language of ambiguity and nuance. Unfortunately, too many translators see ambiguity as a problem to solve rather than a complexity to preserve. They say ‘A’ and ‘Not A’ cannot both be true, and so they lock in one meaning. That’s not the traditional Jewish approach. For Jews, the different readings are in conversation with each other. None of the readings is viewed as excluding all the others. For Jews, the obligation isn’t to memorize Torah or submit to Torah, but to engage with it. It’s more like a wrestling match or maybe a dance than anything else. That actually gives us a good transition to looking at our first text. Turn to the first page of your handouts. We’ll look at the first words in the Torah and explore how they have been translated and interpreted . . .”
The rest of the class passed quickly. The class seemed like a strong group, Adam thought. A few of them had already asked good questions, and Adam had already learned some of their names. Back in his office, Adam wrote himself a few quick notes on which prompts sparked the best comments and where he wanted to pick up at the start of the next class. He also left himself a reminder in his calendar to write a quiz based on the week’s reading. It was best to start off the semester letting the students know he wasn’t bluffing about keeping up with the syllabus.
When he was done, Adam leaned back in his chair and took a breath. He sent Claudia a quick email asking her to get in touch with him as soon as she could. He was anxious to hear about the tablet, and he didn’t want to wait, but he knew better than to expect Claudia to call him on her own. What he wanted or needed was never going to be uppermost in her mind.
Before he left, Adam looked up the number of the superintendent of his grandfather’s building and called to ask about clearing out his grandfather’s apartment. The super asked if Adam could come by before one o’clock, so Adam grabbed a couple of books he needed from his office to prepare for the next day’s class and he headed out.
He poked his head into the departmental office on his way to the stairs. Teresa, the department’s administrative assistant, was there, ensconced at her desk between a picture of her granddaughter and a small Puerto Rican flag. She was in her early fifties, confident and capable. She had worked in that office for decades, running it day-to-day as department chairs had come and gone. Teresa was the first person Adam had met when he interviewed for his job, and she helped get him oriented after he was hired. He still often relied on her advice when he had to deal with departmental politics.
“Welcome back, Adam” Teresa said. She smiled, but didn’t look up from her typing. She had on a blue V-neck sweater and the gold crucifix she always wore. “How was your class?”
“Not a bad start,” Adam said. “Listen, I’ve got to head out, but I’ll be back tomorrow morning for my class if anyone needs me, okay?”
Teresa must have heard something in his voice. She glanced up at him, stopped typing, and pulled a strand of her gray-streaked hair from her face. She leaned back from the typewriter. Adam could see the concern in her eyes. “Are you all right, Adam?”
“I’m fine. I’ve just got an errand to run. No big deal.”
“You didn’t shave. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen you teach in a baseball cap before. What’s going on?”
“Oh.” Adam felt the brim of his cap, embarrassed. “I’ll shave soon. Tomorrow night. It’s a Jewish custom. I buried my grandfather this week.”
“I’m really sorry, Adam. I had no idea. I’ll let John and the others know.”
“Please don’t, okay? I don’t want to make a thing about it. I’ll be back to normal after tomorrow. Let’s not make a fuss.”
She tilted her head as if to get the measure of him from a different angle. She nodded. “If that’s really what you want, okay, Adam. But I think people would want to know.” After a moment, she asked, “Can I pray for you and your grandfather?”
Adam smiled. “Thanks, Teresa. I’m pretty sure that he’s all right, but I’ll take whatever help I can get.”
Dealing with the super didn’t take long. Rent on the apartment was paid through the end of the month, but the super let Adam know he’d appreciate it if Adam closed it out early. He was sure he could rent it out for the first of October if he had time to paint it and fix it up a bit.
Adam took the elevator to the third floor and got out his keys as he walked down the long hallway. The ceramic tile hadn’t changed in at least thirty years—not since Adam had first moved in with his grandparents, anyway. The walls had been painted, but in almost the same color every time. Even the sound of his footsteps felt familiar. When he unlocked the door, Adam had to resist the impulse to call out to his grandfather. The apartment was silent, of course, but nothing looked different. His grandfather
