The big thing that I learned today was mostly about myself. I learned that I can follow along with the Hebrew now! I couldn't have kept up with everybody else if I hadn't been pretty familiar with the prayers and liturgy already, but I wasn't a slave to the transliteration, and I feel proud of that.
The moment that I'm most proud of had nothing to do with the actual service. There was a woman who was wearing a tallit that had Hebrew text on it that didn't have any vowels on it, and I still managed to read that it said "Jerusalem". I haven't been that excited to read a single word since I was about three years old.
I'm very glad that I've been studying. Even though I'm a complete nerd and would have wanted to learn the Hebrew anyway, I had no idea how rewarding it would actually be for me. Language is a big part of culture, and now that I'm starting to make the language part of the way that I think, I'm really starting to feel like I belong. I've said it before, but it's very true. I felt much less like an outsider and more like a participant today.
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