Walk around Israel today
and you will hear a lot of Hebrew. It’s our national language. But did you know
that in the late 1800s, as Jews began to stream back into Israel, Hebrew was a
dead language.

Hi everyone, I am Ron Cantor and you are
listening to the podcast: The Miracle of Modern Israel. Before we get
started, I want to send you my book, The 15 most important facts about the
Israeli Palestinian Conflict free of charge. Just go to roncan.net/Israel48.
This podcast is sponsored by Up-to-Zion Israel tours. Checkout uptozion.net to
get information on one of our upcoming life-changing tours to Israel.

For the past six years I’ve had the privilege
being the senior leader and now evangelist of one of the first modern day
Hebrew-Speaking New Testament congregations in the world, right here in Tel
Aviv.

It’s true, for nearly 2000
years, not one child grew up speaking Hebrew as his or her mother
tongue. Yes, it was used in the synagogue, in the reading of the
Hebrew Scriptures and the Siddur, the prayer book. But at the end of the
service, no one continued to converse in the language of the prophets. In fact,
to do such a thing would have been considered an unholy act. Hebrew is
a holy language and can never be spoken in a mundane, everyday way, thought
the rabbis.

However in 1882,
Eliezer Ben Yehuda, a Jew from Lithuania, decided to challenge this
idea. He would resurrect Hebrew as the language of the Jewish
people. By this time people we were already speaking of the
possibility of the Jewish Nation being reborn, but no one dreamed that the
dead, non-spoken language of Hebrew would become the official language of the
new Jewish State. However, Ben Yehuda felt that the revival of
Hebrew was essential in uniting the Jewish people. 

For Ben Yehuda it
was not enough to be able to read and write Hebrew in religious
institutions—no—meals would be ordered in Hebrew, children would be praised and
reprimanded in Hebrew and haggling over the price of vegetables in the market,
would be done in Hebrew.

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go to uptozion.net. That’s uptozion.net. Now, back to the story…

Ben Yehuda and
his wife immigrated to Palestine with the goal of only speaking Hebrew. This
wasn’t too hard for Eliezer, as he was quite the linguist, being fluent in
French, German, and Russian, as well as Yiddish and Hebrew. However, his wife’s
barely spoke a word in Hebrew. 

There was one other
stipulation before they said their vows in Egypt en route to the Holy Land: she
would only speak to their children in
Hebrew. She promised him that their children would only hear Hebrew. And thus
Deborah Ben Yehuda dared to dream that’s she could be the woman
to give birth to the first child in millennia that spoke Hebrew as his mother
tongue.

When their first
son, Ben Zion (Son of Zion) was born, they went to great lengths to
make this happen. When visitors came over that could not be speak
Hebrew, Ben Zion was sent to his room, lest he pick up foreign
languages.

When you think of what was
riding on this young man speaking Hebrew—the future generations of Israelis
growing up speaking the language of King David and Jeremiah—it is no surprise
that there was demonic resistance. More than three years passed and the boy
uttered not a word. People began to tell Ben Yehuda that he was
raising an idiot. 

Amazingly, in the midst of
a domestic argument did Ben Zion find his tongue at four years of
age.

Having
come here as an immigrant myself with the goal of becoming fluent in Hebrew, I
can imagine the stress of Deborah. Somedays, you just need to communicate in
your native tongue. One day, without thinking she began to sing lullabies in
Russian to Ben Zion. When Ben Yeshua heard a foreign tongue
in his home he scolded his young wife. The boy wrote about the emotional scene:
“It caused a great shock to pass over me when I saw my father in his anger and
my mother in her grief and tears, and the muteness was removed from my lips,
and speech came to my mouth.” He cried out, Lo Abba…not father.

And from
then on, he spoke Hebrew, like a Frenchmen speaks French.

In part
two, we will talk about the struggle to see Hebrew become the language of the
Jews of Palestine.

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from Tel Aviv.