An Ashkenazi Stranger in an Israeli Land
*All posts lifted from an e-mail I've sent out will have an asterisk in front of it, from now on.
I'm conflicted about what accent I should use when I pray. Israeli, or Ashkenazi? I realized that if Hebrew is to be truly my own, then I don't want to maintain a 'diglossia' within my own speech and prayer. I think that prayer should be honest speaking to God, and that will be aided if my natural tongue is the channel for my communication. So it follows that I should speak to both Man and God in the same langauge and dialect. But I am loath to join in squashing all traces of my cultural heritage, for Ashkenazic pronounciation is no worse than other ones (it has its pluses too). My compromise has been to leave Shema and other passages from Tanakh untouched, while slowly attempting to phase out my Ashkenazi pronounciation in dovening. There, in actual passages still marked by cantillation guides [trup], I feel, it is appropriate to retain a sense of Otherness, of Holy separation from the text; I am not speaking in my own words, I am trying to lose myself in the Old words.
Thoughts?
I'm conflicted about what accent I should use when I pray. Israeli, or Ashkenazi? I realized that if Hebrew is to be truly my own, then I don't want to maintain a 'diglossia' within my own speech and prayer. I think that prayer should be honest speaking to God, and that will be aided if my natural tongue is the channel for my communication. So it follows that I should speak to both Man and God in the same langauge and dialect. But I am loath to join in squashing all traces of my cultural heritage, for Ashkenazic pronounciation is no worse than other ones (it has its pluses too). My compromise has been to leave Shema and other passages from Tanakh untouched, while slowly attempting to phase out my Ashkenazi pronounciation in dovening. There, in actual passages still marked by cantillation guides [trup], I feel, it is appropriate to retain a sense of Otherness, of Holy separation from the text; I am not speaking in my own words, I am trying to lose myself in the Old words.
Thoughts?
posted by Shlome at 5:05 PM
1 Comments:
A few people who I know who have managed to phase out the Ashkanazi, still say the Shema how they learned it.
A few others speak Hebrew with an Israeli mifta, but always davven as they have learned it.
Still others, have phased out the mifta of their youth completely.
I flop back and forth, I think it has more to do with when I am saying something by heart, or actually reading it....
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