Hebrew Voices #169 – What I Can’t Control

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #169 – What I Can’t Control

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: Shalom and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I'm Nehemia Gordon and I'm here with Nelson Calvillo, who is a research assistant at the Institute for Hebrew Bible Manuscript Research. Nelson, you just spent something like a month-and-a-half or more in Israel, at an ulpan at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, before the war started. Tell us about what your experience was like doing the ulpan.

Nelson: Absolutely, thank you Nehemia for inviting me on. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here with you, especially during these difficult times. Yes, I was at Hebrew University throughout August and most of September at the Rothberg International School. I was enrolled in a Hebrew ulpan course. For those who may not know, a Hebrew ulpan is basically an intensive Modern Hebrew course for people who are starting to learn Modern Hebrew. They might know a little bit, but they're really starting to learn the language.

My experience was incredible, it was beyond what I had hoped for. I had two incredible teachers, and I met a lot of incredible young students from all over the globe. I had students mostly from Russia, a couple of classmates from South Korea, a few Americans like myself, and there was even someone from Germany.

Nehemia: Wow. So, we're going to take this opportunity to exercise some of those Hebrew skills you developed at ulpan. We're going through a very difficult time right now. Anybody who cares about God's people must be going through a very difficult time. We've been through difficult times in the past. We went through the Holocaust. We had a Holocaust that happened on October 7th. The Holocaust began with what was called the Einsatzgruppen, the special units. They followed the Wehrmacht, the German army, into the Soviet Union, and whenever they got to a place with Jews, they rounded up the Jews. They went door to door, collected the Jews, lined them up in a row, and mowed them down. Did other horrible things; killed, in the end, about something like one-and-a-half million Jews. The more famous death camps, like Auschwitz, were only developed into death camps once they realized, "This is inefficient. It's using a lot of bullets."

Well, what Hamas did on October 7th was exactly what the Einsatzgruppen did; they went door to door killing Jews. In these difficult times, I know I need some encouragement. And I saw this post on Israeli social media; I saw it all over the place and I want to share it with the audience. I want to look at it together with Nelson. It's in Hebrew; it was made for native Hebrew speakers, for Israelis. It has a circle, and there are things inside the circle and outside the circle. And you may have seen similar things like this in different support groups in English; that’s what it’s based on.

But it really blew me away. Some of the things here… because this is designed specifically for people who are going through these difficult times in Israel. It's in cursive, so nobody freak out. The titles are in what's called the square Hebrew script, but most of the things are written in cursive. The reason it's written in cursive is, I think, that appeals more to Israelis because that's what they write in. You know, it's like when you write English, you don't write the G with those little two little circles with the little horn coming out of it, right? You write a handwritten G, whether it's cursive or print. So, this is handwriting. Technically you might not call it cursive, but it’s not connected, but it’s what’s considered to be Modern Hebrew cursive.

So, it says at the top, inside the circle in square letters, "be’shlitati", and outside "lo be’shlitati". So, with your Hebrew skills… this is a bit of a test for Nelson as well. So, what does the word "be’shlitati" mean?