V'Ayn Kol Chadash Tachat Hashemesh

One naturally makes mistakes in a language that isn’t one's own. So I have, in my time, made the odd gaffe or two in Hebrew. Fairly new in the country back in the last millennium, I was asked what I did for a living. I’m a civil engineer, I wanted to say, mehandes ezrachi מהנדס אזרחי, only it came out mehandes atzbani מהנדס עצבני, a nervous engineer.
But learning the language of the country in which you have chosen to live is, I think, a prerequisite for making it your true home. And Hebrew, in my humble opinion, is a logical, well thought out, and relatively easy language to master. Some words, in particular, stand out, because they sound fun, or warm, or beautiful, or odd, or fascinating. Or because of their etymology, their history.
Bakbouk בקבוק, for example, which means bottle. It’s called that because when you pour a drink out of a bottle, doesn’t it make the sound “bakbookbakboobakbook....”?
Chukka lukka (pronounced chuck a lucker) צ’אקה לאקה is a fun word. OK, the purists may say, that’s not a real Hebrew word. Maybe it isn’t. But it sounds too odd to miss. And what does it mean? It’s the siren on a police car or ambulance.
Chashmal (sounds like hush mull, but beginning with a hard “ch” as if you were clearing your throat) חשמל. It’s a dead common word. It’s the word for electricity. But electricity wasn’t around when ancient Hebrew was being spoken. The word had to be created.

Where did the English word for electricity come from? Electron, which was the ancient Greeks' word for amber, that shiny burnt orange stone. The Greeks, as reported by Thales of Miletus, noticed that if you rub amber with fur it creates some frisson, a force that can attract hair (or balloons, if they had them back then), sometimes even a spark if you rubbed long and hard enough.
Is the word chasmal found in the bible? It is. Among other places, in Ezekiel Chapter 1, 4 and what did it mean then?: "And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire." 
So today's Hebrew word for electricity comes from the ancient word for amber, which in ancient Greek gave its name to today's English word for electricity. It's all connected!

The first school in the country that taught in modern Hebrew was… have a guess, go on, where? (answer later on) which began teaching all subjects in Hebrew in 1888, at the same time that Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the man responsible for taking biblical Hebrew and reviving it, was living in Jerusalem. In reinventing a fairly dead language (still breathing--though not getting out much and having fun--thanks to its use in Jewish prayers) Eliezer Ben Yehuda had to not only encourage others to use the language, but to think up new words fit for every day life in the late 19th/early 20th century.
When the staff at this school (it was in Rishon Lezion, did you guess it?) found that there was a word missing from the new language, they would write to Eliezer Ben Yehuda. For example, they wrote and said that there was no word for towel. (Apparently Noah and his family didn’t need one, neither did Moses as he led the children of Israel across the dry sea, and as for the Egyptians... well they didn’t require drying off either. Do you think there was some sort of conspiracy just to keep the word towel out of the bible?)
So Ben Yehuda had a think. And he took the word negev, from the Negev, that expanse of very dry land in the south of Israel, and from that he fashioned the word lenagev, to dry, and one step on, magevet, towel. Isn’t that brilliant?

I moved to Israel in 1995, and learned the language on an intensive course, common among immigrants, called an ulpan. And it just so happened that Ben Yehuda’s daughter, Dora, was still alive (just, she must have been over 90). So our ulpan invited her to come over and chat to some of us about growing up in that extraordinary family. We, the chosen few who were invited to the talk (the top two classes, I had to overcome my natural modesty just to add that detail) were in the room waiting for her to arrive. Waiting and waiting. Finally a teacher came in laughing, and told us why there was a delay.
They’d sent a taxi to go and pick Dora Ben Yehuda up. The taxi driver had got to the address, found this old lady standing on the corner, and bundled her into the cab. But only when they got to the ulpan did they discover that it wasn’t her. The taxi driver had simply pounced on an innocent old lady standing on the street. No wonder she’d struggled, he said.

And the revival works. It is an incredible story. As the acclaimed writer David Grossman once said, “If my son today were to meet our forefather Abraham, they could at least have a reasonable conversation with each other”.
lsrael is an extraordinary place, and Hebrew is an extraordinary language. We in Israel should congratulate ourselves that, just by saying boker tov in the morning, we are part of a remarkable achievement.

Should do better. See me after class

This summer was one of social protest, and our politicians, now refreshed and returned to the trough for the winter session of parliament, are keen to appear as if they are all part of this social revolution.
Meir Sheetrit, a member of Knesset who has never worked in the private sector in his life, came up with a brilliant idea. He proposed a law that would exempt young couples, and singles, from paying VAT on their first homes. (If it sounds a little odd to say "young couples and singles", well that's the odd wording of his proposal. I can just imagine he first wrote "young couples" until someone pointed out how that was discriminatory, so he added in "and singles"). Well that’s fabulous, and who knows how many thousands of votes that will... I mean how many thousands of young couples that will help get on the first rung of the property ladder. Respect Meir! Way to go!

Now you’ve been nodding and thinking “Well that is good news. It would really help.” If that’s the case, then I would suggest that you too consider becoming a politician, because our MKs - particularly life-long careerists like Sheetrit - are full of such knee-jerk reactions, but are too hurried/exhausted/stupid to actually investigate their own suggestions. All knees and no brains. [Not that I'm implying that you are..., heaven forbid.]

This bill, if you look at it, will result in the exact opposite of what it purportedly set out to achieve, in this case help potential homebuyers in a very expensive market.

A market consists of buyers and sellers (that is demand and supply). Currently our housing market is overheated; many thousands of people in the market are fighting over too few properties, or at least not enough in the areas of highest demand. Hence the high prices. And Sheetrit’s solution is to shave the cost for young homebuyers. Will this allow some couples, who currently are struggling to get enough funds together to buy a flat, put in a bid for a home? Yes, of course it would. That’s what the bill is there for. The result? Well, whereas before you may have had three couples bidding for a flat in downtown Petah Tikva, now you’ll have five couples (the extra two are those facing no VAT, thanks to Meir). Prices were high when three fought over the property. What will happen when five are in the game? Prices will go up. I predict (and this is all on my ownsome, with no monstrous BankofIsrael econometric model pumping out statistics for me) I predict, as I say, that if this bill gets passed, then house prices will go up, ceteris paribus. (STOP THERE! Latin alert! Yes, now some of you, who may not have had the benefits of a fine English education, may be flummoxed somewhat by Latin expressions. Don’t be. They are not there to perturb, per se. They serve a purpose. They can explain succinctly what it was you wanted to say. And in this case, I meant “all other things being equal”. In other words (id est) if nothing else changes that also affects housing, then this will result in higher house prices.)

And it doesn’t surprise me.

Knesset, that venerable, risible institution, is full of charlatans, and I mean that in a nice way. I mean they are amateurs. They discover a problem on Monday, suggest a solution on Tuesday, and pass a new law on it by Thursday. The following week, they discover that instead of helping, the new law has actually made things worse.

Here’s another example of a half-baked law by half-baked politicians. Back in 2000, the Knesset adopted an amendment to the Law on Employing Workers through Manpower Agencies. The change in the law stated that "A worker via a manpower agency shall not be employed by an employer for a period of more than nine months." The aim, supposedly, was to change the status of thousands of agency workers, very often employed for months if not years, sitting next to inhouse workers, possibly doing the same work, but for less pay, and on shakier grounds in terms of conditions, pensions or perks.
Only the result was clear for all to see. Employers were likely to dismiss workers just as the nine-month deadline approached. The implementation of the law was postponed FOUR times, and finally came into force in 2008. It has caused disruption, instability, and heartache for the very people it was intended to help. One case involving a manpower agency used by the Israel Antiquities Authority has reached the courts after 21 workers were dismissed, and then immediately replaced by other agency workers.

Maybe our politicians should do a little more homework. Parliamentary bills in England are routinely sent to everybody that might be affected—individuals, companies, unions, trade organizations, professional bodies—for their feedback and input, and this preparatory stage takes at least a year. The result? Laws that work, are respected, and stick around for ages.

Sheetrit's bill by the way was chucked out of Knesset this week by 44 votes to 32. There is hope yet.