So, I kind of got yelled at by this guy I know on Friday night due to the theoretical siddur that I hypothetically wrote.
I was complaining about our Friday night siddur, Likrat Shabbat. He asked why. I said I don’t like the layout. Feeling adventurous, I also said I didn’t like the transliteration all over the place.
Oh, wrong thing to say. “The Conservative movement encompasses everyone…” he went on, “You’re losing people who can’t read Hebrew….” He asked me what I’d put in it, and I said English and Hebrew—if you don’t know Hebrew, then learn it. No big deal. “I can tell you right now because of what you said I wouldn’t read your siddur,” he said. “I’m dead serious.”
Well I’m a sensitive flower and everything so pretty much I took that as yelling at me, and I started looking for new places to sit. I told him, Well, that’s how my Koren siddur is, and it’s Orthodox. And he said, The Orthodox—that’s them. “Well how come if it’s OK for the Orthodox it would be such a bad idea in my siddur?” He kind of gets lost in his own logic, but anyway.
So, I don’t like transliteration. And apparently that means that I’m being exclusive. But I have a feeling that they went many, many years without transliteration in siddurim throughout the ages, and people didn’t know Hebrew then either. If you are participating through transliteration, are you really participating? Not only do you not know what you’re saying, you’re not really at least saying it in Hebrew, nor are you following along at least in the meaning, in English. You know enough to blindly sing along to the point which you could do simply by picking up whatever sounds you heard every week, even without the transliteration crutch. It encourages you, furthermore, to never learn Hebrew in the first place.
So no, I don’t like transliteration. And I wouldn’t put it in my siddur.
Yes, and for long time there were no siddurim whatsoever, let alone transliterated siddurim. I think transliteration is somewhat insidious, even though I’m not quite as militant about it. As you are aware, the total amount of learning to go from transliteration to pointed Hebrew is pretty small. It’s harder for some than for others, but it can be done in a couple hours, really (getting comfortable with it takes longer, of course, but so does getting comfortable with transliterated Hebrew, IMHO). Learning Hebrew language, as opposed to the orthography, takes years of continuing effort (depending on your target level of proficiency). I think too many people don’t understand this difference and assume that the first easy step is beyond them.
Strictly speaking, Hebrew could have been “properly” written in the Roman alphabet, so in that sense, transliteration isn’t that different from learning the orthography without learning anything else. This is why I don’t think it’s worth fighting transliteration tooth and nail; I think everyone could learn the orthography, but learning the language proper is just unrealistic for many. But if you come to rely on transliteration, it makes it HARDER to keep learning because you don’t see the way the roots operate.
I think it’s kind of like the debate about whether to charge non-members for High Holy Days tickets. (I personally think it’s not so great just because I can’t afford $500 myself, but) one side says we ought to accommodate everyone, and the other side says it only encourages twice-a-year Jews. It’s probably not the friendliest thing to think about, but the issue is still relevant.
The same is true here—given that going from transliteration to Hebrew orthography isn’t like earning a PhD, should we really encourage this transliteration crutch? I imagine that if the world were to switch to my hypothetical siddur, no one would go, “Oh NO! Where’s my transliteration?? WHERE’S MY TRANSLITERATION?!” They would adapt. Why impede that?
I think transliterated texts are useful in small texts, for example if you want to teach how to kindle the Shabbat candles. On the other hand I think you cultivate some kind of laziness. Why learn how to read Hebrew, if the text is transliterated anyway?
Right—and the strange thing about this siddur in particular is that it doesn’t transliterate the essential parts—it seems most concerned about making sure you can sing the refrains of some of the psalms!
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