When I entered Brandeis, the first course in which I enrolled was Hebrew 10a. I had wanted to know Hebrew for a long time, first for religious reasons and then for cultural ones. Knowing Hebrew would certainly help my understanding of Judaism and all of its tenets and practices. Knowing the language would also connect me more to the people of Israel. At one point or another, these practical reasons for learning a language no more than 7 million people speak fluently helped me cope with my not taking Spanish, French, German or something else useful.Today, I have no good religious or cultural reason to know the Hebrew language. I think I can be as God-fearin' or Israel-lovin' as I care to be - or for that matter, don't care to be - without knowing a word of Hebrew. But, nevertheless, I keep enrolling in Hebrew. There's something enchanting about a language that ceased to be spoken for a few thousand years and then reappeared suddenly as an official language of the Palestine Mandate in 1992.

The beauty of Hebrew is in its economical syntax. English is a language of at least 500,000 words, while Hebrew has far fewer. One could easily attribute this discrepancy to the fact that English has been spoken in two millennia in which the need for new words increased or to the fact that there are so many more speakers of English, and thus so many more possible inventors of new words. But, this would be too simple an explanation - correct or not.

The English vocabulary has a base syntax of Germanic words, which comprises the simplest means of expression in our language. The Norman conquest of England in 1066 brought the French language to the island nation, which the English monarchy primarily spoke for a few hundred years therefore. English enthusiastically absorbed a Romance vocabulary that sounded more enlightened to them, simply because the monarchy spoke it. People stopped eating "cow" and started eating "beef," just as they stopped speaking a primarily Germanic language.

The English vocabulary is now rooted most heavily on a Romantic word base. That's why Spanish is so similar. In construction, the two languages are about as similar as English and Arabic, but they sound alike. Perhaps it is the way in which a Latin syntax was incorporated so enthusiastically into English that made it a language so willing to accept new words. The poetry of the English language is found in the ability of its speakers to express themselves in so many ways, with so many different words - there are after all at least three ways to say everything in English. In Hebrew, there is a different kind of poetry.

The authors of the Modern Hebrew language created an entire vocabulary for a 20th century speaker from the small vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible and secondarily from the vocabulary of the Mishnah. The poetry of Hebrew is found in the multitude of uses that can be derived from a single root word. The beauty of the language is not in the number of ways of expression but in the very means of expression. In Hebrew, to open is "liftoah;" a key is "mafteah." One can debate the beauty of the etymologies of open and key, but no one can debate the poetry of liftoah and mafteah.

And so, I continue studying Hebrew. I'm addicted to its simplicity. It seems obvious that an English speaker would be so enthralled with a language that espouses opposite values, if a language can even do such a thing. At the very least, Hebrew forces the English speaker to step back and realize that the best expressions are not always found in the pages of a thesaurus, but in the annals of one's life.

- Matthew Bettinger '05 submits a column to the Justice.