Firgun: Dancing on the Border

The borderland between Yiddish and Hebrew is one of Judaism’s most contentious battlegrounds. We have been arguing for a century about which language is better. Not in its ability to convey information, but how it expresses meaning and feeling, how it communicates the wrinkles of the Jewish psyche.

For a while, it looked like it would be Yiddish. In the years leading up to the Second World War, the vast majority of Jews on earth were citzens-by-birth of Yiddishland, the swath of geography between Russia and the Atlantic. All the residents of that Jewish universe spoke the language that first took root in the Rhineland, a combination of German grammar and wordforms, Hebrew vocabulary, and a smallish admixture of Slavic loan words. The only exceptions were highly Europeanized Jews who looked down their noses at what they saw as a Creole, an unfortunate alloy of “authentic” languages.

We know the part that happened next. The Sho’ah brought ruin to that old civilization and created room for the rise of Hebrew. There are now many more speakers of Hebrew than Yiddish and most people would bet on the enduring power of Hebrew. The miracle is that Yiddish endures at all, spoken by hundreds of thousands of Charedim and determined Jews who laboriously acquire it as adults. Yiddish took off during the COVID years, ignited by the power of yearning and curiosity.

What’s most interesting to me is not the battle per se, but the touching points of language intersection. I just learned a new word in modern Hebrew that is rooted in the world that came before it. Firgun comes to us from fargenigun, the Yiddish word for deep, throbbing joy. Firgun is almost untranslatable, but a Hebrew speaker might use it to name an act of unselfish appreciation, devoid of envy, when you describe the personal gifts of another human being. Le-fargayn is to praise, to valorize, to laud the qualities of someone whose behavior you admire. There is even a date assigned to it on the calendar. July 17 is Yom Firgun, when we are encouraged to offer tributes to others, untainted by the expectation of reciprocal admiration. It’s supposed to be a kind of rhetorical gift, an utterance that communicates free-flowing esteem.

I’ve never actually celebrated Yom Firgun, but come July of this year, it will be top of mind. The same for the lasting strength of Yiddish, which continues to deliver its gifts of the heart, long after the moment of its near demise.