Q:
Should we send our children to a cheder that speaks Yiddish if in our home only English is spoken?
A:
Question: Sending a child to a school where they speak Yiddish in a case where the child is not accustomed to Yiddish.
Let me tell you, there’s a tremendous benefit for Ashkenazi people to speak Yiddish. I cannot enumerate enough of the benefits.
There’s a benefit of national identity, of being different from the goyim. How important it is for an Ashkenazi boy to be able to speak the language that his grandfather and his great-grandfather spoke. It ties him up with a history and it makes him different from the Irishmen and the Italian in the streets. Very important!
Only that in some instances it’s almost impossible because the boy does not know even one word of Yiddish.
Now if there is a very smart class of boys, you can teach them Yiddish that way too. Yes. You can break them in. But some boys have difficulty even learning Chumash in English or a piece of Gemara in English. It’s a masterpiece if some boys can repeat a piece of Gemara in English. So how can we expect Yiddish from them too?
So it depends. If possible, by all means children should learn some Yiddish.
And let me tell you something else. If you can introduce Yiddish in your own home, no matter how difficult it is, you don’t realize the precious achievement of that. This little Beis Hamikdosh is a different place from the whole outside world!
You know, our fathers in Europe had an ideal not to learn goyish. They boasted that they didn’t know gentile languages. “I’m going to sink so low as to talk like a gentile?” Not long ago, seventy years ago, it was an ideal in Europe not to know any Polish. Polish was for the servant girl who chopped wood for you and made the fire and brought water from the well. She spoke Polish to you.
Lithuanian was for a grobbe goy; עם הדומה לחומר, they called them. They used to call them עם הדומה לחמור. That’s what they used to say in those countries. “I won’t sink so low as to talk their language.”
Even apikorsim spoke only Yiddish. The Yiddishists in Eastern Europe were apikorsim, terrible apikorsim, enemies of the Torah. But they wouldn’t sink so low as to give up their language. It’s a fact. Yiddishists had Yiddish newspapers. And even the Communists. In Russia, they printed a paper called ‘The Emess.’ ע-מ-ע-ס, emess. ‘The Emess’, as if that was the real emess. It was all lies. But still they wouldn’t give up their language. That’s our language! In Birobidzhan the Communists, Jewish Communists spoke Yiddish.
Now they’re no model for us, but there’s a pride in speaking Yiddish. If possible, by all means.
But of course not all children are capable. And to make a double burden for him? It’s like a child trying to climb up a mountain – it’s very hard to climb a mountain – but you give him a heavy stone too. Both things? You can’t expect two things of him.
So therefore, in many cases it’s worth giving up Yiddish in order that the child shouldn’t go lost. It depends on the child.
(September 1988)
