I'm zipping up my boots...

I don't know if it's age, sentimentalism, the way the wind's blowing, or a return to the orthodoxy of my early childhood—okay, that's not likely—but I've rejected for good having to suffer through English-language and bilingual Jewish services. 

Finished. 

Done. 

I've survived my last ersatz-Joni-Mitchell version of the Sh'ma. Maspik k'var—enough already!

I know the objections to monolingual Hebrew prayer. None seems particularly Jewish and none is more oft repeated than, "Congregants need to understand what they read." Sadly, such condescension is not new. The growth of Reform was driven in part by a wealthy, assimilated leadership's embarrassment at the appearance, customs, and manners of poor immigrants from the East, not by concern for their ability to read Hebrew—which, as it happens, was often strong. In rejecting traditional prayer, and so putting aside ancient tunes, gestures, and emotions, the reformers also cut us off from our linguistic spring and thus narrowed the stream that is our collective memory. Where they might have introduced teaching services, during which one could learn Hebrew as he or she prays, they created insipid, vernacular liturgies that helped further dilute our identity into America's Christian mainstream.  

Here's my point. A more traditional Hebrew liturgy:

• Makes my past present: it re-members for me my grandfather, the beautiful Egerton Road New Synagogue he'd pray in, and the old Jewish men he'd hang with after services in front of the cinema on Stamford Hill—the cinema that's now a cut-price supermarket 
  
• Binds me with all Jews, both through time—back to my East European ancestors and forward to my sons' yet-to-be imagined children—and across space
  
• Allows me to "communicate with" the Imminent/Transcendent in the people Israel's lashon kodesh, our holy tongue    

From now on, I'm praying only in Hebrew. What about you?

(By the way, the modern appeal to the vernacular is rooted in Luther's rebellion against Rome—yes, that Luther, the one who called us teufelsdreck, Satan's shit. His actions comprised the politically motivated rejection of someone else's "dead" foreign language, not the inexplicable throwing away of his own heritage.)