// essays //
Spring 2014
Deep Roots and Budding Branches:
Renewal and Rejuvenation at Yiddish Farm
Max Daniel
First, the land was settled by a local Native American tribe. Then it would be built on by Polish-American farmers. It would become a Chabad bungalow colony for a time before it was turned over into a pagan commune, later transferring hands to a Jewish couple, who then gave it over to its current proprietors, Naftali Edelman and Yisroel Bass. This is the pedigree of the parcel of land in Goshen, New York, currently settled by Yiddish Farm – a place as richly diverse as its history.
What is Yiddish Farm? A simple answer is that it’s exactly what it sounds like – a farm where the spoken language is Yiddish, the thousand year-old vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews. Today, Yiddish is spoken by only a small fraction of Jews, mostly among the elderly and Hasidic communities. A more complex and layere answer touches on Jewish territorialism, Enlightenment, Yiddishism and other Jewish socio-political movements, the organic farming movement, the booming Hasidic populations in the nearby communities of Kiryas Joel and Monsey, the ba’al tshuva trend (literally “masters of repentance or return,” those who decide to adopt a dedicated observant Jewish lifestyle), and the steady stream of people leaving the ultra-Orthodox fold. An abstract answer would suggest that the farm is a site of perpetual rebirth, a living analogy between Jewish history and agriculture. However one chooses to answer the question, what the farm says about itself is a good place to start.
* * *
After entering a dirt road, overcoming a few bumps and exposed tree roots, and passing the bilingual sign, you’ll approach the modest main house with its empty grain silo, old well, and henhouse. If the fog isn’t too thick, you can glimpse the rolling hills and the grazing sheep in the distance. On the porch, there’s a board nailed to one of the wooden beams that reads, in Yiddish, “makht zikh heimish” [make it homey], recalling poet Ezra Pound’s famous Modernist assertion to “make it new.” This informal slogan encompasses both the farm’s project to reach back to a traditional Jewish vernacular and agricultural life, while simultaneously adopting a modern modality. At its bare minimum, Yiddish Farm is another branch of the vast project of modern Jewry, one that has been trying to reconcile tradition and modernity for the past two hundred years.
Revealing its European roots, the farm’s declaration – which acts as a sort of practical manifesto - hangs framed in the front anteroom of the main house, next to a newspaper clipping from the Yiddish Forverts and some informational brochures about ticks and bugs. It’s the first thing you’ll see upon entering, and the deliberate placement is a reminder to all visitors that, indeed, you’ve crossed a threshold beyond which Yiddish is the lingua franca. The ornate script, like that found in a traditional torah scroll, outlines in Yiddish the key tenets of the farm: nurturing a living and spoken Yiddish, promoting contact between Hasidic and secular Jews, and committing to organic farming and cultivating a respect for the environment. Everything on the farm is done with these often overlapping goals in mind. The directness and explicitness of Yiddish Farm’s stated aims – they are things that can be directly measured and observed – also help ensure the project’s success and bolster participants’ enthusiasm and support. Below those three bullet points, you’ll see a few dozen signatures with names that those familiar with today’s Yiddishist circles would be expected to know. If you can’t already read the declaration or recognize the names, it’s certain that by the time you finish one of the farm’s various programs you’ll at least be able to parse some of the Yiddish text and to say that you’ve makh-ed a l’khayim [make a toast/have a drink] with some of the undersigned.
While the farm’s flagship program takes place in the summer (with more emphasis on farming), it offers language immersion programs throughout the year along with other themed sessions. Additionally, the farm opens its doors on Shabbat to a variety of guests, friends, and family of the owners, secular and Hasidic alike. At Yiddish Farm, the language is not learned for use in a dusty archive, but absorbed and spoken in the fields, kitchens, and bungalows. Here songs are sung, jokes made, private asides whispered, gossip spread, recipes shared, stories told, friends made, histories recounted, and politics debated exclusively in Yiddish.
* * *
Any student of Talmud will tell you that the key to working out the multiple meanings and interpretations of a certain passage is often discovered in going back and forth over the text, turning it over and over. In traditional models of Jewish education, repetition and learning by rote is the norm. While the Yiddish classes at the farm were much more engaging than what one might have found in an Eastern European heder [traditional religious elementary school], repetition is still key to learning any language. However, learning Yiddish engages in a much grander project that includes generations of its speakers and puts the learner at the beginning of the next cycle. The historical sweep of Yiddish is an appealing part for many Yiddish students, who are often motivated by their older Yiddish-speaking relatives who are seen as possessing a vanishing and invaluable cultural and literary asset. For many people, learning Yiddish is a way to “return” to their ancestral past.
For the Hasidic Jews who grow up with and continue to speak Yiddish as their daily vernacular, the language is a tool to protect home life and to separate themselves from Gentile society. In Borough Park or Williamsburg, in Monsey or Kiryas Joel, Yiddish is the language of childhood, of family, of casual communication and conversation. There can be no “return” if one was always there, but speaking Yiddish still fosters a connection to an ancestry and heritage in Eastern Europe infused with the holiness of their great rabbis. Even Hasidic Jews, when they speak Yiddish, engage in a type of return and renewal.
In similar ways, Yiddish has become a vehicle for ba’alei tshuva, who did not grow up observant, to join the Orthodox community. Scholars like Sara Bunin Benor have documented the adoption and use of Yiddish phrases and words by Orthodox and newly Orthodox Jews in their daily speech as a way to strengthen their particular type of Jewish identity. Although the meaning of “ba’al tshuva” refers to religion, there is also a return to a Yiddish or “Yinglish” vernacular that often accompanies a shift to a more spiritual and observant lifestyle.
But for others Yiddish can be something that connects them to a family or a personal history that was unwelcoming or suffocating. Nevertheless, these individuals who have left the strictures of Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox communities might have poor English skills (more so for men than women) and feel more comfortable expressing themselves or socializing in Yiddish, but without the burdens of their former communities. This phenomenon, often referred colloquially as going “off the derekh [path],” has, in recent years, been receiving more attention in popular Jewish and secular presses. Organizations like Footsteps have been established to help those who choose to leave with the resources and assistance necessary to acclimatize to the secular world. Many of those individuals have written best-selling memoirs like Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox and Leah Vincent’s Cut Me Loose that explore their personal struggles with leaving the Hasidic community. In this sense, a place like Yiddish Farm, which brings together secular, religious, and ultra-Orthodox Yiddish speakers, grants those who have left the Hasidic fold a place to “return” to the comforts of their mother tongue in a safer and more welcoming environment.
As Isaac Bashevis Singer, the famous 20th century Yiddish writer, once said: “Yiddish is the language of us all.” Indeed, at Yiddish Farm, people from all across the Jewish spectrum (and non-Jews as well) come together to speak a common language despite all of their often monumental ideological and religious differences. It is hard to find a place where a Bobover Hasid can speak (relatively) comfortably about religion with an atheist. In different ways, each of these groups engage with Yiddish through a prism of return and renewal.
Despite the pervasiveness of the themes of renewal, regeneration, and return, a visitor to Yiddish Farm would not be likely to hear such words in class or in the fields. If a project of Yiddish “revival” is motivating its proprietors, they keep it well hidden. Other Yiddish-centered venues might hit you over the head with ideology and dry “academese,” but Yiddish Farm is deliberately and earnestly unselfconscious, instead focusing on sociability, education, and agriculture with the occasional lecture on Hasidism, Jewish history, organic farming, or linguistics. After a day or two on the farm, speaking and hearing the language ceases to be a kitschy novelty or anthropological curiosity. The words “schlep,” “oy vey,” “chutzpah,” or “farklempt” begin to shed their vaudevillian costume they acquired with years spent in the American comedic repertoire. In this small plot of land in New York’s Orange County, Yiddish functions as a living language. Any talk about a “Yiddish revival” is left to the journalist eager to coin a catchy headline, as committed Yiddishists as well as scholars generally eschew such a characterization. The only talk of recycling or renewal would be about composting or next year’s garlic harvest. But Yiddish Farm is nevertheless constantly engaged in acts of revival.
This realization hit me full force on a Saturday night, during a raucous and ecstatic four-hour song-and-dance session. The main room was filled with the students, teachers, and many guests who had just spent shabbos together. With a few guitars, a piano, a violin, and a dozen or so hoarse voices, we sung and stamped our feet to the rousing, mournful, moving, and humorous songs that make up the Yiddish musical repertoire. During a particularly energetic version of “Vos vet zayn,” an old Hasidic song about the Great Feast during the messianic era, an extended instrumental interlude between the verses about King David’s harp-playing and Aaron’s priestly blessing inspired two young men to get up and dance. Aside from their erratic fervor, there would be little extraordinary to mention. But this was the traditional Hasidic wedding dance knows as “tkhies hameysim” [resurrection of the dead], in which the two dancers fight, one of them “dies,” and then the living revives the dead and the frantic dancing continues. Like the song’s messianic setting, the title of dance refers to the traditional Jewish belief of the resurrection of the dead upon the messiah’s arrival.
At first glance, this seems like a clever way to incorporate the themes of the song into a dance – and that is probably what it was intended to portray. A second glance might prod one to dig deeper and conjure an analogy between the dance – reviving the dead – and everything that we were doing at Yiddish Farm with “reviving” a language. But a third, more nuanced look reveals much more. Just as Yiddish is not truly a dead language, the play-acting dancer was not actually dead. The language, like the dancer, was alive the entire time.
Many an opinionated Yiddishist (though I have yet to meet one who isn’t will adamantly tell yo that you can’t revive a language that was never dead to begin with. But what this dance reveals, and what an agricultural calendar will tell you, is that life works in cycles. Nothing can grow in the winter among cold, muddy fields, but spring and summer reveal a golden-brown expanse of a bountiful wheat harvest. Isaac Bashevis Singer, upon receiving his Nobel Prize, remarked that “Yiddish has not yet spoken its last word.” Yiddish Farm stands for nothing more or less.
// MAX DANIEL is a senior in the GS/JTS Joint Program and Editor in Chief of The Current. He can be reached at med2181@columbia.org. Photo by author.
What is Yiddish Farm? A simple answer is that it’s exactly what it sounds like – a farm where the spoken language is Yiddish, the thousand year-old vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews. Today, Yiddish is spoken by only a small fraction of Jews, mostly among the elderly and Hasidic communities. A more complex and layere answer touches on Jewish territorialism, Enlightenment, Yiddishism and other Jewish socio-political movements, the organic farming movement, the booming Hasidic populations in the nearby communities of Kiryas Joel and Monsey, the ba’al tshuva trend (literally “masters of repentance or return,” those who decide to adopt a dedicated observant Jewish lifestyle), and the steady stream of people leaving the ultra-Orthodox fold. An abstract answer would suggest that the farm is a site of perpetual rebirth, a living analogy between Jewish history and agriculture. However one chooses to answer the question, what the farm says about itself is a good place to start.
* * *
After entering a dirt road, overcoming a few bumps and exposed tree roots, and passing the bilingual sign, you’ll approach the modest main house with its empty grain silo, old well, and henhouse. If the fog isn’t too thick, you can glimpse the rolling hills and the grazing sheep in the distance. On the porch, there’s a board nailed to one of the wooden beams that reads, in Yiddish, “makht zikh heimish” [make it homey], recalling poet Ezra Pound’s famous Modernist assertion to “make it new.” This informal slogan encompasses both the farm’s project to reach back to a traditional Jewish vernacular and agricultural life, while simultaneously adopting a modern modality. At its bare minimum, Yiddish Farm is another branch of the vast project of modern Jewry, one that has been trying to reconcile tradition and modernity for the past two hundred years.
Revealing its European roots, the farm’s declaration – which acts as a sort of practical manifesto - hangs framed in the front anteroom of the main house, next to a newspaper clipping from the Yiddish Forverts and some informational brochures about ticks and bugs. It’s the first thing you’ll see upon entering, and the deliberate placement is a reminder to all visitors that, indeed, you’ve crossed a threshold beyond which Yiddish is the lingua franca. The ornate script, like that found in a traditional torah scroll, outlines in Yiddish the key tenets of the farm: nurturing a living and spoken Yiddish, promoting contact between Hasidic and secular Jews, and committing to organic farming and cultivating a respect for the environment. Everything on the farm is done with these often overlapping goals in mind. The directness and explicitness of Yiddish Farm’s stated aims – they are things that can be directly measured and observed – also help ensure the project’s success and bolster participants’ enthusiasm and support. Below those three bullet points, you’ll see a few dozen signatures with names that those familiar with today’s Yiddishist circles would be expected to know. If you can’t already read the declaration or recognize the names, it’s certain that by the time you finish one of the farm’s various programs you’ll at least be able to parse some of the Yiddish text and to say that you’ve makh-ed a l’khayim [make a toast/have a drink] with some of the undersigned.
While the farm’s flagship program takes place in the summer (with more emphasis on farming), it offers language immersion programs throughout the year along with other themed sessions. Additionally, the farm opens its doors on Shabbat to a variety of guests, friends, and family of the owners, secular and Hasidic alike. At Yiddish Farm, the language is not learned for use in a dusty archive, but absorbed and spoken in the fields, kitchens, and bungalows. Here songs are sung, jokes made, private asides whispered, gossip spread, recipes shared, stories told, friends made, histories recounted, and politics debated exclusively in Yiddish.
* * *
Any student of Talmud will tell you that the key to working out the multiple meanings and interpretations of a certain passage is often discovered in going back and forth over the text, turning it over and over. In traditional models of Jewish education, repetition and learning by rote is the norm. While the Yiddish classes at the farm were much more engaging than what one might have found in an Eastern European heder [traditional religious elementary school], repetition is still key to learning any language. However, learning Yiddish engages in a much grander project that includes generations of its speakers and puts the learner at the beginning of the next cycle. The historical sweep of Yiddish is an appealing part for many Yiddish students, who are often motivated by their older Yiddish-speaking relatives who are seen as possessing a vanishing and invaluable cultural and literary asset. For many people, learning Yiddish is a way to “return” to their ancestral past.
For the Hasidic Jews who grow up with and continue to speak Yiddish as their daily vernacular, the language is a tool to protect home life and to separate themselves from Gentile society. In Borough Park or Williamsburg, in Monsey or Kiryas Joel, Yiddish is the language of childhood, of family, of casual communication and conversation. There can be no “return” if one was always there, but speaking Yiddish still fosters a connection to an ancestry and heritage in Eastern Europe infused with the holiness of their great rabbis. Even Hasidic Jews, when they speak Yiddish, engage in a type of return and renewal.
In similar ways, Yiddish has become a vehicle for ba’alei tshuva, who did not grow up observant, to join the Orthodox community. Scholars like Sara Bunin Benor have documented the adoption and use of Yiddish phrases and words by Orthodox and newly Orthodox Jews in their daily speech as a way to strengthen their particular type of Jewish identity. Although the meaning of “ba’al tshuva” refers to religion, there is also a return to a Yiddish or “Yinglish” vernacular that often accompanies a shift to a more spiritual and observant lifestyle.
But for others Yiddish can be something that connects them to a family or a personal history that was unwelcoming or suffocating. Nevertheless, these individuals who have left the strictures of Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox communities might have poor English skills (more so for men than women) and feel more comfortable expressing themselves or socializing in Yiddish, but without the burdens of their former communities. This phenomenon, often referred colloquially as going “off the derekh [path],” has, in recent years, been receiving more attention in popular Jewish and secular presses. Organizations like Footsteps have been established to help those who choose to leave with the resources and assistance necessary to acclimatize to the secular world. Many of those individuals have written best-selling memoirs like Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox and Leah Vincent’s Cut Me Loose that explore their personal struggles with leaving the Hasidic community. In this sense, a place like Yiddish Farm, which brings together secular, religious, and ultra-Orthodox Yiddish speakers, grants those who have left the Hasidic fold a place to “return” to the comforts of their mother tongue in a safer and more welcoming environment.
As Isaac Bashevis Singer, the famous 20th century Yiddish writer, once said: “Yiddish is the language of us all.” Indeed, at Yiddish Farm, people from all across the Jewish spectrum (and non-Jews as well) come together to speak a common language despite all of their often monumental ideological and religious differences. It is hard to find a place where a Bobover Hasid can speak (relatively) comfortably about religion with an atheist. In different ways, each of these groups engage with Yiddish through a prism of return and renewal.
Despite the pervasiveness of the themes of renewal, regeneration, and return, a visitor to Yiddish Farm would not be likely to hear such words in class or in the fields. If a project of Yiddish “revival” is motivating its proprietors, they keep it well hidden. Other Yiddish-centered venues might hit you over the head with ideology and dry “academese,” but Yiddish Farm is deliberately and earnestly unselfconscious, instead focusing on sociability, education, and agriculture with the occasional lecture on Hasidism, Jewish history, organic farming, or linguistics. After a day or two on the farm, speaking and hearing the language ceases to be a kitschy novelty or anthropological curiosity. The words “schlep,” “oy vey,” “chutzpah,” or “farklempt” begin to shed their vaudevillian costume they acquired with years spent in the American comedic repertoire. In this small plot of land in New York’s Orange County, Yiddish functions as a living language. Any talk about a “Yiddish revival” is left to the journalist eager to coin a catchy headline, as committed Yiddishists as well as scholars generally eschew such a characterization. The only talk of recycling or renewal would be about composting or next year’s garlic harvest. But Yiddish Farm is nevertheless constantly engaged in acts of revival.
This realization hit me full force on a Saturday night, during a raucous and ecstatic four-hour song-and-dance session. The main room was filled with the students, teachers, and many guests who had just spent shabbos together. With a few guitars, a piano, a violin, and a dozen or so hoarse voices, we sung and stamped our feet to the rousing, mournful, moving, and humorous songs that make up the Yiddish musical repertoire. During a particularly energetic version of “Vos vet zayn,” an old Hasidic song about the Great Feast during the messianic era, an extended instrumental interlude between the verses about King David’s harp-playing and Aaron’s priestly blessing inspired two young men to get up and dance. Aside from their erratic fervor, there would be little extraordinary to mention. But this was the traditional Hasidic wedding dance knows as “tkhies hameysim” [resurrection of the dead], in which the two dancers fight, one of them “dies,” and then the living revives the dead and the frantic dancing continues. Like the song’s messianic setting, the title of dance refers to the traditional Jewish belief of the resurrection of the dead upon the messiah’s arrival.
At first glance, this seems like a clever way to incorporate the themes of the song into a dance – and that is probably what it was intended to portray. A second glance might prod one to dig deeper and conjure an analogy between the dance – reviving the dead – and everything that we were doing at Yiddish Farm with “reviving” a language. But a third, more nuanced look reveals much more. Just as Yiddish is not truly a dead language, the play-acting dancer was not actually dead. The language, like the dancer, was alive the entire time.
Many an opinionated Yiddishist (though I have yet to meet one who isn’t will adamantly tell yo that you can’t revive a language that was never dead to begin with. But what this dance reveals, and what an agricultural calendar will tell you, is that life works in cycles. Nothing can grow in the winter among cold, muddy fields, but spring and summer reveal a golden-brown expanse of a bountiful wheat harvest. Isaac Bashevis Singer, upon receiving his Nobel Prize, remarked that “Yiddish has not yet spoken its last word.” Yiddish Farm stands for nothing more or less.
// MAX DANIEL is a senior in the GS/JTS Joint Program and Editor in Chief of The Current. He can be reached at med2181@columbia.org. Photo by author.