British author Adam Jacot de Boinod spent five years researching over seven hundred dictionaries from different languages, culminating in a book titled, The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World.

His findings suggest that a nation’s dictionary says more about its culture than does its guidebook.

Indeed, you can tell a lot about a people by analyzing the prevalence and prominence of certain words in their language.

For example, Hawaiians have sixty-five words to describe fishing nets, one hundred eight words for sweet potato, forty-two for sugarcane, and forty-seven for bananas, all staples of a Hawaiian diet. In Albania, where there is a fascination with facial hair, there are twenty-seven words to describe mustaches and another twenty-seven for eyebrows. And in Persian there are numerous words to describe recalcitrant camels, including, for example, nakhur, a Persian word meaning “a camel that gives no milk until her nostrils are tickled.”

Notably, in the same way that Inuits have many words to describe the subtle differences between different types and textures of snow, the Talmud employs a wide range of words to describe different types and categories of inquiry, reflecting the centrality of asking questions in Jewish culture and tradition.

Another telling example about Jewish culture is the fact that there are many words in Hebrew that describe joy and happiness.1 To name a few, there are sason, simchah, gilah, rinah, ditzah, chedvah, and tzahalah, each of which describe a different shade of joy, from spontaneous joy (gal means wave) to the kind of exuberant joy expressed in song (rinah) and dance (ditzah), as well as the bittersweet joy that is tinged with sadness (sason), such as when a parent walks their child down the aisle.

As is evidenced by the numerous, nuanced descriptions of joy in Hebrew, despite the many humorous stereotypes to the contrary, Jewish people take their joy very seriously.

This brings us to an ancient question vigorously debated over millennia: Does the language we use merely express our worldview and values, or does it shape them?

Do the words we use merely convey our thoughts and emotions, or do they influence the way we think and feel?

As a growing body of research suggests, language does more than communicate our perception of reality, it creates it.

Indeed, according to Professor Lera Boroditzky,2 a cognitive scientist who specializes in the fields of language and cognition:

“One of the key advances in recent years has been the demonstration of precisely this causal link [between language and perception]. It turns out that if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world. When bilingual people switch from one language to another, they start thinking differently, too.”

In the words of Charlemagne: “To have a second language is to have a second soul.”

Boroditzky offers numerous examples3 to showcase just how vital a role language plays in shaping the way we view and interface with the world around us.

For instance, in Pormpuraaw, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, there are no words for “left” or “right.” Instead, Indigenous Australians speak only in terms of cardinal directions (north, south, east, west). If one wants to tell a friend that they have an ant on their pants, one would say something like, “There’s an ant on your southwest leg.” Hello in Pormpuraaw would translate more accurately as, “Which direction are you going?” If you don’t know which way is which, you may find yourself stuck, both conversationally and physically.

“About a third of the world’s languages rely on absolute directions for space,” writes Boroditzky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes. They perform navigational feats scientists once thought were beyond human capabilities.”

Yet people rely on spatial knowledge for much more than geographic orientation; it helps with time management, mathematics, musical pitch, interpersonal relations, and even causality.

For example, Boroditzky points out that in English, events are most often described in terms of agents doing things. English speakers will say things like, “John broke the vase,” even if it was by accident. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would say, “The vase broke,” omitting the guilty party.

These linguistic differences have acute consequences in terms of the speaker’s view of cause and effect, and the role that agency plays. This, in turn, affects the blame and accountability of those involved,4 even within the criminal justice system itself.

Since English sentence structures focus on agents and causality, American justice emphasizes finding and punishing the perpetrator rather than aiding the victim.

Beyond the above examples, linguistic patterns have also been shown to shape perception and thought, to fascinating ends. The Russian language’s many descriptors for shades of blue enables its speakers to better visually identify those colors. The Piraha, an Amazonian tribe in Brazil, use a language that favors terms like “few” and “many” rather than exact numbers. This results in a lower ability to keep track of precise quantities.5

“Likewise,” according to Professor Antonio Benítez-Burraco,6 “the way people think about time is encoded deeply in the grammar of most languages. In some languages, like English, time is tripartite: past, present, and future. However, in a language like Yimas, spoken in New Guinea, there are four types of pasts, from recent events to remote past.” On the other extreme, “there are languages like Chinese that lack grammatical tense” altogether.

The Pormpuraawans of Australia tell time according to the sun’s daily journey from east to west. Mandarin centers time around gravity, so that when something falls, the past is where it was—above—and the future is where it will be—below. The South American dialect of Aymara uses basic human reasoning: What’s in front of us is the past, since it’s already known, and what’s behind us is the future, the unknown.

In sum, the patterns, structures, and particular words used in each language not only offer a window into a culture’s sensibilities, dispositions, and priorities, they help shape them, as well.

Hence the title of this book: The People of the Word: Fifty Words That Shaped Jewish Thinking.

In the pages that follow, we aim to provide insight into fifty key Hebrew words and the big ideas embedded in their etymology, which have helped shape Jewish thought and values, and, in many instances, have led to measurable, real-world impact.

For example, one could argue that the emphasis on happiness and joy in the Hebrew language and Jewish tradition (as mentioned above and elucidated in the chapter titled, “Simcha” (page 3)) has contributed to the phenomenon that, according to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index,7 Jews score the highest of any faith and non-faith group in the US when it comes to happiness and well-being.

One could also posit, as did Nobel Prize winner Robert Aumann during a conversation I had with him while researching this book, that the great emphasis in Jewish tradition and culture on scholarship, curiosity, critical thinking, and tikkun olam (as elucidated in the entries on “Rav” and “Chochmah” see page 53 and 101) have led to the disproportionate representation of Jewish people among Nobel Prize winners.8

A final example of the link between the Jewish way of thinking, speaking, and behaving can be drawn between the Hebrew word tzedakah, often mistranslated as charity, and its true meaning as elucidated in Chapter 13.

If, as Salman Rushdie once said, “A culture can be defined by its untranslatable words,” the word and concept of tzedakah has much to teach about the unique Jewish understanding and culture of giving.

To quote R. Lord Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory: “The Hebrew word tzedakah is untranslatable because it means both charity and justice. Those two words repel one another in English, because if I give you a hundred pounds because I owe you a hundred pounds, that’s justice. But if I give you a hundred pounds because I think you need a hundred pounds, that’s charity. It’s either one or the other, but not both. Whereas in Hebrew, tzedakah means both justice and charity. There’s no word for just charity in Hebrew. Giving is something you have to do.”

According to author Paul Vallely, who spent six years researching the history of Western philanthropy, from the ancient Greeks and Jews to modern times, culminating in a book titled, Philanthropy: from Aristotle to Zuckerberg9 :

“It is, therefore, perhaps no coincidence that throughout the history of philanthropy, Jews have been consistently generous givers, and disproportionately so. A survey in Britain in 2019 showed that ninety-three percent of British Jews gave to charity compared with fifty-seven percent of the rest of the population. In the Sunday Times Giving List in 2014, more than twelve percent of the most charitable givers were Jewish, though Jews constitute less than half of one percent of the UK population according to the last census.”

In the US, as well, Jews give charity in quantities far disproportionate to their numbers.10

For example, in 2010, nineteen of the top fifty-three US donors recorded in The Chronicle of Philanthropy were Jewish, including five of the list’s top six.11

The point of the above examples and observations is not to suggest that Jews are naturally happier, smarter, and kinder, but that Jewish culture, as shaped and molded over the millennia by the Jewish ideas and values expressed in the Hebrew language, provides a universal paradigm shifting toolkit and template that can be emulated by all.

More than merely a thought-provoking read, we hope this book, like the fifty words upon which it is based, will inspire readers to concrete action that reflects their highest ideals and values.

To conclude where we began, in case you were wondering about the meaning of the word Tingo, mentioned at the beginning of this introduction: Tingo is an invaluable word from the Pascuense language of Easter Island (near Chile) meaning “to borrow objects from a friend’s house, one by one, until there’s nothing left.”

And this, dear friend, perfectly describes the way we’d like this book to be read. We invite you to borrow these words, one by one, and make them your own—in thought, word, and deed.

Mendel Kalmenson
London, 2022