Confessions of a Mexican-American speaking Hebrew. Every so often people ask why I occasionally pronounce certain things different in our Hebrew prayers. Some of them are obvious, being inspired by kabbalistic and chassidic prayerbook texts I am accustomed to since my youth. Others are more curious, but those too are also artifacts of my early Jewish education. For instance while saying kiddush, unless Im reading from a book and concentrating, my natural tendency is to say the blessing for wine, “boray pri haGEFEN,” as opposed to “haGAFEN.” The simple answer is that I became accustomed to a Sephardi-Mizrahi (Spanish and Middle-Eastern) pronunciation real early, as opposed to following strict biblical grammar as seen in the Ashkenzai tradition (Eastern European). Many of the books I learned from and that appealed to me as a Latino Jew were books I got from Mexico. Most often these bilingual Spanish-Hebrew books were published by people who were Sephardic Mizrahim; mostly often Syrian or even Lebanese Jews. These Mizrahim are very numerous and influential in the Mexican Jewish community, thus they produce the majority of the books in the region. Likewise most of my Sephardic siddurim from Israel follow this form. I asked my Rabbi what she thought about this, because I not so infrequently make this slip up. I dont want to be out of form. And I notice that sometimes other Mexicans do this as well. She said that its a real miracle we can speak the same language at all, so its fine. We all do have our own customs we bring. Hear this explained by the wonderful Rabbi Juan Mejia in Spanish, as he teaches us about different customs of saying Kiddush:
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 05:35:59 +0000