QUESTION: My family and I spend a part of each year in Israel . Although we are beginning to feel at home with spoken Hebrew , it remains rather basic, and we feel ill at ease in the Liberal Jewish services which we have attended. We would like to establish a service which will use English . That effort has been discouraged by various individuals who felt that this was inappropriate in Israel and that it would hurt the Liberal movement in Israel . May we use a service which contains a considerable amount of English in Israel ? (Norman Miller, Tel Aviv , Israel )"
ANSWER: Problems with the lack of familiarity with Hebrew are very ancient. Ezra had to explain the Torah to the exiles who returned from Babylon(Neh. 8:7). The Torah and other sections of the Bible were subsequently translated into Aramaic as well as
Greek so they could be properly understood.
We find some discussion of the language to be used in prayers both in the Mishnah and the Talmud . Permission to recite basic prayers in the vernacular was granted quite early(M Sotah 7.1; 32bff). Such decisions in favor of the vernacular were carried into all the great codifications of Jewish law(Yad Hil Qeriat Shema 2.10; Tur and Shulhan Arukh Orah Hayim 62;101). In addition to this, of course, many devotional volumes and books of women's prayers were written in the vernacular throughout the Middle Ages (Solomon B. Freehof ,“Devotional Literature in the Vernacular, Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook, Vol. 33, pp380ff). Reform prayer books began to use the vernacular in Europe and in the United States . The earliest such liturgy is the Charleston , South Carolina , prayer book of 1824. We have continued to use the
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