“We do not inhabit a country; we inhabit a language.”

Metal Gear Solid V begins with this attributed to Emil Cioran. It captures a truth that I did not fully appreciate until I began learning to pray in Hebrew.

At first, learning Hebrew felt like learning vocabulary. I would encounter a word, find its English equivalent, and move on. Hebrew word. English word. Problem solved. Yet the deeper I went into Jewish prayer, the more I encountered words that seemed resistant to translation. Da’at is usually translated as “knowledge,” but knowledge is not da’at. Teshuvah becomes “repentance,” but repentance is not teshuvah. Chesed is rendered as “lovingkindness,” a term so awkward that translators effectively had to invent a compound word merely to gesture toward the Hebrew.

The problem was not that translators were incompetent. The problem was that translation itself has limits. Every language contains assumptions about reality. Every language carries distinctions, categories, and relationships accumulated over centuries. Words are not merely labels attached to things. They are containers of meaning. They reveal what a culture notices, what it values, and how it organizes experience. As I struggled through Hebrew prayers, I slowly realized that I was not merely learning new words. I was being exposed to another way of understanding reality itself.

Modern people often think of language as a tool. Language allows us to communicate information that already exists in our minds. In this view, words function like labels attached to objects and concepts that are otherwise universal.

Yet this understanding quickly breaks down when one encounters a foreign language at a sufficient depth. Translation is not merely the transfer of information. It is the transfer of meaning between different conceptual worlds. Some ideas move easily. Others do not.

A person can spend years studying Hebrew and still struggle to explain certain concepts adequately in English. This is not because Hebrew is superior to English, nor because English is deficient. Rather, the two languages emerged from different histories and encode different assumptions about reality. Every language notices some things more clearly than........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)