Pride and prejudice

I learned a funny Hebrew factlet from reading Amos Oz's “Here and there in the land of Israel, Autumn 1982”. I came across a word I didn't know, which happens about five times a minute but this a word I couldn't quite get from the context and I was curious about it. In the book, Amos Oz is going around the country asking people what they think about the future of the country and the occupied territories. It is right at the end of the Lebanon war (the first Lebanon war). Menachem Begin is still Prime Minister. Huge demonstrations have taken place calling for his resignation. I guess it is as the revelations about Sabra and Shatilla are coming out. Anyway, Amos Oz goes to Bet Shemesh, which is today a bedroom community of Jerusalem. In 1982 it was divided, as he describes it, between the new city, which was suburban and Ashkenazi and old Bet Shemesh which is Sephardi, largely Moroccan, and, until recently, quite poor. This is hardcore Begin country. Apparently, a little while before he visited, Shimon Peres had been shouted down at a town-hall meeting there and ended up calling the hecklers “birionim” “thugs” which confirmed all of Bet Shemesh's suspicions that Peres was a prejudiced, effete, Ashkenazi, elitist. Anyway, not long after that along comes Amos Oz, this Ashkenazi, (former) kibbutznik, lefty (at the time) activist writer. And he plunks himself down at a cafe. Somebody recognizes him and pretty soon he's got thirty guys around him telling him “Write this down...” “Tell your friends in the media this....” “Your problem is...” “You should thank God for Begin, get down on your knees and kiss his feet...” “When my parents came from Morocco, you people made them clean toilets...” “Yossi, get the man another soda, and some bourekas...” Anyway, at one point one of the guys says to him, “If you want to fix what you did to us, you need to come and ask for forgiveness, but without 'shachatsanut', forget the 'shachatsanut'.”

It seemed odd to me because the sense seemed to mean 'pride', but Hebrew has a very good word for pride: “gavah”. I remember once at this very religious school I used the term gavah, in its yiddish pronunciation “gayvah” and asked the kids what that meant and one boy, a round little kid with glasses, did a funny stretch of his neck, stuck his nose in the air and said in his snootiest voice, “haughtiness.”

Anyway, I was sitting reading Amos Oz at the Matnas in Baka, the community centre while Benjy was at his Caipoera class. I turned to a lady sitting near me and I said, “What is shachatzanut?”

She said “It's to say that you're better than someone or that you think you're so great.”

“Like 'gavah'?” I asked.

She said, “Well it comes from 'gavah.' But it's negative.”

Then I realized what the issue was. I had even seen it without realizing it in Oz's book, which is in some sense about pride. Gavah, pride in any pre-modern Jewish context is, (I think. Feel free to correct me) always negative. Its opposite is humility which is viewed as a tremendously positive attribute most embodied by no less a figure than Moses. There is no such thing in Jewish religious thought as -- and so no semantic expression for – pride as a positive or even neutral quality. But when Hebrew became a language of daily use again in the context of national revival and Jews wanted to express feelings of positive pride, which they most certainly did, they used gavah, stripping it of its negative connotation (maybe even as a finger in the eye of a religious world-view that saw all pride as a negative). So when people want to say to Amos Oz that they felt proud when Israel won the Six-Day War, or that leftists lack pride in the country, or that Begin restored the pride of the Sephardim, they say “gavah” or something derived from it. But that shift leaves Israeli Hebrew speakers with the problem of how to express negative pride, haughtiness.

Shachatz, the most stripped down form of shachatzanut, seems to have been used mostly in the Jerusalem Talmud and it meant something like a character flaw. Since pridefulness was such a central fault in Jewish religious thinking, the two became identified. “That person has a character flaw,” was understood to mean, “that person is proud.”

There's a joke about a rabbi and a cantor on Yom Kippur in the synagogue. First the Cantor goes before the congregation and turns to the ark where the Torah is kept and cries out in a loud voice, “Oh Lord, forgive me for I am as nothing in your sight” The rabbi, then gets up stands before the ark and says, “Oh Lord forgive me for I am as nothing in your sight.” Yankle Yossef, the butcher is genuinely moved. He runs up to the ark and cries out, “Lord, forgive me for I am as nothing in your sight.” The rabbi turns to the cantor and says, “Oh, ho! Look who thinks he's nothing!”

It is warm here, unseasonably so according to people who live here. Daffodils are flowering. The cyclamens – which I still can't believe actually flower wild anywhere are almost done and as per the song the almond trees are flowering. Pretty much like Montreal.