On a Friday night in July, I and three other American Jewish college students assembled for Shabbat services and a kosher dinner. But this night was different from all other nights. For amid the formal Hebrew prayers and familiar tunes, we spoke to each other only in Arabic. “Sabaat Salaam,” we greeted each other at the service’s conclusion. Shabbat Shalom.
The two months I spent this summer studying and speaking only Arabic through the Middlebury Arabic Language Institute in California were full of such seemingly strange occurrences. But having pledged along with 180 other students of all ages and backgrounds to speak, read and listen only to Arabic, situations like this quickly became the new norm.
At night, exhausted from my studies, I often fell asleep asking myself, “Why, of all places, are you here, at the secluded campus of Mills College in northern California, on an Arabic language immersion program?” I would remind myself that the Middlebury program is very renowned for its teaching. I would reassure myself about my interest in the Middle East and my desire to master Modern Standard Arabic, the language of the media and basis of all contemporary Arabic dialects. I would recall the frustration of people who routinely responded to me in English at my first linguistic error when I studied in Jordan. And I would remember the beauty and joy of my sister’s June wedding, the timing of which made it impractical to study abroad this summer.
So it was that, as revolutions raged across the Arab world, I awoke each morning to the California sun and watched the Arab spring turn to summer live streaming through BBC Arabic or al-Jazeera online. Then I sat in my always-chilly Arabic class for four hours, studying patterns for declining verbs with weak stems and complicated rules for number-noun agreements that most Arabs themselves do not even know. At lunch-time, the Arabic students crowded the salaat al-ta’am (cafeteria), where, amid such options as gluten-free beef and mushroom risotto patties, we tried to hold sincere conversations while using obscure vocabulary words from the omnipresent al-Kitaab textbook. Later we entered Wajib-stan, or land of homework, as we called it. Within this self-contained world we developed our own Arabic dialect, infused with words like shuks, short for shukran (thank you) and an Americanized accent that sometimes made our highly-regarded professors’ cringe. Though intentionally disconnected from the English-speaking world, I nonetheless continued to scan the English news, lest the debt ceiling collapse without me ever hearing about it.
But I knew I was not the only person asking the “Why here?” question. Moreover, this time I was not the only Jew on the program with a Jewish day school or religious upbringing. Having studied Arabic in Jordan and traveled in Syria and Israel/Palestine, I have sometimes struggled to express to non-Jewish peers what I feel when I confront the words, places, tastes and tunes of my childhood as actors in another’s narrative. On one level my summer studies were a very isolating experience devoid of the constant opportunities for cultural exploration that life abroad affords. Yet, in another sense, I came to appreciate that I was one among many at Middlebury at Mills.
I sensed this most acutely one day when my class watched a clip from BBC Arabic on economic problems among Haredi, or ultra-religious, Israeli Jews. Knowing that I have studied Hebrew, my professor asked me to write the word Haredi for the class in both Arabic and Hebrew. And so there I found myself standing before the white board with 12 years of Jewish education, drawing a complete blank. In that moment, I could not remember how to write the Hebrew letter chet, the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets merging in my mind into one indiscernible hodge-podge of paralysis. Caught up in my linguistic confusion, I helplessly turned to a classmate who was also a day school graduate and unintentionally asked for his help in Hebrew. He smiled in solidarity as if to say, “We’ve all been there.”
But other days, these two worlds flowed together more effortlessly. After lunch I joined two other day school graduates, one from my own Philadelphia area, for an hour of Palestinian colloquial, or amiyaa, class. Our class of three was unusually small and it was our Professor’s intellect and wit that made the experience so worthwhile. Intentionally non-politicized, class felt more like a conversation among companions who know that they may never have met this way had lives aligned differently. One day we left the isolation of Mills campus for lunch at a Middle Eastern restaurant in a nearby town. As one of the three students kept strictly kosher, we found ourselves at the only suitable place, an Israeli-owned restaurant called Holy Land. Immediate language confusion ensued. But committed to our language pledge, we sat together at a table outside, broke pita together, and tried to act as if this was like any other day. It was good. In a way, the falafel and hummus and shawarma the restaurant offered were like us—trying to remain ourselves wherever we go.
So while I often awoke still wondering why I was on an Arabic language immersion program in northern California, I found that I benefited from this experience in more ways than just my much-improved Arabic skills. Of course, studying Arabic removed from the Arabic-speaking world is a very different experience than studying the language in its natural environment. And of course, all students—intentionally or not—broke the language pledge at one time or another. But left alone for two months in our little sanctuary, we Middlebury at Mills students created for ourselves a personal comfort zone that can be taken wherever we go next.
Miriam Berger hails from always-sunny Philadelphia and is a senior at Wesleyan University studying Political Science and Arabic. She has studied and traveled in Israel, Jordan, Syria and the Palestinian Territories and just can’t get enough of Baklava. Last year she wrote “The Jews Behind BDS.”
