Words From Rabbi White

Dear Chevra Shaas/Shearith Israel

WHAT DO FOOTBALL, HONEST REAL ESTATE, AND EATING BREAD HAVE IN COMMON?

I happened to think of this question this past Shabbat, while going over last week’s parasha at the Shabbat table. I’ll discuss football first, as the NFL season has begun this week. [Actually, I couldn’t care less about NFL, except that the football analogy will help to visualize my devar Torah. And my apologies to CFL, which began a couple of months ago.]

(#1 football) I remember from my youth: when the visiting team would get perilously close to the end zone, with a touchdown imminent, the home fans would chant “push ‘em back, push ’em back, waaaay back!” That is, the home fans are encouraging their team to cause the visitors to RETREAT. And the Hebrew phrase for ”retreat” is “NASOG AHOR.”

(#2 last week’s parasha: honesty in real estate) At the beginning of the 6th aliya: the Torah says “lo’ tassig gevul re`akha.” Rashi there explained that it is forbidden to push back the boundary of your property, so that it would diminish your neighbour’s property. [In modern times, could you imagine, you go on vacation, and when you return, you find that your neighbours have moved their fence several inches into your property!!] Rashi clarifies the verse in our parasha, by quoting the expression. ”NASOGU AHOR,” from Isaiah 42:17, referring to people who should retreat from embarrassment due to their attraction to idolatry, avodah zarah.

(#3 eating bread) We all know that before eating bread, we make a bracha “ha-motsi’ lechem”, meaning that we thank HaShem, Who brings out bread from the land. The Hebrew word “motsi’” is normally stressed on the last syllable. Grammarians tell us that a word stressed on last syllable is called, in Hebrew grammar lingo, MILRA’.   HOWEVER, when we make the bracha over bread, we stress the next to last syllable, and we say, ha-MOTSi (in fancy english, that is called the penultimate syllable, and in Hebrew MIL`EIL)

Why is that? The answer is that the next word, “lechem,” the word for “bread,” as we all know, is stressed on the first syllable.” No one says leCHEM; we all say LEchem.

So, we see that the word LEchem, with the stress on the first syllable, pushes back the stress on the word MOTSi. When I was younger, I used to call this the “push’em back” affect on the Hebrew language. And, indeed, the grammatical term in Hebrew used for a pushed back stress, is NASOG AHOR.

By the way, the technical word for recessive accent in English is “barytonesis.”

So, we have seen how NASOG AHOR, a concept known to us from football, applies to property and to the blessing over bread.

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If you haven’t said kiddush Levana yet, you have until motsa’ei shabbat to say it. Public prayer in the street is still permissible in Qc, as far as I know.

Shabbat shalom, shalom `al Yisrael, Rabbi Menahem White, Chevra Shaas