Parents and Teachers

 

So there I was, in shul, quietly listening to the Torah portion’s being read. Jesse called me over.

“Dan, I know this is about last week’s parsha, but can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” I said, “you can always ask.”

Jesse pointed out Sh’mot, 35:34 which reads “וּלְהוֹרֹ֖ת נָתַ֣ן בְּלִבּ֑וֹ” (ul’horot, natan b’lebo). The Artscroll translation has “He gave him the ability to teach.” Jesse saw that “natan b’leebo” means “gave in his heart” which would indicate the ability, and wanted to confirm the “l’horot” is the word for “teach.”

I agreed.

“Why?” He asked.

The easiest answer would be to say “the Chizkuni explains that it means ‘to give instructions to others’ so that’s what it means” but I doubt Jesse would have been satisfied with that. He asked me, not the Chizkuni. He might have previously asked the Chizkuni, I don’t know. He has a life outside shul so anything could have happened. At that moment, though, he was asking me.

I pointed out that l’horot is the same root as the word for teacher in Hebrew, morah/moreh. He seemed satisfied. But, nooooooo, I couldn’t stop there, so in the grand tradition, I made something else up.

“Seems to me,” I started, “that the word for teaching, like a moreh, a teacher, is connected to the word for parents, horim, because a teacher is exegetically considered a parent figure.” I was actually on solid ground with this one, at least the latter part about a teacher as parent. See here https://rosends.blogspot.com/2022/02/honoring-parents-under-law.html for more. But the etymological connection? I had no idea – which is fine, if Jesse hadn’t been the inquisitive type.

“Did you already study that?” He asked.

“No,” I explained, “I just made it up.”

He smiled and said “Well, there’s a dvar Torah for you to write.” So here I am.

So I did some digging trying to establish some sort of connection between the words for teach and for parent and I’m here to report my findings.

My first step was to look in the Aramaic and see if similar words are used by Onkelos. It turns out that the word used for “and she conceived” (Bereisheet 4:1) is vatahar and in Aramaic, ועדיאת v’adee’at, while the word for l’horot is ולאלפא u’l’alafa. Now, already I was intrigued because the act of physical union is based on the y-d-ayin root which also refers to “knowing” and the word for “becoming pregnant” is “conceive” so there is an intellectual aspect to that event. Teaching seems to work well with that.

Next up, I started looking to see if the roots overlap.

For l’horot, the Sefaria website starts with the Open Bible (via Github) which traces the root to y-r-h, meaning to throw or cast, to point, show or teach. The teacher is putting the curricular material out there, as it were. The same reference source on Sefaria has vatahar starting with the root h-r-h meaning to become pregnant, contrive or devise. So that is about keeping the intellectual property internal or at least, just conceptual.

I ran home. OK, ambled. And pulled out a couple of etymological dictionaries. Ernest Klein’s A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language has the h-r-h root (conceive, become pregnant) from the Akkadian eru (to conceive), and the Ugaritic hry (conceive) but also hr – conception. The derivatives include herayon (pregnancy) and horim, parents. https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.4.1?ven=The_Contemporary_Torah,_Jewish_Publication_Society,_2006&vhe=Miqra_according_to_the_Masorah&lang=bi&lookup=%D7%95%D6%B7%D7%AA%D6%BC%D6%B7%D6%99%D7%94%D6%B7%D7%A8%D6%99&with=Radak&lang2=en&p3=Klein_Dictionary%2C_%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%94.1&ven3=Carta_Jerusalem%3B_1st_edition,_1987&lang3=en

For the y-r-h root he has what you would expect, all sorts of “throw, cast, shoot” words and then a secondary possibility of a connection to the Arabic “rawa(y) he handed down” which would lead to teaching. Interesting but not conclusive.

Over to Matityahu Clark’s Etymological Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew https://books.google.com/books?id=eVAAfn6Itb4C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false . For h-r-h he has “implant and absorb seed” so that accounts for definition 1, “becoming pregnant.” But definition two is “teaching: implanting seeds of knowledge.” EXCLAMATION POINT. A direct connection between parenting and teaching, right there. I might have made it up, but clearly, I did not make it up!

Strangely, or not so strangely – I don’t judge, in his entry for y-r-h Clark makes all the connections to throwing and casting but says absolutely nothing about teaching, as if he doesn’t see this as the root for teaching at all. That idea only comes from the parenting word.

But I wasn’t satisfied with just being right; I wanted to add more to the idea. So I thought about the Aramaic words again. The word for pregnancy is ועדיאת so I looked up possible Aramaic words in Jastrow. My Aramaic is incomplete especially as it relates to grammar and while this might hamper one of any sort of integrity, it frees me up to make connections which the scholar might dismiss. So connect, I did. Jastrow (page 1043 http://www.tyndalearchive.com/TABS/Jastrow// ) has the Aramaic word derived from the root for “pass by,” “remove” or “carry” which lead to the woman carrying a fetus. But the source letters of ayin-dalet are the root for “proof” or “witness.” The pregnancy is proof of something. Jastrow has the root of alafa meaning “to join” and “to train” (there, page 72). The root is also the same one as the word for “thousand”. To train others is to increase knowledge from one person to more than one.

This process of growth, from being a parent (proving that you can pass along your genetic material, in most cases, to one other person) to teachers (who increase knowledge substantially and in most cases, to many) also seems to be present in the injunction repeated in Pirkei Avot. In both 1:6 and 1:16 we are commanded to “aseh lecha rav” establish for yourself a teacher. But what is the word for “teacher”? Rav, which also means “many.” We are told that we need to make our singular knowledge more widespread – we have to join others and increase information. The teacher casts information out for all, expanding on the parent who only produces a limited number of witnesses.

So, to answer you, Jesse, the concepts of parents and teachers are very inter-related and the logical link goes beyond just an overlapping etymology into an intellectual progression making the internal external and the local, universal. We can’t keep it to ourselves to we have experts who make sure that it gets out there.