Language

One word of warning, I am not guaranteeing the correct spelling of all these words. In some cases they are probably more phonetic than otherwise. But I did want to give you a flavor of some everyday Hebrew terms.

Shalom - Yeah, I know, everyone knows this one, meaning "peace". But it gets used very often in everyday conversation to the point where it means "hi", "how are you", "welcome", not just "peace".

Bokur Tov - "good morning"!!! and the correct response is Bokur Or - basically "back at ya"

Haval Al Hasman - "what a waste of time" - spoken with a lot of hand gestures and inferring a lot of sarcasm

Lila Tov - "good night"

Eza Balagan - "what a mess" - also a lot of hand gestures and sarcasm:)

Aliya - "ascent" - refers to a person's first visit to Israel/Jerusalem. Since Jerusalem is built on a hill, the word implies a great deal of physical and spiritual effort to make the journey, climbing the hill, that sort of thing. In many ways, this is my favorite expression. Reading the Psalms now makes so much more sense when you see the words "I will go up to Jerusalem to the house of God.

Obviously we were exposed to a lot more than these few words but I found these to be the most significant. In general, however, language was never a problem while we were in Israel; most people were fluent in Hebrew and English. Quite a difference from here in the USA where we seem to insist that visitors ought to speak "our" language and not that we should have to learn theirs.