Gender and Hebrew Tattoos

One of the questions in our contact form is about your gender. Of course, we’re aware of how much asking US Americans about their gender is a potentially problematic question in 2023. We have been criticized, ridiculed, corrected, looked down on.

Now, I get it. I create tattoos for Jews. Many of my clients are progressively minded. A progressive myself, I agree with a lot of liberal, reformist ideas. One of those ideas is that gender is a concept not entirely dictated by nature. In other words: a large part of what is often seen as “natural gender” is, in fact, performative. As such, gender performance isn’t eternal, it is important to question it and we will be freer if we avoid accepting traditional gender roles as fixed, permanent and inevitable. And if there’s anything dear to my heart, it’s freedom. 

And yet, male Hebrew wording for a tattoo on a female body isn’t revolutionary. It’s erroneous and misguided. I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine, with the original male term for beloved is not a tattoo suitable for a heterosexual male person. And no amount of “but gender is oppressive!” will fix this. 

To explain this supposed contradiction between my progressive stance on gender and my seemingly conservative opinion on gender in the Hebrew context, we have to recall that one of the beautiful and terrifying things about languages is that it gives us tools to think - but only certain things and only in certain ways. Language silently guides our thought processes. And just like a fish in the water, for which water doesn’t exist, that silent guidance is hardly ever noticeable. 

Ask any multilingual person you may know. Not your friend who took a French class in high school. But that childhood friend who grew up speaking Spanish at home and English on the streets. That coworker who migrated from one culture to another, adapted perfectly and is now fluent in two languages and two cultures. Or even better: a person who speaks three, four, five languages, because they maybe lived in different cultures. If they are truly at home in more than one language, they will tell you how they are a slightly different person in each. 

Or think about great people and their culture. Think about Bach and Wittgenstein. Bach’s music and Wittgenstein’s thoughts would never have been possible without the inherently complex structure of the German language they lived in. But neither could Cortázar or García Márquez ever have been Germans. The German language would have choked the delicacy of their expression.

And so if we compare the “guidance” inherent to Hebrew on one hand and to English on the other, one of the most noticeable differences between the two is the importance gender has in each.

Everything is gendered in Hebrew. People. Of course. And animals. OK. But as well tables and ideas and relationships and cloud formations. And numbers! There are no gender neutral numbers in Hebrew. Gender is everywhere. 

Is someone running? A female person and a male person run differently in Hebrew. One ratz, the other one ratza. Are there 5 apples on a table? Bon Appétit, you have chamisha apples, because apples are male. If it were bananas. It would be chamesh bananas. Because bananas are female. The number five reflects the banana’s gender. Go figure.

Is this cool? It may not be. But it’s a fact. English, on the other hand, is super flexible regarding gender. Even people can sometimes be gender neutral! And yes, that happened already before Gen Z came along.

A good parallel to that omnipresence in the English language may be tenses. Tenses are amazingly specific in English. In Hebrew, you got present, past and future. That’s it. In English, you got all these weird constellations like Future Perfect Progressive. Hardly graspable for a Hebrew speaker! We don’t think in these terms. Quite literally so: a Hebrew speaker will often have a less specific idea of time than an English or a German speaker. 

The same goes for Spanish speakers, but for slightly different reasons: vamos a la playa is significantly more flexible than any sentence you can come up with in English. Is this a prompt? A statement regarding a general present? The future? It’s ambiguous. 

So now imagine a person who just starts learning English and regards these very specific tenses as oppressive. You may laugh now, but believe me, in our current social climate, someone will come up with a reason to be insulted by the concept of time. I will give it a year from now. 

So they decide to use English tenses very loosely. They will say “yesterday, we will have been going to the beach”. Or “later today I was taking a bath”. Going one step further, after a week of daily classes,  they may choose to dismantle the oppressive structures altogether, saying stuff like “I would been like have to wanted of be eaten an ice cream”. 

Is this a revolutionary act? I hardly think so. It’s a failure to properly use the English language. 

It actually could possibly have been a revolutionary act if performed from within. By someone who is intimate enough with the delicate structures of the English language to estimate the impact of a change like the one described above. But simply copying the expectations of a simple, flexible and unspecific concept of tense from their own language into English, without first gaining a profound understanding of the English language can hardly result in anything but messy mistakes. 

And now to my point: the same goes for gender in Hebrew. I’m not against reforming the deeply traditionalist gender structures of the Hebrew language. On the contrary. But this change will come from within. Assuming that the relative gender flexibility the English language offers its user can simply be pasted into a complex, multi layered structure like a 4000 years old language without causing anything but messy mistakes is ignorant and anglocentric. Simply ignoring the fact that the Biblical beloved has a very clear gender isn’t a progressive act. 

It’s more akin to letting go of the driving wheel because you don’t like where your trip is going. Possibly an authentic moment. But probably a somewhat short sighted decision.

Gender and Hebrew Tattoos