The Language of Dreams: What Eliezer Ben-Yehuda Teaches Us About Summer

Let’s talk about a young man sitting in a cafe on the Boulevard Montmartre in Paris in the autumn of 1881, with no idea his life was about to change.

His name was Eliezer Perlman. He was a student at the Sorbonne, far from his childhood home in Lithuania, a yeshiva boy turned secular intellectual. He had a vague dream — something about the Jewish people returning to their land, about belonging somewhere. But it was just a dream. He didn’t have a plan. He was wandering.

And then, over coffee, he started talking to two other Jewish men. Their names were something like Getzel Zelikovitz and Mordechai Adelman — the historical record isn’t entirely sure. What we do know is that the conversation that followed is considered the first modern conversation held in Hebrew. Not the Hebrew of prayers and sacred text. Conversational Hebrew. 

Something clicked into place for Eliezer Perlman that afternoon. He changed his name to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda — “son of Judah” — arrived in Jerusalem that same year, and began the work of bringing a language back to life. No itinerary. Just a vision.

Here is what amazes me most: the people who handed him his life’s calling are people we can barely identify. History didn’t bother to record their names clearly. Two Jewish men, over coffee, on an unremarkable autumn afternoon. And yet that conversation may be one of the most consequential moments in all of modern Jewish history.

BEN YEHUDA & HIS LIFE’S WORK

Ben-Yehuda threw himself into the work of reviving the Hebrew language with holy obsession. He invented modern Hebrew words for dictionary, newspaper, towel, toothbrush, tomato — writing the vocabulary of a new civilization one word at a time, frequently logging eighteen-hour workdays. 

At home, he and his wife made a pact: only Hebrew inside their walls. They raised their son, Ben Zion,  as the first native Hebrew speaker in two thousand years.

But here is the part of the story most people don’t know. The dream almost didn’t make it.

HEBREW VS GERMAN

In 1913, a battle erupted in the Jewish community known as the War of the Languages. 

The German Jewish aid organization Ezra Society was building what would become the Technion — Israel’s great institute of technology in Haifa — and the board of governors decided that instruction would be conducted in German, not Hebrew. 

Their argument wasn’t unreasonable. Hebrew lacked vocabulary for advanced scientific subjects. The Zionist Congresses themselves were conducted in German.

German philanthropists had put serious money into the Jewish future in Palestine. The Ezra Society even described their Technion openly as a “stronghold of German culture in the Holy Land.”

The teachers refused to teach. The students walked out. Ben-Yehuda became one of the loudest voices against the decision.

Hebrew won.

The institution where German almost became the language of Jewish scientific life is today one of the world’s leading research universities. The Technion. Conducted entirely in Hebrew.

The practical voices almost won. The dream survived because enough people refused to let it go.

MIRACLE OF HEBREW LANGUAGE

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a little bit obsessed with Hebrew.

Not just the Hebrew of Torah and prayer, though I love that too. 

I listen to Israeli music constantly — in the car, while I’m cooking, on my walks and runs. 

I watch Israeli television. I follow the slang. 

I have been known to text my nephews urgently when a word stumps me. 

These are young men currently serving in the Israeli army and working in the real world. They have things going on. 

And yet there I am: What does this mean? Is this new slang or have I just been missing it? To their credit, they always answer. Maybe they find it entertaining. Maybe they just know their aunt.

And then there are the words Ben-Yehuda invented, which I find genuinely thrilling. 

He needed a word for newspaper, so he built one from the root meaning “to run swiftly.” He needed a word for dictionary and built it from the word for “word.” He needed a word for towel and reached back into ancient Aramaic. Every modern Hebrew word is a small archaeological dig.

TORAH CONNECTION

Why am I telling you all of this on a warm Shabbat evening, at the start of summer?

Because I think most of us are better at planning than we are at dreaming. And summer is when the dreaming is supposed to happen.

There is real science on this. 

A 2025 peer-reviewed study on unplanned travel found three distinct ways that itinerary-free experience creates value in us: it subtracts the stress of obligation, it adds novelty and surprise, and — most importantly — it transforms. 

It actually changes how we see ourselves and the world. 

One researcher at Lund University calls the solution “planned serendipity.” You don’t abandon all structure. You just leave deliberate white space in the itinerary — room for the unscheduled conversation, the unexpected turn, the Getzel Zelikovitz you didn’t know you were going to meet.

The most important things that happen to us are almost never the things we scheduled.

WANDERING IN THE MIDBAR, BUT NOT LOST

This connects directly to where we are in the Jewish calendar. We are reading the opening of Bamidbar — the Book of the Wilderness. This Shabbat always arrives right before Shavuot, always on the doorstep of Sinai. Revelation didn’t happen in a city, inside walls, on a planned occasion. It happened in the midbar — the open, ownerless wilderness.

The rabbis asked: why the wilderness? Because the wilderness belongs to no one, Torah can belong to everyone. You cannot receive something new if you are clutching too tightly to what you already have.

Ben-Yehuda stepped off the boat in Jaffa without a roadmap, trusting that the language and the land and his own stubborn dream would be enough. They did. 

He died in 1922, one month before Hebrew was declared the official language of the Jews of the Land of Israel. One month. He didn’t quite make it to the finish line.

But the dream did.

WANDER AND DREAM THIS SUMMER

Here is my invitation to you this summer. 

Leave some space in the itinerary. Leave an afternoon with no agenda. Take the road that looks interesting. Have the conversation you weren’t expecting. Wander a little.

And while you’re wandering, ask yourself: what dream am I carrying that still doesn’t have words yet? And when the practical voices show up — with their reasonable arguments and their German textbooks — how are we  going to respond?

Ben-Yehuda sat in that Paris cafe with a half-formed dream, talking Hebrew with two random men whose names history can barely remember.

 The plan came later. The fight, the stubborness, came later.

The dream came first.

This summer, I hope you find your cafe. I hope you stumble into it, unscheduled, in some ordinary place you weren’t expecting.

And I hope it transforms something in you so that when we meet again – we are truly refreshed and renewed as we should be after any good wandering vacation.

Shabbat Shalom.