By Mordechai Geller
From: “Our Sharon Plain – The Tel Mond Bloc”, published by the Hefer Valley Regional Council, 1972
For you, children, it is easy and natural to read this story, for it is written in your own language. You were born here, on this land, and from the very beginning of your lives, when your little ears first caught sound and voice, those sounds were Hebrew words.
Not so for us - the founding fathers of the village. We were born in faraway lands, in the Diaspora, among peoples living on their own soil and speaking their own languages. We studied in their schools, but we never assimilated. Among us Jews, there was always a special language.
When we came to this place forty years ago to build our village, we learned to earn our livelihood through hard labor on this land. And we also faced great challenges in mastering the Hebrew language. We felt that we now had land, our homeland, and every homeland must have its own language.
When the time comes for songbirds to build their nests, they sing joyfully, and their voices carry far. A bird never changes its own song for that of another species. So too, when we returned to our land and began building our nest for generations to come, the Hebrew letters stood before our eyes and whispered in our ears: “We went with you into exile, accompanied you, clung to you along the long road. Now the time has come to join the Hebrew letters and shape them into Hebrew words.”
Each night, at the end of a long day of toil, we would gather together, and singing would burst forth from our mouths. And that singing was in Hebrew, written in the ancient tongue. It was, and will always be, our language.