I look back on my first year in Israel as one of the best in my life.  Not to sound like Polly-Anna, but everything I have hoped to happen, happened.  I loved the people I met, the places I saw, the opportunities I came across, and the men I dated ;).  However there is one thing, one obstacle, which proved far more obtrusive and aggravating than I had imagined.  I sucked at Hebrew. 

Now learning a new language was never easy for me.  When someone started conjuring up grammatical rules  and verb conjugations there was always a part of my brain that turned off.  So coming to Israel holding only the translations for yes, no, peacehelloandgoodbye, and strangely pencil in my pocket, I knew I was setting myself up for a challenge.

reason at all. The reality was that Israelis are the masters of body language.  With the movement of a hand, the flick of the wrist, or the jutting of a chin they can communicate a whole series of complex emotions without saying a word.  I at first believed these movements were the accessory to the spoken word, the cultural additives that add flare to any society.  However, halfway through my year I came across something that changed my mind.

The 2005 annual edition of The Economist featured an article entitled Behind the Mind’s Mirror, which described a breakthrough in the field of neuroscience.  Scientists discovered mirror neurons, nerve endings in the brain that become active whether you perform an action or, and here’s the rub, observe someone else perform an action.  Before the “grunts of our ape ancestors” evidence concluded that hand gestures were the primary form of communication, only to be followed by the spoken word.  So intricately connected is word and gesture that “one of the most important speech areas (in our brain) is active when we speak, when we gesture, and when we see others gesture.”  Mirror neurons are, therefore, responsible for our development of language in that they have enabled us to hear a word, understand it, and then reproduce it ourselves.

When applied beyond the fundamental stepping-stones of our species, our ability to empathize, detect lies, feign truthfulness, and manipulate others all derive from our prehistoric ability to learn from others’ experiences, to digest these actions and reconstruct them as our own.

Gesture is thus not the cultural excess to a language, but rather its foundation.  Israelis may be able to explain their worldview through words, but I now believe it can only be understood through movement.  So do not feel like a fool when you soon find yourself holding your hand out in a pinched formation.  There is no need to utter the word rega.  You are revealing your true beginnings of integration within Israeli society.  Actions speak louder than words.

Source: Anderson, A., Behind the Mind’s Mirror, The Economist: The World in 2006, pp 141.  December 2005