How's My Hebrew?

When I was at the bank opening an account I inquired in Hebrew “how much interest will I get on my mammon?” The woman looked at me very confused, after repeating my question and seeing her same confused looked, I deduced that mammon must not be the correct way to say money in Hebrew. Lucky enough I guessed kesef must be the way. I was pretty surprised that mammon is not in the Hebrew language as it’s such a good Aramaic word and it almost sounds like money in English. I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t her that didn’t know Hebrew so I told someone this story and they thought it was hilarious. Supposedly theres an old joke about an American tourist that gets on a bus and asks in Hebrew “how much mammon to Tel Aviv” to which the bus rider responds: “Shtei zuzim.” (It’s a good thing I found this out before going into a client meeting and offering to get them harbei mammon.)


Another funny thing that happened in the bank was when we were filling out the paperwork (2 hours worth!) the woman was asking me questions and filling in the blanks. Most of the stuff she said I could understand and give answers that made sense such as “what is your address?” When I didn’t understand something I would generally pick between using three canned answers: a) Nod b) Ken c) Betach! (This is a strategy I suggest anyone visiting Israel use.) I could usually figure out based on the tone of her voice which one of these responses would look like I understood her best. This was a solid plan unless the question was more than just a yes or no answer – which I could generally tell, once again, from the tone of her voice. The only problem was when she asked me questions that were not yes/no such as when I thought heard her ask “Do you have any other names that you use?” To which I responded: “Dov” (Because I was opening my account with my other alias.) She looked at me very confused and repeated the question in English, which really was “Do you have any accounts in other banks?” I once again didn’t realize how funny this actually was until later because dov means bear in Hebrew. So essentially she asked a normal question and I answered with a zoo animal.

I got out at 8:30 PM tonight (or as my taxi drivers correct me every night, 20:30)! Baruch Hashem!