My grandfather used to say, “English is for business, Hebrew is for prayer, Yiddish is for telling the truth.” He wasn’t joking. There are some things you just cannot say in English the way you can say them in Yiddish. You can try, but it lands like a kreplach with no filling — technically a dumpling, but where’s the point?
I grew up hearing these words spilled across the kitchen table like spilled tea, soaking into everything. My mother used them when she was happy, when she was furious, when she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry — which, if you grew up in a Jewish home, you know is most of the time. So I want to give you eight Yiddish words that, in my opinion, explain Jewish life better than English ever could. Pour yourself a glass of seltzer. We’re going in.
1. Mensch
You probably know this one. A mensch is a person of integrity, a good human being, the kind of guy who notices the waitress is having a rough night and leaves an extra twenty without making a show of it. But “good person” doesn’t quite capture it. A mensch is not a saint. A mensch can curse. A mensch can lose his temper. What makes him a mensch is that when nobody is watching, he still does the right thing. That’s the whole religion in one word.
2. Shlimazel
There’s a saying: the shlemiel spills the soup, and the shlimazel is the one it lands on. The shlimazel is the cosmically unlucky one. The guy whose car breaks down the morning of his job interview. The woman whose umbrella inverts on the one day she did her hair. In English we’d say “bad luck,” but bad luck is impersonal. The shlimazel is followed by it. Stalked by it. The universe has chosen him personally, and he just shrugs and says, well, what can you do.
There’s a deep Jewish theology in this, actually. We don’t pretend life is fair. We just keep going.
3. Naches
This is the warm bath you sink into when your kid wins the spelling bee, when your grandson reads from the Torah, when your daughter calls just to say hi for no reason. Pride doesn’t cover it. Joy doesn’t either. Naches is specifically the pride and joy you take in the people you love being the people you hoped they’d become. It’s the only English approximation, and it’s bad.
You shep naches. You don’t have it. You collect it, like a good cup of soup, ladle by ladle. (And speaking of family, my Rabbi’s Daughter book is more or less a tribute to this feeling.)
4. Tsuris
Trouble. Aggravation. Heartache. The mortgage is late, the boiler broke, your cousin Sheila isn’t speaking to you because of a wedding seating chart from 1997. Tsuris. The catch-all word for the daily indignities of being alive in a Jewish family. You can have tsuris from your children, your parents, your boss, your knees. It’s a Swiss Army knife of suffering, and yet the word itself is almost affectionate. Of course you have tsuris. Who doesn’t have tsuris? Welcome to the species.
5. Bashert
Destined. Meant to be. The person you were always going to marry. The job you were always going to take. The wrong turn that landed you in the right place. When something is bashert, it means there’s a thread you couldn’t see at the time but that, looking back, runs straight through your life like a stitch holding everything together.
I have a lot of thoughts on bashert. I wrote about a few of them in the Kabbalah Kronicles, which started as a weekly column and turned into something I still hear from readers about fifteen years later.
6. Chutzpah
The classic definition: a man murders his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan. That’s chutzpah. Nerve, but more than nerve. Audacity, but with a punchline. The Jewish people have survived for thousands of years on a combination of faith, humor, and an absolutely shameless willingness to argue with God. You think Moses didn’t have chutzpah? “Excuse me, You, on the burning bush — could You send someone else? I have a stutter.” That’s chutzpah. And that’s how we got out of Egypt.
7. Kvell
Similar to naches but more active. To kvell is to glow with pride to the point that strangers in the supermarket notice. When my son first read aloud from the bima, my wife kvelled so loud the rabbi paused. You can’t fake a kvell. It comes from the gut, up through the chest, and out of the mouth in a small involuntary sound that translates roughly to look at this beautiful child I made.
8. Beshert
I’m sneaking this in because there’s a second usage. Beshert isn’t only about marriage. It’s about meaning. The friend who calls when you most need a friend. The conversation overheard at a bus stop that changes how you think for a week. Beshert is the universe winking at you, saying — pay attention. Something is happening here.
And that, by the way, is the entire point of Jewish humor. We tell jokes because we are paying attention. We notice the absurd, the painful, the holy, the ridiculous, and we hold them up to the light at the same time. A good Yiddish word does the same thing. It’s a compressed life lesson with a wink.
So what do you do with eight Yiddish words?
You use them. Sprinkle them into conversation. Tell your daughter you’re shepping naches when she calls. Tell your boss you have tsuris with the printer. Call your brother a shlimazel when his car battery dies on the same day his check bounces. Mostly, listen for them in your own life. The next time something clicks into place that you didn’t plan, that’s bashert. The next time someone does something quietly good when nobody is looking — that’s a mensch.
Yiddish isn’t dying, no matter what anyone says. It just goes underground, surfaces in a phrase, a shrug, a punchline. If you want more of this, I have a few free funny stories over on the site that are basically Yiddish translated into English on the fly. Some are about my grandmother. Some are about my dog. All of them are true, or true enough, which is the only kind of truth Yiddish ever really cared about.
Now go call your bubbe. She’s worried.