The Voyage of the Dawn Etymologist

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“It’s hard nowadays to accept America’s attitude toward our problems,” Israel’s president Re’uven Rivlin told the daily newspaper Haaretz in an August 6 interview. “But with all due respect [for Prime Minister Netanyahu], we can’t just say to the world, b’rogez, b’rogez l’olam, sholem, sholem af pa’am.'”

The last words, which I’ve left in their original Hebrew, translate literally as “angry, angry forever, peace, peace never,” but every Israeli would recognize them as Rivlin’s ironic inversion of a traditional children’s chant that goes sholem, sholem l’olam, b’rogez, b’rogez af pa’am, “peace, peace forever, angry, angry never.” This is said by two children who have been fighting and pledge to make up, and it is generally accompanied by an embrace of the little fingers of the right hand, each child twining his pinky around the other child’s. Whether the “peace” thus achieved lasts as much as five minutes, let alone forever, is of course something else.