Why Does My Family Chant Yiddish-Hebrew Toasts at Celebrations?

"Fire is fire, meat is meat." But what does it all mean?

Henry Cohen sends me “a Yiddish-Hebrew toast chanted in rhymed couplets” and asks:

Can you tell me anything about the attached toast, which has been in a friend’s family for a long time? In my family, too, we have used original variations of it at simḥes [celebrations] for many years.

I have taken the liberty of changing some of Mr. Cohen’s idiosyncratically Latinized spellings, which would seem to reflect a West or Central European Yiddish dialect closer to German than is standard Yiddish. Here are the first two couplets:

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Henry Cohen sends me “a Yiddish-Hebrew toast chanted in rhymed couplets” and asks:

Can you tell me anything about the attached toast, which has been in a friend’s family for a long time? In my family, too, we have used original variations of it at simḥes [celebrations] for many years.

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