It is a little known fact that the day before the Pilgrims on the ship Mayflower came ashore in the year 1620 – remembered every year in America’s unique holiday of Thanksgiving – they wrote out an agreement on how they would run their community, which came to be known as the Mayflower Compact. And they wrote a draft of it on the back of a sheet of paper they had previously used during the monotonous weeks at sea, sailing from Holland, to study Hebrew. That paper was a vocabulary list, two columns of words, one in English, one in Hebrew. These were so-called Old Testament Christians, which Book enraptured them and they used for their model of society. They were out to live in a wilderness according to their own religious beliefs, rooted in the so-called Old Testament, people who had been oppressed in England, and one feature of their Christianity was immersing themselves in the Hebrew text in order to really understand what was written.

And after they landed and survived and began to thrive and take root in the New Land, after sixteen years, when a man in those days was a ma (no teenagers in those days) the community saw the need to establish a school to teach the next generation of ministers; for their political-social leaders were their clergy.

And because these Puritans were who they were, they laid out a four-year course of study in what today would be called a seminary, and every year the students had to study Hebrew. And at end of the four-year course – they all got BAs – the best student during the graduation ceremony gave his valedictory speech in Biblical Hebrew.

And as the school expanded, Hebrew nonetheless remained a requirement at what came to be called Harvard College for the next 150 years, until the practice was abandoned in 1786 in the spirit of the anti-religious Enlightenment.

And here we are 224 years later, since Harvard stopped having this valedictory speech in Hebrew – and the American economy, its money bloodstream managed by banks, has been polluted and made worthless because since the 1960s all the old values were flushed down the toilet.

Here in Israel, though, apparently, our bankers never let go of the reins, and the economy here, the Hebrew-speaking economy here, is doing pretty good…