When
an Israeli novelist creates a character with a fiery personality —
and a name to go with it -- he has taken the opportunity to teach an interesting
Hebrew lesson about fire. In David Grossman’s recent novel, The Zigzag
Kid (1993, English 1997), his heroes — father
and son — are called Feuerberg, in German, “fire
mountain,” i.e., volcano. When Grossman finds it necessary to give a
Hebrew version of the name, “Uncle Feuerberg” to one of peripheral
characters, he is faced with an embarrassment of riches. Shall he use the
common word 
(esh), fire, or shall he reach perhaps for 
(delekah), or (serefah), or 
(tav’erah)?
He might also consider 
(lapid), torch, or
(medurah), campfire, or even, reaching back to the Latin word for hearth,
(focus).
That Grossman chooses
to name his character 
(dod shilhav), Uncle Shilhav and to call his character’s
activity
(shilhuv),
“Shilhavization,” from the root 
(lamed, heh, vet), flame, leads us to some interesting insights
into the Hebrew language.
We
discover that the verbal form of the root
(lamed, heh, vet), flame, quite likely originally meant, “to
be thirsty.” It is easy to see how that led to, “to burn with
thirst,” and from there to, “to blaze fiercely.” It is
also perhaps not too difficult, with a bit of imagination, to see how
the word 
(lahav), flame, came to mean, in addition, the blade of a sword.
Not surprisingly, a unit of the Israeli army, playing on this coincidence
of vocabulary, has on its shield both a sword and a flame. (That it
also has an olive branch tells us not a little about Israeli culture.)
Speaking
of weaponry, modern arsenals often come equipped with a piece of machinery
whose Hebrew name is taken from our root. The word for flame-thrower,
(lahavyor), is made of two words,
(lahav), flame, and 
(yoreh), shoot.
(shalhevet), torch, another word deriving from our root, has
two interesting extensions, one containing God’s name and one doing
God’s work. The first is the word for, “powerful flame,”
(shalhevet-yah), literally, a “God-flame,” a phrase
we first come across in, Song of Songs (8:6). The latter refers
to an experimental Jewish Day High School in Los Angeles, California,
Shalhavet, which carries a torch for encouraging and enabling students
to make ethical choices independently.
There
is another way of, “burning” with our root that has nothing
to do with physical fire. You will find this in an expression such as
(ani nilhav me’od me-ha-tokhnit ha-hadashah), “I’m
very enthusiastic about the new program.” Or, a newspaper might
report that the speaker at the convention 
(hilhiv et shom’av), “fired the imagination of his
audience.” In Hasidism, profound joy in God rooted in an inner
fervor is known as 
(hitlahavut);
the term, meaning literally, "enthusiasm," may be translated,
"religious ecstasy." Finally, the word
(hitlavut), enthusiasm, from the
(l-h-v, flame) rootword, makes its way into modern Israeli slang:
teenagers express their scorn for excessive displays of enthusiasm or
braggadocio with the words: 
(hu mitlahev ka-zeh), "He's so enthusiastic!" How dreadfully
uncool.
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 Dr.
Joseph Lowin is Executive Director of the National Center for
the Hebrew Language (NY). He has written extensively (in both
popular and scholarly formats) on Jewish narrative, modern Jewish
literature, and Hebrew language. His most recent book is Hebrewspeak:
An Insider's Guide to the Way Jews Think (Jason Aronson, 1995).
You can visit his site at: http://www.ivrit.org
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