Speaking Different Languages: Aaron & Becky Lewin
Aaron is from Israel and England. Becky is from German-speaking Switzerland. They speak to one another in different languages but that doesn't keep them from relating with deep appreciation and mutual respect. They also share the intimacy of a spiritual harmony as well. Theirs is a fascinating story of cross cultural communication and love.
"Be ready to forgive. Consider your partner as higher, better than yourself. That really helps. Like the moment I think I’ve got it all sorted out and he’s the problem, usually that’s when we’re on the downward slope, and it ends up really badly, and then I need to forgive a lot of things.”
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Interview Transcript
Tuvya: Today we are talking with Becky and Aaron Lewin, in Berlin, Germany. I’m really delighted to have them! These two have some amazing insights about culture, and this is really why I’ve looked forward to having this conversation. Becky, where are you from?
Becky: I grew up in Austria, but from a Swiss father and French mom, so pretty European.
Tuvya: What language did you speak in your home?
Becky: At home we spoke Swiss German, which is a German dialect, and Austrian German, which is another dialect. But in school, we learned proper German, and we learned French and English.
Tuvya: Aaron, your parents came from where?
Aaron: My parents were both born and raised in Zimbabwe, in southern Africa, but I was actually born in Israel. We moved straight away from Israel to Greece where I lived the first four years of my life.
Tuvya: Why did your parents move to Israel from Zimbabwe?
Aaron: Well, they actually tried their luck in America. Some friends of theirs were moving to the States, and they thought it would be a great opportunity, so they moved with them. They moved to Los Angeles for something like two and a half years trying to get their green card. It didn’t work. At that time, my father’s parents made aliya. They immigrated to Israel. Where my grandfather got my father a job. And so that’s why my parents followed, moving to Israel.
Tuvya: And your mom ...
Aaron: My mom’s not Jewish. She’s from an Anglican Christian background. They were traditional. So, my father’s family was traditional Jewish, and my mother’s family traditional Christian. I think both believed in God, but not in sort of a deep way. Maybe like a God is far removed, up in heaven somewhere, and not really interested in what’s going on down here. Religion didn’t really play a bit role in either of my parent’s lives when they were growing up.
Tuvya: So, they eventually ended up in London, England?
Aaron: Yes, just north of London, in Oxford, very famous for the university.
Tuvya: Becky, where and when did you and Aaron met?
Becky: Well, we both went to West Africa at different times to worked there for a couple of months. But we had the same friends there, so we heard about each other. So, I knew that he was Jewish, and I was planning to go to Israel with my sisters. We wanted to talk with people about God, their thoughts about the Messiah. So, I asked him if he would be interested to come along. He was, and that’s where we met for the first time. We had like three weeks there as a group going around in the country.
Tuvya: And Aaron, when you first had conversations, what language were you speaking to one other?
Aaron: We started off speaking English. I grew up monolingual. That’s changed over the years. I now speak several languages. At the time, my German wasn’t the same level as Becky’s English, so were just conversing in English. But I soon noticed over the course of our friendship, that she was a different person when she spoke her mother tongue, which was this Austrian dialect. And I know that from learning languages myself, that if I’m speaking a different language, somehow your personality changes a little bit. Language is a vehicle for culture. It helps you find yourself in that culture. And so, when I realized she’s a little bit different when she speaks her mother tongue, I wanted to know that version of Becky. And so, I said, “Can you speak a bit more, or can you teach it to me, or whatever.” And then she was the one who
suggested, “Well, why don’t we do this. I’ll speak my Austrian dialect to you, and you reply back in English.” We do that to this day where we both speak our mother tongues to each other because it’s easier to communicate that way. Of course, it’s easier to understand a foreign language than to speak it. So, we figured that should help our communication.
Becky: Sometimes, we had really funny situations. We lived in Budapest at some point and Hungary. And so there in Hungary where we lived, sometimes we were going with the tram or underground and people were like, you know, sitting across from us and going, “Yeah, this guy is speaking English, but then what kind of English is she talking back to him in?” (Laughter) You could see who knew a bit of English or a bit of German, and they got so confused. They really didn’t understand what was going on.
Tuvya: Do you find yourselves stopping each other and saying, “That word you just used, what did that mean?” Did you mean this by that?” You report what you’ve heard and find out that it’s different. Happen very often?
Becky: I think, we are both now at a very good level of the languages, so it doesn’t happen a lot in everyday life. It’s just when Aaron is reading a book to our kids that I sometimes have to interrupt, “Hang on! What is that?” You know, it’s describing quarries, gold ingots, and that kind of stuff that I’ve never heard of before.
Aaron: Sure, exclusive vocabulary that we don’t use in everyday life. We don’t have too many gold ingots stored away at home, so, you know, it doesn’t really come up often. (Laughter) I think it probably happened a lot earlier on, especially for me as I was learning her dialect. I’d have to ask, “what does this mean exactly.” But something I’ve realized is that we spend our lives saying mostly the same thing. We’re just repeating ourselves. And so, if you hear an expression once, you’re most likely to hear it again. And it’s only if you’re speaking about something very specific that you’re using very specific vocabulary that maybe there’s a new word. It does happen. Every so often Becky will use a word, and I’ll say, “What was that? I’ve never heard that?” But of course, now a days it doesn’t happen so much.
Becky: One funny word that Aaron likes a lot in my dialect is the word for tree. It’s called baum. So, every time I talk about trees, he thinks I’m talking about blowing up the city with bombs. (Laughter)
Aaron: Exactly. I’m surprised we haven’t had the police come around.
Tuvya: This is gonna be recorded guys. (Laughter) I often speak of language as a function of culture, as you’ve said Aaron, and it changes. We can change our language easily. I really love the observation that our personalities are affected by the language that we’re using, especially if we’re using a heart language. And it happens to couples, even when speaking the same language because all communication is cross cultural. That means, you both might use the same word, but have a different meaning in it. That is because we haven’t had the same experiences, and associations with ideas and terms. So that’s how you get a massive difference for what you have in mind when one says baum and the other hears bomb. Even I’m hearing what Becky says, and my first thought is of people I know named Teitelbaum (“date palm tree”) or Greenbaum and so on. And that just comes from living around Ashkenazi Jews in North America.
Aaron and Becky: Mmhmm. Yeah.
Tuvya: Culture changes a lot, but ethnicity doesn’t change. So, how would you each describe your ethnicity?
Aaron: For me, it’s always been an interesting question. I suppose you can tell by now that I’m quite a mixed person. I have one Jewish parent, one non-Jewish parent; one Christian parent, one Jewish parent; different countries, and stuff like that. So, for me, it’s always been a question of who am I? What is my identity? And that was a big question for me growing up. You know, born in Israel, Jewish father, but traditional Judaism says I’m not Jewish because my mother’s not Jewish. But we have relatives in Israel. We would visit there, always hearing the Hebrew language. So, of course, I feel Jewish. I remember when I was at school, a kid came up to me and said to me, “Aaron, are you Jewish?” with this really
menacing tone. And I remember answering him, “Nooo.” And I remember in that moment realizing that I was Jewish, or at least I identified and felt Jewish because by saying, “No,” I realized, in doing that, I was denying who I was. I denied who I was to get out of trouble! So that was an interesting moment where I thought, “This is great.” This guy was being a bit anti-Semitic, but he’d actually helped me to work out my identity. So, I always identify as Jewish.
Tuvya: So, where does that Jewishness come from? If it’s not cultural, where does it come from?
Aaron: Well, it’s definitely a matter of ethnicity. You have this ethnicity. You have this blood. I don’t really want to get into race or questions of blood or race. It brings up bad memories from history here in Berlin. But there is something to that. My father came to believe in Jesus before I was born. He identifies as a Messianic Jew. At his work, he was always known as “Jerry the Jew.” So, that identity passed down as this ethnic identity of being Jewish.
Tuvya: There is a whole conversation going on in North America, probably in other parts of the world too, about the source of identity and ethnic identity. There might be less sensitivity about it in the US than there is Europe because of what happened in the Holocaust. People don’t think in ethnic terms as much, until they open the Bible. Then they realize, from the Jewish perspective, there are two groups that are described in the Bible. After Genesis 11, you find there are the descendants of Abraham and everybody else. And the term for “everybody else” is Gentiles. In the New Testament, the equivalent word was Greeks. From that perspective, I concluded that it is easier to speak of ethnicity when we’re talking about mixed couples where only one partner is Jewish. That’s the origin for the distinction Jewish-Gentile couples. Culture is studied for the changes. Ethnicity doesn’t change, though it can be blended. Becky, how would you describe your family from the Alps?
Becky: Well, it was always clear that I am not like the others in Austria. You know they’re Austrian, like their great-great-grandmother was Austrian. So, I always had to define who I am for my ethnicity when people asked, and I would always say, “Yeah, I’m Swiss and French, but I grew up in Austria.” That was like my thing that I played back every time. But then I also realized that people are also asking for the culture, the way you’re living.? Like what feasts do you celebrate? What does it look like in a practical sense? And there also, because I was from mixed background, we didn’t have so many strong traditions, or there were traditions that developed as we were living as a family. And I must say I am very thankful for that. I’m grateful that I didn’t have this strong traditional or religious background. I didn’t grow up thinking this culture is my identity, or even, I am from this village in this valley, and that’s my identity. So, I never had that from early on. I had to think about who I am, and how I define myself. And because my parents taught us very early on that God is the one who created the world, who created you, and who wanted you, and so he had plans for your life. And I could see that they’re not just telling me to make me feel nice, but that’s what they believe. I could see that it worked in their lives.
Tuvya: I hear in Europe, often the picture of ethnicity gets blurred with nationality, with the political state.
Becky: Definitely.
Tuvya: People do the same thing with Jews. When they talk about Israel, people get confused between the patriarch, Israel, and his children who over centuries are called The People of Israel. And that same term is used of Jews today. But there too, we must distinguish between historical Israelites and Israelis who are the Jews of the sState of Israel today. Just out of curiosity, Becky, does the term Gentile fall easily on your German-speaking ears? Or is it an awkward term for you?
Becky: I think usually Gentiles wouldn’t call themselves Gentiles. For me, it’s clear I am a Gentile, but I don’t have a problem with it because I see in God’s Word, what He thinks about Gentiles, —He loves Gentiles.
Tuvya: Aaron, have you ever had somebody say to you, “Well, I’m not really a Gentile. I don’t like that term.”
Aaron: It is interesting. In German, the word for Gentile is also the word for heathen. So, it’s even worse. In English, there’s an awful connotation with heathen. So, I tend to shy away from it, preferring to use the word nation. I make a distinction between the Jewish people and people of other nations. Maybe that’s a bit artificial.
Tuvya: Well, you are dealing with a German cultural perception. Then that means you couldn’t use the phrase Jewish-Gentile couples, because it could also be understood as Jewish and heathen couples, which would be something different, right? (Laughter)
Aaron: You know what I find interesting? The Hebrew word for Gentile is goy. In Yiddish, that can become a little pejorative. But in the original Hebrew, it just means nation. Israel is even described as a goy, as a singular nation. I think describing people as in the Bible, you find the Jewish people and the rest of the nations. Jews aren’t the only ones who do that. Every other country has the local or majority people and then there are foreigners. We love doing that. It’s psychology. It’s anthropology. We like making groups of which we speak about “us and them.”
Becky: I think God also makes distinctions and puts into groups. But He doesn’t put people into hierarchies, like we do so much because people like to be at the top. We want to be the best. So, if we talk about foreigners, that always means like we are higher up than they are, right? But God doesn’t see us that way.
Tuvya: When we look at the Torah, it’s so clear that He created humanity, —men and women, —in His image. We all bear the image of God: the same dignity, and the same value God has been given to all of us. That image might be broken and marred by our nature. Still, God relates to us all, Jews and the nations with the same love and expectations.
Aaron and Becky: Yeah. Yes, exactly.
Tuvya: So, in your home, are there are certain things you must do to accommodate German customs?
And are there other things that you’ve done intentionally to capture the culture from both of your families where you’re living?
Aaron: I think there’s a lot of things that we’ve done unintentionally, you know, subconsciously. That’s always the case, isn’t it, with parents passing things down to the children? We don’t even realize what culture is often in our lives. Probably some of the unintentional things, I guess, are the food and stuff. Becky does most of the cooking, so the food that she’s grown up with, that’s passed down. The value systems, what was valued in her house, are also passed down. One thing that we did was get intentional about was deciding what does it look like for us as a Jewish-Gentile couple coming together, marrying, having children, what are we going to do in terms of festivals and celebrations? What are our traditions that we want to develop? We decided that, specifically for me, I found it very helpful for children to celebrate Jewish festivals because there’s so much symbology. There’s so much that children can learn that’s very tangible and practical. And so, we decided, yeah, we will light candles on Friday evening and have some challah and wine.
Tuvya: So, you’re celebrating Shabbat.
Aaron: Yes. Exactly. For Passover, we’ll do a Passover Seder. The point is, it’s meant to be something to help us. It’s not meant to be a bind on us or anything like that. And the decision that we made was because I also came to believe in the Messiah Jesus. So, we said that whatever we were to do in terms of cultural practice, we would do it as long as it helped us in our faith with Him and in passing that on to the children. And if it just became an empty ritual, then we would stop doing that because it wouldn’t be a help anymore.
Tuvya: Becky, are there any holiday festivals that either you grew up with or are part of German culture around you that you said, “We’re not going to do that?”
Becky: Since I’m from a mixed background, we didn’t grow up with very strong traditions, and my parents were always thinking about what we were doing, if it makes sense in the way we’re living. So, I would say we hardly had any like empty tradition going on in our family, and I would say the same was the case for Aaron. So, he also didn’t grow up with strong traditions. We know why we are doing the things we do. And I think that was a real privilege coming together as a couple and then being able to just continue like that. And actually, with everything we start new as a family, as a couple, to think why are we doing that? So, that’s a real privilege. My family, for example, used to celebrate Christmas. It was a living faith of my parents in God, in His Messiah. For example, we didn’t have a Christmas tree. We didn’t have a lot of
things that people do for Christmas, like always turkey, or whatever. It wasn’t about foods, but it was about God who sent His Son for us to save us from our sin. That was the reason why we celebrated Christmas, to remind us of that.
Tuvya: How do you do that now?
Aaron: There are some things for example. I mean it’s easy for us to talk about Germany, right, because there’s things like Valentinstag.... We discovered a lot of this stuff through the kindergarten. You know, we put our kids into kindergarten, and they come home, and they say, “Oh, it’s this holiday, or that holiday,” and we’re like, “Oh, is it? Okay, we didn’t know that.” So, Germany has, I guess, some extra holidays. We said we don’t want to take this or that from the Austrian culture. We also don’t want to take some things from the German culture where we live. I’m sure there’s some Jewish things that we said we’re not doing that either.
Tuvya: I was amazed to find in the Jewish museum in Berlin, a whole section on the assimilating Jewish community that was in Germany during the 1850s to 1870s. There’s a room showing a typical Jewish home of the time with a Hanukkah bush at Christmas time. And I’d heard that as a funny cultural observation but never knew that it was an artifact of German -Jewish culture in that period. In this podcast series we talk about the hope in finding spiritual harmony as a way of bringing couples together. Jewish-Gentile couples ordinarily face significant challenges in their experience as a cross-
cultural couple. You two have met those challenges very well. You’ve looked at culture very intentionally. I mean, the fact that you choose what language you’re going to speak to one another so you can get at the heart. To me, that’s pretty cool. So, in your home, what things are you doing to live out and strengthen spiritual harmony?
Aaron: I think the most important thing is to be on the same wavelength when it comes to spirituality, and that was always something that was very, very important for both of us. When we met each other, we were like straightaway, we were on the same page. We come from very different backgrounds, but we have essentially the same faith. You know, the same faith in Yeshua, or the Messiah Jesus, and what that means for our lives practically on a day-to-day basis. From that foundation, we can build on it for us. I think it’s safe to say we would want our kids to also have that experience, and it’s not something that we can give them. It’s a personal relationship with God. It’s not something that you can do for your kids, but you can prepare the groundwork for their relationship. And we do that through praying with our kids, telling our kids about what we experience with God, telling our kids about what we do when we fail, when we make mistakes. Also, we own our mistakes. If we say an angry word, or if we do something wrong, we own that, and we get them to own that when they do that.
Tuvya: You mentioned you pray together. A lot of people might have no idea what that looks like. Do you have a book? Do you have a pattern that you follow? What is prayer like when you say, “we pray together”?
Becky: We believe that God made us as human beings so we would be in relationship with Him. And so, praying, is what we experience if we have this loving relationship as a couple, we want to talk with each other. If you’re in love, you want to talk, and you will tell each other what you find difficult. What do you find good? What do you love about the other person? What you didn’t you understand in his/her behavior? And for us, this is praying. It’s talking with God, communicating with Him, sharing our lives, our thoughts, our distress, like everything with hHim. So, this is talking for us. You don’t really need a book as a couple if you want to talk to each other. So, we don’t think you actually need a book to talk to God, but you talk from heart to heart.
Aaron: I think prayer, because it’s a religious word, sometimes people, they get put off by it. I think you have to define it. As Becky’s saying, it’s just talking with God. And if you find a book, like a prayer book, it’s helpful for that, that’s great. I mean there’s some couples, sometimes we’ve done it as well, where you can find lists of questions that you can ask each other, right? All these games that you can play where it’s like remember a funny memory together, or whatever. So, you know, sure, if it helps you, then you can do that, but it’s just building relationship with God. That’s what prayer is. It doesn’t have to be something mystical, or weird, or boring, or strange.
Tuvya: Some couples who are listening are experiencing cross-cultural challenges? You guys have lived as observers, as outsiders in many cultures. Because you’ve been in so many, what kind of advice or tips would you have?
Aaron: I think communication is just the most important thing in any kind of relationship. And the more differences that there are between a couple, —different background, different religion, different language, whatever, different ethnic group, —you’re putting up more and more barriers to hinder good communication. So, I would just say make sure you really work on that. And if your partner says something, make sure you get them to define it. I mean honestly, you don’t have to do that with every word, and the communication gets easier the longer you are together as a couple because you get to know each other better. But define everything. Talk about everything. Talk about the things that make you
mad with the other person and why do you get upset. What is it that provokes you? Just work on your communication.
Becky: I think my biggest tip is, be ready to forgive. Consider your partner as higher, better than yourself. That really helps. Like the moment I think I’ve got it all sorted out and he’s the problem, usually that’s when we’re on the downward slope, and it ends up really badly, and then I need to forgive a lot of things. But usually, if I can see that maybe he didn’t mean it all that bad, and maybe I misunderstood something, usually that helps a big deal, yeah?
Tuvya: I’m sure it does. And we’ve put together a small booklet for Jewish-Gentile couples to help them through the different challenges as they go through four stages in their relationship. Each stage poses different challenges like when they’re getting to know one another, dating, different challenges trying to pull together a wedding. There are huge challenges there. And then when they’re together without children, they are trying to define who they are together and discovering how different their world is from being singles. The biblical idea of becoming one flesh really starts to come into life at that point. Then when the children come along, that raises all the expectations about what our family is going to look like and how we hand our culture to our children from generation to generation. So, that’s just one side of it.
The other is all the different cultural categories. You two touched on some of those: festivals, relating to family or the culture around you. So, that little resource booklet is available online, and is called Finding Spiritual Harmony in Your Jewish-Gentile Relationship.
Finding Spiritual Harmony in Your Jewish-Gentile Relationship
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If you or someone you know would like support in your relationship, write to tuvya@jewishgentilecouples.com.
