Kaki: A Brief Philological Inquiry Prompted by Two Men on My Street
The Hebrew Bible has words for excrement. Tzo’ah appears in Deuteronomy — waste must be buried outside the camp, because God walks among you. The Talmud tractate Berakhot rules on where one may and may not recite the Shema in proximity to it. There are measurements. There are rulings. The rabbis brought the same precision to bodily functions that they brought to everything else, because the body exists within the law and the law must address it. This is not squeamishness, and it is not comedy. It is a civilization taking itself seriously.
I was sitting in my garden when I heard it. I couldn’t see the street, only the voices coming over the fence. One man had walked his dog. The dog produced something. The man kept walking. A neighbor appeared. This is Jerusalem — someone is always watching.
What followed had structure. The dog owner’s position: what his dog had produced was not kaki. It was kaki nozly. Liquid. An entirely different category, closer to sheten — urine — than to solid waste. No one collects sheten from a public street. You cannot pick up a liquid. This is not negligence. This is physics. This, implicitly, is law. The neighbor was not persuaded. The argument lasted several minutes. The word kaki appeared in every sentence.
The rabbis of the Talmud would have recognized the move immediately. The categorical distinction that creates the exemption. Pilpul, on a Jerusalem sidewalk, applied to dog waste.
The word traces back through Yiddish — where it already meant poop, related to farkakte, lousy, literally full of crap — through Latin and Ancient Greek, to a Proto-Indo-European root older than most languages we can name. Hebrew absorbed it as it does without ceremony.
I have been in Israel almost four years. I came with the Hebrew of scholarship — the language of texts, of things that happened a long time ago and still matter. I have since learned the Hebrew of sirens and furloughs and bureaucratic forms that make no sense in any language. I did not expect kaki nozly to be the moment the whole thing came together.
But there it was: the biblical seriousness about the body, the Talmudic instinct to categorize and therefore to rule, two men on a Jerusalem street conducting a legal proceeding about dog waste with complete conviction — and somewhere underneath all of it, farkakte, the grandmother of the argument, still cursing in Yiddish.
This is what I did not expect about living here. The past does not stay in the past. It shows up on the street, in the argument, in the word. The distance between Deuteronomy and kaki nozly is, it turns out, not very far at all.
