The calf and the missile

Everyone here is talking about שגרה right now. Routine. When are we going back to it, what will it look like, is this — this strange suspended few days after the ceasefire — already it, or is it the thing that comes before it. The word is in every news segment and every conversation. Chazara la-shigra. Return to routine. As if routine were a place you could drive to.

My good friend Ronit wrote to me the other day with something I can’t stop thinking about. She’d been looking at שגרה and its root, ש.ג.ר. Shin-gimel-resh. And then she pointed out what the same root does now: איראן משגרת טיל. Iran launches a missile.

Same three letters. Opposite worlds.
In biblical Hebrew, ש.ג.ר belonged to the world of the herd. שֶׁגֶר אֲלָפֶיךָ — the offspring of your cattle, the issue of the flock. Something coming forth the way a calf comes forth: on its own, in its time, because that’s what bodies do. A root built by people who watched animals and weather and crops, and needed a word for the quiet arrival of the next thing. שגרה, routine, is the descendant of all that. Breakfast. The dog. The drive to work. The thing that happens when nothing has to happen.

And then modern Hebrew took the same root and used it to launch rockets.

Modern Hebrew had to invent itself quickly. It went rifling through the old language for roots it could press into new service — and ש.ג.ר was ready to be pressed. The rabbis had already stretched it from livestock to sending more generally, and modern Hebrew took the next step and stretched sending into launching. A calf is sent forth. A messenger is sent forth. A missile is sent forth. A morning is sent forth. Same letters, either way.

Which is maybe why the word sits so strangely in the mouth right now. We keep saying chazara la-shigra, and somewhere underneath, faintly, a flock is still moving through a field. And somewhere else, just as faintly, a finger is resting on a launcher.

Thank you, Ronit. I’ll be sitting with this one for a while.