Mizpah

I was delighted to read about Denver’s Mile High Station in the September/October 2010 issue of Humanities, and was particularly intrigued by the photo of the Mizpah Arch. Pamela Carter-Birken tells us that the departure-facing side of the arch contained “the Hebrew word MIZPAH, meaning God watch over you while we are apart.”

A lovely sentiment, to be sure, but the word mizpah -- really mitzpah, since the second letter in the word is a tzadi, not a zayin, but our alphabet has no symbol for the “tz” sound, so substitutes in transliteration a “z”-- literally means no such thing. As with all Semitic languages, Hebrew is quite compact in written form, but even Hebrew cannot generally express an entire complex sentence with a single four-letter word, as mizpah is in the Hebrew alphabet.

Mizpah does not literally mean “God watch over you while we are apart”, but, as any speaker of Hebrew knows and as any Hebrew-English dictionary will affirm, it is a noun that means simply “lookout” (not as a sentry but as a place). A secondary meaning is “watchtower.” It comes from the verb tz-f-h or tzofeh (nearly all Semitic verbs are composed of a root made from three consonants), which means to look over from a height (as opposed to “look over” meaning to inspect or “overlook” meaning to miss seeing something). That is why the Hebrew word for bird is “tzipor”, literally a creature that looks over its environment from a height.

Ms. Carter-Birken is in no way at fault here, however. She did not invent the more expansive translation, but rather inherited it from an accepted understanding of a Biblical phrase—specifically, Genesis chapter 31, verses 48 and 49—in the Anglo-American Protestant tradition. She is merely repeating what the typical resident of Denver thought it meant back when.

Indeed, the word Mizpah, taken to mean “God watch over you while we are apart”, gave rise to a category of jewelry (broaches, mainly), postcards, poetry and the like around the end of the 19th century in both Britain and the United States. (It does not seem to have caught on in other places.) Since then towns, steamboats, Masonic lodges and several other things in the United States have been named Mizpah, always in the letters of the Roman alphabet, never in the Hebrew alphabet. At the present time a woman named Helena Lind is trying to make a business out of Mizpah, claiming that the word bears sacred and secret meanings thousands of years old. Check it out on the Internet.

The original reason for all this is fairly straightforward. From the time of the Puritans, Anglo-American Protestant leaders and laymen alike have demonstrated an affinity for the symbols and personalities of the Hebrew Bible. But the Protestant expositors of the Bible who thought Mizpah meant “God watch over you while we are apart” seem to have allowed their fertile imaginations to trump their frail knowledge of the Hebrew language. Mitzpah was a fairly common place name; the Hebrew Bible contains about half a dozen such geographical mentions. It was called that (as well as Galeed, which mean heap) in the Genesis text noted above because of the heap of stones that Jacob and Laban used to mark and symbolize an agreement between them, not the other way around; Jacob and Laban did not make a heap of stones because there was already a general belief that such a heap, called a mitzpah, connoted a divine blessing or a broader sentiment. A place called Mitzpah just meant an elevation from which one could get a panoramic view of what lay below, period—like Mitzpe (slight spelling variation, same word) Ramon today in Israel, a spot in the Negev that overlooks a huge crater called the makhtesh. To get this backwards is testimony to the interpretive fecundity of those Anglo-Protestant expositors. For it to then turn into a kind of cultural curlicue in the Protestant tradition is both amusing and, in an entirely harmless way, wacky.

The more grandiose translation of Mizpah derived from the story in Genesis seems to exist only in the Protestant tradition. Catholics don't have it, and Jews have not used the word mitzpah as a symbol of anything, or as a short form of the phrase “may God watch over you while we are apart.” There is no Jewish mitzpah jewelry using the Hebrew script, at least none I have ever seen. Note, too, that the Jewish liturgy does contain a “traveler’s prayer,” called t’filat ha-derekh in Hebrew, which asks God’s protection whilst one is one the road, separated from friends and loved ones. The prayer’s main part consists of slightly over a hundred words, not a single one of which is any form of the verb tz-f-h.