Siyum: The best part of certain parties

As 'twas said in the days of yore: 'In the siyum, the love you take is equal to the love you make.'

Celebrating an important 'siyum'. Photo by Dreamstime

In religious Jewish circles, a siyum, meaning “end,” “completion” or “conclusion,” is a celebration marking the fact that one has completed the study of an entire tractate of Talmud or other religious text.

It’s considered enough of a celebration that taking part in a siyum is all you need to do to get out of a low-level fast day like the fast of the firstborn, held the day before Passover to mark the death of the Egyptian firstborn sons.

The siyum hashas marks the completion of not just a single tractate of the Talmud but all 37, a cycle that is completed every seven and a half years and has attracted tens of thousands of people to massive stadiums like New York’s Madison Square Garden.

There are also the other kinds of siyumim (to use the plural) that take place every year around this time.

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At the end of the academic road (or not, depending on how long that road extends), you get graduation: siyum limudim, or the “completion of studies.” Graduation ceremonies, naturally, feature the distribution ofte’udot siyum, or “completion certificates.”

End-of-year celebrations (no cap and gown necessary) are called mesibot siyum, or siyum parties. At the preschool and kindergarten level (and possibly further on, but I haven’t gotten there yet to know for sure), these often feature a singing and dancing routine of some sort and a Hebrew rhyming poem about what a great year it’s been (plus the requisiteburekasim).

If you’re particularly unlucky, the party will start after your child’s bedtime or feature preschool boys lifting toy barbells to show off their ostensible muscles while the girls sit in a circle and watch, in either case leaving you at your wit’s end and at an ending party you’ll be happy to see end. Lucky for me, the kindergarten end-of-year party I attended this year was kept short enough that cute didn’t have time to morph into endless – one of those mesibot siyum with no siyum in sight.

להתברג to screw oneself

By the laws of Hebrew grammar that's what it ought to mean, but leave it to sports writers to find it a nicer use.

The word was first used in the context of dribbling in soccer.
These days, "lehitbareg" means to wedge oneself into a group or situation. Photo by Reuters

In its most literal sense hitbareg (to use the singular past tense) is a reflexive verb meaning to screw oneself; but it is also a reciprocal verb, meaning that two objects are connected to one another by a screwing action. In fact, this is how the word was used at first when it entered use in the 1930s, usually referring to connecting pipes.

Then come 1947, Jacko Farchi, sports editor at the socialist newspaper Al Hamishmar, gave the word a new twist when reporting on a soccer game between Haifa and a Hungarian team: “Y. Meirovitch mitbareg into the opposing teams defense and after he drew in his opponents, passed the ball with a long left pass to Y. Fuchs.”

What Farchi meant was that Meirovitch was dribbling in a spiral fashion through the Hungarian defense, and he used the verb mitbareg to indicate the spiral motion like the spiral on the screw.

His neologism spread among sports writers in the 1950s and 1960s. But over time the spiral sense of the word was forgotten and the word was taken to mean “difficulty pushing into the opponents defense” much like a screw is inserted (with much effort) into wood.

Eventually sports writers started using the word to mean "hardly placing" (as in a team) or barely making the cut.

Then in the early 1980s, the word moved from the sports world to general use. Now it is used to mean "barely making it", with great effort involved. The literal sense of screwing oneself migrated to a very different phrase.

Today the words best meaning is "to fit"

Soccer versus Football

New Zealand's largest newspaper is deeply conflicted. With the World Cup underway in Brazil, should The New Zealand Herald refer to the "global round-ball game" as "soccer" or "football"? The question has been put to readers, and the readers have spoken. It's "football"—by a wide margin.

We in the U.S., of course, would disagree. And now we have a clearer understanding of why. In May, Stefan Szymanski, a sports economist at the University of Michigan, published a paper debunking the notion that "soccer" is asemantically bizarre American invention. In fact, it's a British import. And the Brits used it often—until, that is, it became too much of an Americanism for British English to bear.

The story begins, like many good stories do, in a pub. As early as the Middle Ages, Szymanski explains, the rough outlines of soccer—a game, a ball, feet—appear to have been present in England. But it wasn't until the sport became popular among aristocratic boys at schools like Eton and Rugby in the nineteenth century that these young men tried to standardize play. On a Monday evening in October 1863, the leaders of a dozen clubs met at the Freemasons' Tavern in London to establish "a definite code of rules for the regulation of the game.” They did just that, forming the Football Association. The most divisive issue was whether to permit "hacking," or kicking an opponent in the leg (the answer, ultimately, was 'no').

The Football Association

But that wasn't where the controversy ended. In 1871, another set of clubs met in London to codify a version of the game that involved more use of the hands—a variant most closely associated with the Rugby School.

"From this point onwards the two versions of football were distinguished by reference to their longer titles, Rugby Football and Association Football (named after the Football Association)," Szymanski writes. "The rugby football game was shortened to 'rugger,'" while "the association football game was, plausibly, shortened to 'soccer.'"

Both sports fragmented yet again as they spread around the world. The colloquialism "soccer" caught on in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century, in part to distinguish the game from American football, a hybrid of Association Football and Rugby Football. (Countries that tend to use the word "soccer" nowadays—Australia, for example—usually have another sport called "football.")

In support of this theory, Szymanski cites a 1905 letter to the editor of The New York Times from Francis Tabor of New York, who warned of the spreading "heresy" of the word "socker":

It seems a thousand pities that in reporting Association football matches THE NEW YORK TIMES, in company with all the other newspapers, should persistently call the game "Socker."
In the first place, there is no such word, and in the second place, it is an exceedingly ugly and undignified one.
You may search the English papers through and through, and in all the long columns of descriptions of games you will not find even "Soccer" (which is probably the word intended.)
As a matter of fact, it was a fad at Oxford and Cambridge to use "er" at the end of many words, such as foot er, sport er, and as Association did not take an "er" easily, it was, and is, sometimes spoken of as Soccer.

If the word "soccer" originated in England, why did it fall into disuse there and become dominant in the States? To answer that question, Szymanski counted the frequency with which the words "football" and soccer" appeared in American and British news outlets as far back as 1900.

Rugby football was shortened to 'rugger,' while association football was shortened to 'soccer.'

What he found is fascinating: "Soccer" was a recognized term in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, but it wasn't widely used until after World War II, when it was in vogue (and interchangeable with "football" and other phrases like "soccer football") for a couple decades, perhaps because of the influence of American troops stationed in Britain during the war and the allure of American culture in its aftermath. In the 1980s, however, Brits began rejecting the term, as soccer became a more popular sport in the United States.

In recent decades, "The penetration of the game into American culture, measured by the use of the name 'soccer,' has led to backlash against the use of the word in Britain, where it was once considered an innocuous alternative to the word 'football,'" Szymanski explains.

Football. Soccer. Calcio. We're not so different after all. But tell that to these guys: