Drink to Life, Not Saying Lachaim but Lechaim

Drink, my friend, and pour
for me so that my sorrow
may trouble me no more
tonight, although tomorrow
I am sure you’ll see
me die before your eyes,
unless with lute you flee
before my dry demise.

In Hebrew with me say
lechaim, one-word appreciation
for those who wish to stay
alive, an exclamation
that’s not lachaim, to lives,
but is lechaim, said by blessers
of drinks, loved less than wives
who’re husbanded by lessers,
their herbands, hisbands not
the word I use to sing
of the loved lass, the her I got,
love Lindered, with a ring.

The first verse of this poem is my very free translation of a poem by Moses Ibn Ezra, an Andalusian Jewish philosophic poet who was born in Granada about 1055 – 1060, and died after 1138:

Drink up, my friend, and pour for me, while I with joy
surrender to the alcoholic cup my pain,
Refraining from it plaintively, please plead, “Enjoy!
Play on your lute “l’chaim,”  life’s pain-free refrain.”

The second verse was inspired by “L’Chaim a Bad Grammatical Error?” mosaicmagazine.com. 11/21/22, in which Philologos  (Hillel Halkin) writes:

The definite article in Hebrew is ha-, so that if bayit, say, is “house,” ha-bayit is “the house.” Yet if I want to say “to the house,” I don’t say l’-ha-bayit. Rather, the l’ and the ha- combine to form the single syllable la-, so that “to the house” is la-bayit. This is something learned in the third week of “Beginning Hebrew.”

It’s only in the 23rd or 49th week, however, that one learns something else — namely, that in Hebrew, as opposed to English but as in French and many other languages, abstract nouns take a definite article. In English, for example, one says, “Life is wonderful,” but in French it’s “La vie est grande,” and in Hebrew, “ha-ḥayim nehedarim.” (Hayim nehedarim without the article would mean “a wonderful life.”) Therefore, if we wish to toast someone by saying “[Let’s drink] to life,” meaning, “Let’s drink to that wonderful thing called life,” we should say la’ chayim and not l’chayim.

Have we Jews, then, been saying l’ḥayim ungrammatically all along? I wouldn’t jump to such a hasty conclusion.

Let’s look briefly at l’ḥayim’s history. The earliest mention of it in Jewish sources in the context of drinking can be found in the 13th-century Italian rabbi Tsedakiah ben Avraham Anav’s guidebook to Jewish ritual, “Shibbolei ha-Leket.” There he writes: “And when drinking a glass of wine… it is customary to respond [to anyone reciting the blessing over it] l’ḥayim, that is, ‘May what you drink bring you life and not harm.’” In medieval times, in other words, when the practice first originated, l’chaim was said not by a toaster in our sense of the word, but rather by anyone hearing the borei p’ri ha-gafen, the “Blessed are You O God our Lord, King of the Universe, who creates the fruit of the vine.” This is a custom observed to this day by Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews in Israel and elsewhere, who, during the Sabbath and holiday Kiddush, exclaim l’chaim after the Aramaic call to order savrei maranan, “Attention, my masters,” that precedes the actual blessing.

L’chaim, in other words, did not originally mean “[Let us drink] to life;” it meant, “[May you be consigned] to life,” the life in question being that of the blessing’s reciter, not life in general. In such a case, ḥayim does not take the definite article and l’chaim, not la’chayim, is correct.