Excerpt from
Born to Kvetch
by Michael Wex

Jews and non-Jews alike spit to ward off bad luck; everybody seems to know of the demon-repelling powers of human saliva. Spitting can be defined as the deliberate projection of saliva into the area around you. Neither standing saliva inside the mouth nor involuntary drool outside it is believed to protect against anything but dating it's the propulsion or transfer, rather than the mere presence of saliva that does the trick. Granted that the saliva must be in motion in order to be effective, "Where," asked these Jews of yore, "shteyt geshribn, is it written, that the motion of saliva has to originate in the mouth? Why don't we just find some that's already part of our surroundings and transfer it to another part of those surroundings in such a way as to give it the same deterrent effect as actual expectoration? But where are we going to find traces of our own saliva and how will we propel them? They're only traces, after all."

God, as they say in Yiddish, shikt di refue far der make, He sends the remedy in advance of the plague. Halokhe obliges us to drink four glasses of wine over the course of the seder and everybody, children included, has a glass which is filled (and drained) at specified points in the proceedings. The first of these compulsory libations takes place well before we get to the plagues, which means that everybody's glass contains enough saliva for apotropaic purposes and enough wine to get that saliva moving. The finger does duty for a human tongue.

And so Passover wine-dip was born. The logic was a little too subtle, however, and the lack of actual spitting caused the origins of the custom to be forgotten; most people who did it did so because... that's what you do. Hirsch's reinterpretation of the motives underlying this act managed the brilliant feat of translating something that was intended to cover our own asses into a show of concern for the asses of others.

III

As this need to protect ourselves when naming plagues that took place thousands of years ago might suggest, Judaism as a civilization and a system of thought has a dep-seated belief in the power of words and the significance of names. It could never countenance the logic of Shakespeare's Juliet:

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself
(Romeo and Juliet, II:2:43-49)

Juliet is taking the goyishe side in a debate that has bedeviled Western philosophy since the days of the Greeks: is the name of a person or thing just a label that derives its meaning from convention or is it an integral part of the being to which it refers? Can the name be doffed without affecting the thing, or is the essence of the thing contained in its name? Juliet takes the former position, which is known as nominalism; the other, more Jewish one is called realism, and so far as the Jews are concerned, a rose by any other name would have a very different smell. What happened with sheygets and shikse was just an early application of realist theory. Call a rose a pile of crap and the flower turns into something else.