ABSTRACT
Let me begin with a linguistic misnomer. The Hebrew lexicon is devoid of an appropriate equivalent to the word “care.” Translated as attention, looking after, concern, treatment and even honor (in the biblical sense), the concept is defi cient in a certain added value that is inexhaustible in Hebrew. That lacuna could be construed as yet another haphazard mismatch between two linguistic codes but it could also lend itself to a more culturally telling interpretation. If we adopt the assumption that language both represents and manufactures social categories as well as whole cosmologies, then the absence of the term in Hebrew is intriguing, since the revival of Hebrew is largely an institutionalized effort to engineer a system of communication that is both a functional tool and a setter of collective identities in a nascent modern nation state. Care, or more precisely its non-existence therefore, should be treated as one of the refl ections of the process of Israeli nation building and its symbolic structuring. This premise linking societal considerations to normative meanings governing attitudes and practices will underline our discussion of eldercare in Israel.
