Long story short, I’m dating a guy whose daughter is having a bat mitzvah and I’m helping him write up the invitations. I got the design down, the fonts are good and then I came across this BSD as an option on some of the invitations that one can spend the big bucks ordering. BSD as I’ve found out is spelled Bet Samech Daled and according to this Rabbi:
What’s interesting is that on this invitation which supposedly contains the BSD, it doesn’t look like it’s written in Hebrew (AFAICT). Is that in Aramaic? Or should it be written in Hebrew (and if it’s written in Hebrew, I’m assuming that the order would be right to left “BSD”, right?)
That’s Hebrew. It’s just cursive, so you didn’t recognize the letters. Most non-Israelis never see handwritten Hebrew outside of a Torah scroll, so that’s not that surprising.
Incidentally, I hate it when people write the BSD. On a Bat Mitzva invite it’s fine, but there’s a lot of people who’ll put it everywhere, including business correspondence. It gets annoying after a while.
This is completely pointless, but the Temple in that sample invite is down the street from where I work, and any number of my students go there. Kinda odd.
Bet Hei does not stand for “baruch ha-shem” but rather “b’ezrat ha-shem” “with God’s help”, the Hebrew version of “b’siyata d’shamaya” “with Heaven’s help” in Aramaic.
It should be noted that “Ha-shem” means the “the name” but is used to refer to God.
Don’t forget Passedika Bazooka gum. I can only think that if I could read cursive Hebrew, and understood Hebrew in general, those comics might be marginally amusing.
