On Laving the Hands
In my morning study of Hayom Yom, a daily calendar compiled by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, I came across the word “lave” in a translation of the Yiddish “negel vasser,” denoting the ritual washing of the hands religious Jews complete upon waking. An elevated choice over the more humble “wash,” it feels like a word imbued with sacred meaning, though it isn’t especially and I suppose that speaks to the way we accord privilege to Latinate words in English.
At first glance, I assumed “lave” was of Anglo-Norman pedigree. It looks as if it ought to be related to the French laver and its Anglo-Norman relatives, and so to the familiar Latinate family around lavare: lavatory, lavation, lavage. In that lineage, “lave” would simply be the slightly archaic English cousin of an otherwise ordinary Romance verb, recruited here because “wash” felt too flat for liturgical prose. But the O.E.D. sends one further back. The core verbal sense “to wash; to bathe; to pour water over” is traced to the Anglo-Saxon “lafian,” with attestations beginning in no less a corpus than Beowulf. Whatever visual resemblance it bears to the French verb is a secondary convergence, not an origin.
Once one notices this, the translator’s choice is even more striking. To “lave the hands” instead of “wash the hands” is not only to match the elevated tone of ritual but also to tap a native Germanic lexeme that has existed all along in the margins of the standard lexicon. The word’s survival into modern English has been haphazard, largely literary, and frequently the result of translation: the most recent quotation from the O.E.D. is from Ellis’s 1871 translation of Catullus’s Poems, “Now in waters clear they feet like ivory laving.” An 1858 translation of Rhythm of Bernard de Morlaix reads, “Who … bore with me in defilement, And from defilement laved.” Prior usage includes Gower, Shakespeare, and Milton.
Contemporary examples are few, and tend either toward consciously archaizing prose or toward highly conventionalized collocations: “lapped and laved,” “laved by waves,” and the like. It is the sort of verb that almost never appears in unreflective description of everyday action: no one “laves” the dishes. When it does surface in a religious context, such as in the translation that prompted this note, it functions as a marker of register as much as a bearer of meaning. The action is unchanged; what alters is the perceived distance from the vernacular.
A further complication, which is worth noting in passing, is that “lave” has another history as a noun and verb in Scots, where “the lave” means “the rest, the remainder.” That line is cognate with “leave” rather than “lavare,” and its sense is entirely different. The two words are etymologically distinct, but modern readers encounter them with the same spelling. As with so many such homographs, the potential for unnoticed resonance is always there; but in the context of ritual handwashing, it is the Anglo-Saxon sense which matters. The translator who reaches for “lave” is drawing on a long, if intermittent, tradition of using this verb when water meets the body in a setting that requiring description in more than purely functional terms.