Forward reader Leon Chameides has been, so he writes, “troubled since Passover,” which is indeed a long time to be troubled. What is bothering him is “the grammatical construction of the tenth plague.

The Israeli poet Yona Wallach memorably wrote that “Hebrew is a sex maniac.” Wallach, who died in 1985, was no stranger to attention-grabbing subjects: One of her poems discusses sex with tefillin.

Unlike in English, Hebrew nouns, verbs, and adjectives come in two varieties, commonly called masculine and feminine. The endings -a (singular) and -ot (plural) frequently mark the feminine, and while ...