I have long believed that the most important rule of customer satisfaction is: Under-promise; over-deliver. While the second part isn’t always easy, the first is, so let me get that out of the way.

I am writing at 10:00 on Monday morning. As soon as I have finished this blog post, Bernice and I will be driving to Zichron, from where, tomorrow morning, we will leave for the airport to fly to Portugal.

These are not, I’m starting to feel, the optimal conditions for writing a blog post. First, there is, inevitably, a bit of pressure. We want to leave Maale Adumim in time to arrive in Zichron, or, more accurately, Binyamina (where Raphael’s new gan is located) in time to pick him up. We have, in fairness, plenty of time, even allowing for unexpected hold-ups on the way, which can, of course, these days, range from a minor accident on the road half a kilometre ahead to a ballistic missile attack from Iran.

In addition, this week, my mind has been too full of other, individually trivial but cumulatively significant, concerns. Or rather, my mind has not, it seems, been full enough of them. Let me explain. This last couple of weeks should have been punctuated by steady, leisurely progress, working our way through our to-do list for preparing for a trip to Portugal. However, any normal activity over the last few weeks has been sabotaged – wonderfully and spiritually upliftingly sabotaged, but nevertheless, sabotaged – by the on-off, stop-go procession of the Tishrei chagim. This has left Bernice and I in no state of mind to work systematically and in an ordered fashion through our list.

Somehow, I completed the packing yesterday, and discovered that, once again, the pile of games, books, children’s clothes, staple foodstuffs, snacky kiddie treats, grape juice, and more arcane other stuff than you can imagine, a pile that seemed to occupy the entire salon, managed to Mary Pop-in to two regulation suitcases, and weighed in, astonishingly, at under 35 kilos. Of course, with each trip, the maximum case weight I can manage to lift over the lip of the hatch of our hatchback drops by a few hundred grams, so that 2025’s 17-kilo case is the bicep equivalent of 2020’s 23-kilo case.

Normally, completing the packing means just that. This time, it was only the overture to remembering a frighteningly large number of items – from the charger for my shaver to the crochet hook I use for catching the threads of my tzitzit and looping them through the eyehole so that they don’t tangle in the washing machine – and having to partially unpack and repack.

While my mind has been full of extra socks and sink drainers, I have been unable to allocate any room for ‘What on earth am I going to write about this week?’, so that, in addition to the time pressure, I am also feeling topic pressure.

All of which is a long-winded (500 words so far, so we’re already a third of the way through and we haven’t said anything yet) way of under-promising.

At this point, it occurs to me that, since I doubt my ability, this particular week, to over-deliver, bringing up the subject of over-delivery probably counts as a tactical error. However, it’s too late now. I certainly don’t have time for any rewrites. Most weeks, my post is more or less a stream of semi-consciousness. This week, that is going to be even truer than normal.’

I had thought of reflecting, this week, on how my post of last week has been overtaken by events. However, on rereading it, I don’t feel that there is much I need to adjust. It has been a good week – especially at the start – but I don’t think any rational player believes we are going to get very much further through Trump’s 20 points. (Incidentally, CoPilot tells me that the 21^st point in the Peace Plan – which mysteriously disappeared before the plan was published, and on whose disappearance I commented last week – was a proposal that Trump himself would lead the transitional authority overseeing Gaza’s post-conflict governance. Presumably it was eventually felt that that was rather a demeaning post for a king.)

If I’m going to get even close to 1500 words, and leave on time for Binyamina, I think a change of subject is called for, and it must, perforce, be an abrupt one. This would be a good place for a road sign warning of an upcoming and frighteningly sharp segue in the road ahead.

The difference between Donald Trump’s character humour and Patricia Routledge’s, it seems to me, is that Trump makes no attempt to conceal the fact that he is fully aware of how humorous people find what they may mistakenly believe is his apparent lack of self-awareness of his arrogance and pomposity. Patricia Routledge, on the other hand, was at her best (and at her best nobody was better) at portraying characters who were genuinely unaware of how funny their feeling of self-importance was. For my money, her portrayal of Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced Bouquet) was her least subtle and least successful portrayal. (Viewing figures, in fairness, suggest otherwise.) If all you know of Routledge’s work is that portrayal in the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances, then you are missing a great deal. In comedy, she was never funnier than in her ‘Kitty’ monologues written by the hugely talented and sadly missed Victoria Wood. You can see an example, brilliant but plucked at random, here. (It only lasts 3 minutes; please do visit.)

For a slightly longer (5-minute) excerpt from a characterisation which is more nuanced, where the humour is more gentle and the pathos more front and centre, you can find an extract from Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads here. Viewing it again now, I am acutely aware of how centred it is in a particular geographical area, social milieu and historical moment of mid-late 20^th Century Britain, and I fear some of you may not find much here to grab hold of. Sadly, that will be your loss, because, as is true of all of Bennett’s monologues to camera, this is TV writing of the highest calibre, executed to perfection by an actress who was in complete command of the dramatic material.

On the world stage, the death of Diane Keaton is undoubtedly larger, and certainly more untimely. It certainly falls, for me, into the category of memento mori. However, Patricia Routledge was, in her own way, equally a unique talent, who, just like Keaton, occupied a small patch of the dramatic landscape that nobody else did or could occupy, and who made that patch her own. Keaton, in fairness, also wandered further away from that patch, and with great success, but with both Routledge and Keaton, the mere mention of the name is enough to conjure up an entire character.

Okay. 1200 words is, if you are rounding up to the next half-thousand, 1500 words, and 11:15 is about as close as I can cut it without risking an overly speedy and potentially frosty drive up north. So this is as far as we go this week. Next week, adventures in Lisbon, if all goes as planned.

Blogger’s Note: Between writing the above on Monday morning before leaving Maale Adumim and rereading it on Monday evening in Zichron Yaakov before setting it up ro be published on Tuesday morning, I have discovered that J D Vance’s arrival in Israel tomorrow morning is expected to disrupt airport traffic between 10:30 and 13:00. Our flight is scheduled to leave at 13:55, but your guess is now as good as mine. And if this is the kind of challenge that is supposed to keep you young, why do I suddenly feel 10 years older? The only silver lining is that, if things go disastrously wrong tomorrow, that’s next week’s blog post sorted.

And, at 1334 words, that, dear reader, is that, for this week.

You find me, today (Sunday) riding the train up to Binyamina to spend the day with Esther and family. I am laden with not only my laptop – this is another chag Tuesday week, so publication date is Monday again – but also my arba minim (my four species), with the plan of showing them to Raphael, and helping him bentsch lulav in the sukka, even if my research this week has revealed that this is a custom not universally embraced. (The ‘in the sukka’ part, I hasten to add. Everyone agrees that bentsching lulav is a good thing.) If it were universal, of course, it would be about the only custom in Judaism that is (although there are some who disagree).

But I digress. For some of last week, I kidded myself that I might, after two weeks of the kind of geopolitical analysis that I feel totally unqualified for, be able to regale you with memories of seeing Robert Redford (a global master at what he did) on the big screen, or Patricia Routledge (an actress of extraordinary range and an English national treasure whose name, I suspect, means nothing to my native Israeli or transatlantic readers) on the small.

However, in the end, I see that I have no choice. There is, this week, only one game in town – although at time of writing it is still unclear exactly what that game is. This week’s post has to be dedicated to Trump’s 20.5-point plan. (If you know for certain whether it is a 21-point plan, as originally touted, or a 20-point plan, as increasingly mentioned lately, I’d appreciate clarification.)

So, let me set out my position. If the hostages, living and dead, are returned by Hamas to their families, then I will rejoice. Until then, I fail to understand the jubilation that has been very visible in some sectors of Israeli society and the world media. What we have at the moment is an agreement that Trump declares will bring eternal peace to the Middle East. Will all those who believe that Trump is capable of not exaggerating please go into that phone booth over there? Thank you. We also have a piece of paper with a Hamas signature on it. Will all those who believe that a Hamas signature is worth the paper it is written on please go into the same phone booth, as I see that there’s still plenty of room in there. Thank you. That leaves the rest of us. 

Yes, of course Qatar and Turkey’s endorsements are encouraging, although, again, if I shook either of their hands I would count my fingers afterwards. However, you will, I hope, allow me my caution. As I say, if the hostages, alive and dead, are returned by Hamas, then I will rejoice. Until then, I will remain non-committal.

What is very clear is that, in the first phase of the agreement, the return of the hostages will come at a very heavy price. Although Netanyahu has been commendably insistent on the handful of master-terrorists that will not be part of the exchange of convicted terrorist and arrested suspects for the hostages, very, very many of those likely to be released are murdering terrorists.

For me, one of the major lessons that Israel has to learn from this whole horrifying experience is that terrorist prisoners in Israeli prisons are an encouragement to the abduction by terrorists of innocent civilians. As soon as is possible, Israel should pass legislation making the existing death penalty mandatory for all convicted terrorist murderers. If we have no terrorist murderers to release, we will have removed a major incentive for the abduction of civilian or military hostages.

Of course, such prisoners are a potential source of sometimes vital intelligence information. If I were the head of the secret service, I would propose to the Prime Minister that, in the case of terrorist murderer prisoners who may have useful information, we should, after their conviction, stage their execution, and remove them to a secret underground facility where they can be interrogated until such time as they are deemed no longer useful, and then executed.

Please excuse my cold-blooded proposal. I am not the same person I was two years ago, Exactly two years ago, I, in common with all of Israel, felt myself the target of an attempt at genocide. Since then, I, in common with all of Israel, and the Jewish people abroad, have felt myself the target of uninterrupted calls for genocide over a period of two years. At the same time, my country has been conducting a just war, in which, even accepting the casualty figures published by the wholly unreliable enemy, the ratio of civilian to combatant casualties resulting from the campaign we have conducted is judged by objective world experts to be the lowest ever achieved in such a conflict. At the same time, leading Western nations, governments and populations, have consistently accused Israel of genocide, a claim in such obvious ignorance or ignoring of the facts as to make it impossible not to judge it to be antisemitic.

So, yes, I am not the same person I was two years ago, and I am angry at the fact that I have been changed by events, actions and opinions aimed at me over that period.

As I write this, Hamas, who are required by the later phases of the agreement to disarm, are combing the streets of Gaza City, executing in public members of other terrorist organisations. This helps to explain my scepticism that anything will come of the later phases of the agreement. Nevertheless, if the hostages, alive and dead, are returned to their families, then those families will finally be able to begin their journey back from hell. In addition, the sacred pledge that Israel has always made to its citizens, not to leave anyone behind, will be to some extent restored, and the long and painful process of national healing will at last be able to begin. This will indeed be sufficient cause for rejoicing, and our prayers are that the next couple of days will indeed bring what we are all hoping and praying for.

PS: It is now 09:10 on Monday morning, and, as I write, news has broken that the first seven live hostages have been handed by the RedCross to the IDF: after 738 days, Eitan Mor, Gali and Ziv Berman, Matan Angrest, Omri Miran, Guy Gilboa-Dalal and Alon Ohel are no longer held in inhuman conditions by Hamas. In the coming hours, the other 13 hostages believed to be still alive are due to be released by Hamas in Khan Yunis: Evyatar David, Avinatan Or, Ariel Cunio, David Cunio, Nimrod Cohen, Bar Kuperstein, Yosef Chaim Ohana, Segev Kalfon, Elkana Bohbot, Maxim Herkin, Eitan Horn, Alon Ahel, and Rom Braslavski.

Of course I feel in a different place this morning from where I was yesterday. However, although the transfer to the Red Cross was conducted in Gaza City as required by the agreement, with no ceremony, and, apparently, with Hamas forbidding Gazans from filming the transit of the hostages, there are reports of preparations for a staged ceremony in Khan Yunis. This is the first indication that Hamas may ignore those clauses of the agreement that it is not ready to accept.

In addition, 28 hostages are believed to be dead, with their bodies still in Gaza: Tamir Nimrodi, Bipin Joshi, Tamir Adar, Sonthaya Akrasri, Muhammad al-Atarash, Sahar Baruch, Uriel Baruch, Inbar Hayman, Itay Chen, Amiram Cooper, Oz Daniel, Ronen Engel, Meny Godard, Ran Gvili, Tal Haimi, Asaf Hamami, Guy Illouz, Eitan Levi, Eliyahu Margalit, Joshua Mollel, Omer Neutra, Daniel Peretz, Dror Or, Suthisak Rintalak, Lior Rudaeff, Yossi Sharabi, Arie Zalmanowicz, Hadar Goldin.

It is not clear how many of these bodies are held by Hamaz, how many are in known graves, how many are in unknown locations. It is currently expected that a (possibly international) force, including Israeli personnel, will work within Gaza to locate and retrieve these bodies, so that they can be brought back to Israel for burial, and so that their 28 families can also begin to work towards some kind of closure.

Until such time as that happens, if it ever does, even the first phase of the agreement in incomplete. In my eyes, elation and celebration, such as we are hearing in the voices of the mainstream media reporting from Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, are inappropriate. I am feeling a partial sense of relief and gratitude, and a contentment that there are currently seven and, God willing, shortly another 13, families reunited with their loved ones. It is also tremendous to hear that all seven of those released to date are standing unaided.

So, at this stage, I wait, with a little more faith than I felt last night, and a little more optimism, but still with the expectation that, in the best-case scenario, the only lasting achievement of this agreement will be the return of Israelis to Israel, to attempt to begin a new life or to be buried with dignity.

May I be proven wrong, and may we all continue to hear good news.

I face a bit of a dilemma this week. Because Sukkot begins on Monday evening, I need to plan to publish this week’s post on Monday morning. I can’t honestly see myself writing it on Sunday, when I will be busy decorating the sukka, so I really need to write the post today (Friday). However, looking back, the last ten days seem like one almost unbroken string: get ready for shul, go to shul, daven in shul, come home from shul, eat, sleep, repeat, Not that I am complaining: I find the liturgy of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur profoundly moving and powerful and the traditional melodies very evocative; in addition, the sense of being unhurried in prayer is one I particularly value.

All of which means that all I could really think of to write about as I walked back and forth to shul repeatedly this week is prayer. I know that I wrote about prayer last week, and so this may seem an unwise choice. Nevertheless, because there were some things I left unsaid last week, and because I have received positive feedback, including from unexpected quarters, I decided to plunge in, and finish what I started last week.

And then we came home from shul last night, switched on our phones, and heard the news of the murderous attack on Heaton Park Shul in Manchester. I knew immediately that I could not ignore this appalling attack; I also realised how it actually led directly from what I was planning to write. So, on a day when my thoughts and prayers are with family and friends in Britain, at this critical time for Anglo-Jewry, let me share my reflections with you.

In discussions about organised religion and formalised prayer, one of the points often raised is the impossibility of a rule-based religion fitting all believers and all situations. How can a set liturgy be relevant every time we follow it? How can a liturgy written, or accrued, or hammered out centuries ago speak to the reality Jews face in 2025? (The same argument is sometimes made about the Torah. However, you don’t have to follow the weekly reading for many years to realise that it is always possible to find something in the rich text that speaks to that week’s headlines, every year anew.)

The liturgy blazed alive for me, and, I suspect, for many others, this Yamim Noraim as we read Avinu Malkeinu. This is a prayer with a very long history. The Talmud records Rabbi Akiva (died 135 CE) reciting two verses each beginning Avinu Malkeinu (Our Father, Our King) in a prayer to end a drought (apparently successfully). The prayer book of Amram Gaon (9th century) had 25 verses. Mahzor Vitry (early 12th century) has more than 40 verses and added the explanation that the prayer accumulated additional verses that were added ad hoc on various occasions and thereafter retained. This evolution continued over the centuries, so that each of the traditions of Judaism currently recites its own version of the prayer. Our Polish tradition has 44 verses, each constituting an appeal to our Father, our King.

During the Ten Days of Repentance, in particular, our liturgy constantly defines our relation to God in two contrasting ways. We acknowledge Him as our Father; we allow ourselves to appeal to Him to show fatherly mercy on us, in this role. At the same time, we acknowledge Him as our King, and stress our total dependence on His being gracious to us as His loyal subjects.

The 44 verses of Avinu Malkeinu are wide-ranging, but fall into a small number of clearly-defined categories. There are those that appeal to God, at this period in the year when the fate of all living beings is signed and sealed for the coming year, to look kindly on us and inscribe us for life. Others request that the specific evils, either that others plan to visit on us or that occur naturally, be thwarted. Others appeal to God to show mercy for the sake of holy martyrs, or, if not, then for His own sake.

I want to focus on six verses near the beginning of the prayer.

אָבִֽינוּ מַלְכֵּֽנוּ בַּטֵּל מֵעָלֵֽינוּ כָּל גְּזֵרוֹת קָשׁוֹת
אבינוּ מַלְכֵּֽנוּ בַּטֵּל מַחְשְׁ֒בוֹת שׂוֹנְ֒אֵֽינוּ
אבינוּ מַלְכֵּֽנוּ הָפֵר עֲצַת אוֹיְ֒בֵֽינו
אבינוּ מַלְכֵּֽנוּ כַּלֵּה כָּל צַר וּמַשְׂטִין מֵעָלֵֽינוּ
אבינוּ מַלְכֵּֽנוּ סְתוֹם פִּיּוֹת מַשְׂטִינֵֽנוּ וּמְ֒קַטְרִיגֵֽנוּ
אבינוּ מַלְכֵּֽנוּ כַּלֵּה דֶּֽבֶר וְחֶֽרֶב וְרָעָב וּשְׁ֒בִי וּמַשְׁחִית וְעָוֹן וּשְׁ֒מַד מִבְּ֒נֵי בְרִיתֶֽךָ

Our Father, our King! annul all harsh decrees concerning us.
Our Father, our King! annul the designs of those who hate us.
Our Father, our King! thwart the plans of our enemies.
Our Father, Our King! rid us of every oppressor and adversary.
Our Father, Our King! seal the mouths of our adversaries and accusers.
Our Father, Our King! remove pestilence, sword, famine, captivity, destruction, [the burden of] iniquity and religious persecution from the members of Your covenant.

Reciting this repeatedly over the 25 hours of Yom Kippur, I kept coming back to two observations. First, how can it be that these words were incorporated into our liturgy hundreds of years ago, and yet, if we were looking to add new verses relevant to the state of the Jewish People in Israel and in the diaspora in October 2025, in Tishrei 5786, we would quickly realise that there is no need to? These six verses reflect, with word-perfect relevance, where we find ourselves today.

The second realisation was that, having lived most of my life in what I believed was a different kind of world, I find, over the last two years, that I am in fact living in the same world as the Jews have occupied for millenia. The fifty or so years after the end of the Shoah were, for the Jews of the free world, a golden age, and that golden age is now over. You may also feel that it was never, in fact, more than an age plated in fool’s gold. Suddenly, the horrifying stories of the tortures inflicted on the leading Rabbis in medieval times do not seem like a distant memory; rather, they seem to vividly pre-echo the reality that we seem to have been plunged into on Simchat Torah two years ago.

The news of the attack in Manchester serves only to intensify that feeling. The noises coming out of Britain since yesterday morning intensify it further. You may, like some of the mainstream media, argue that it is premature to assign motive to the attacker, to which I would reply that, if his first name is Jihad, he at least seems clear about his motive.

Keir Starmer has declared to the Anglo-Jewish community that he will do “everything in my power to guarantee you the security you deserve”. This is, of course, the same Keir Starmer who has accepted without question Hamas propaganda lies about ‘starvation’ in Gaza, and has thereby tacitly supported the accusations of genocide against Israel. It is the same Keir Starmer who has threatened to arrest Israel’s prime minister as a war criminal. It is the same Keir Starmer who rewarded the butchers of October 7 by ‘recognising’ the ‘state’ of ‘Palestine’. It is the same Keir Starmer who has failed to ensure the policing of Britain’s streets, and has instead given them over to pro-Hamas demonstrators, allowing them to publicise their equating of Zionism with Judaism and thereby to globalise the intifada, viewing British Jews as complicit in Israel’s ‘war crimes’ and deserving to do for the crime of genocide.

The British Home Secretary has expressed disappointment at the pro-Palestinian marches that took place in Britain on Thursday, despite appeals from the police to cancel them, in order to free up police to increase patrols in Jewish areas. She said that the protestors “could have stepped back and just given a community that has suffered deep loss just a day or two”. She failed to state exactly how long a wait was appropriate before resuming calling for the death of all Jews.

At some point yesterday evening, I realised that, to be honest, today’s reality for the Jews is not in any way comparable to what it has been for the last two millenia. Unlike in 1492, or 1290, or 1938, or 1147, or 1903, or any one of hundreds of other dates, persecuted Jews have a home to go to, in Israel. It is, of course, true that they will not be guaranteed a life of untroubled safety here; nobody needs reminding that Israel is subject to terror attacks. However, from where I’m standing, living in a country where the government, the security forces, the local authorities, are all primarily concerned for my safety makes the Israeli experience, even in 2025, qualitatively different from the British one.

And so, I am left this morning with a question. In the middle of the night last night, a family member posted on their WhatsApp status a single word in white on a black background: Dayenu! Enough! I want to ask them what they mean by that, and I want to ask all my friends and family in England what it will take for them to accept that enough is enough – ‘Dayenu!’ – and that the place for Jews is the Jewish homeland.

The England that I grew up in, that had a national culture and ethos that I was proud to identify with, is, quite simply, no longer. It has been sacrificed on the altar of multi-culturalism, and its democratic values have been undermined by anti-democratic forces that exploit Britain’s democracy in order to impose their alien values. In the subsequent battle for the heart of Britain, either the Caliphate or the extreme right seems certain to triumph. Neither will provide a place for Jews to live a secure and meaningful life.

One last liturgical comment. In the Musaf Amida on Shabbat, we say: ‘May it be Your will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to lead us in joy back to our land, and to plant us within its borders.’

I think there are two massive messages here. The first is that we are not praying to be brought back to Israel. That is going to happen, ultimately, one way or another. What we pray is that we should come back in joy, rather than under duress. This is the choice facing the Anglo-Jewish community (indeed, facing Jewish communities throughout the diaspora) at this precise moment. The second message is the wish that God plant us within the borders of the land. The soil of Eretz Yisrael is the natural soil in which Jews can flourish. It is here, and only here, that we can be truly rooted.

Our gates, and our hearts, are open. May the diaspora join Israel in a resurgence that will populate the under-populated areas of Israel and open up the Negev, revive the economy, strengthen the military, reignite Zionist spirit, and help the country towards a national healing it so desperately needs. Come for your sakes and your children’s sakes, and come for our sakes as well. Now more than ever we need each other home, here.

You may not be at all surprised to learn that I’ve been giving a fair amount of thought recently to the question of prayer. Or perhaps that should be ‘the questions of prayer’. What with selichot before the regular shacharit morning service every day for the last week and a half, and two long days of morning services of Rosh Hashana, I’ve been occupied in prayer a fair bit recently, and I thought I might bounce some of those thoughts off you this week.

But first: I have never lived close to the shul I daven in. Growing up, we were an eighteen-minute walk, mostly uphill, from our shul. For the first fourteen years of our married life, Bernice and I lived 20 miles from shul. In East Talpiot, we had a challenging twelve-minute uphill climb to shul, and here in Maale Adumim shul is what used to be a twelve-minute walk, and is now, inexplicably, a sixteen-minute walk away, including a climb of 82 steps at the end of our street. The disadvantage of living so far from where you daven is obvious; the advantages perhaps less so. Let me, then, describe the two key advantages.

First, nobody WhatsApps me early in the morning to tell me that the shul is one short of a minyan.

Second, I usually have time, either walking to shul or walking home from shul, for contemplation. Some of my better blog posts have been shaped on the potter’s wheel of my walk home.

So, when a chance conversation with a fellow-congregant after the evening service last Friday night set me thinking, I had sixteen minutes to mull over what he had said as I walked home.

Let me give you a quick background to the topic of our conversation. In the wake of October 7 and the abduction of the hostages, and in common with most mainstream congregations in Israel (though not as quickly as some), our community adopted the practice of reciting a couple of psalms at the end of each of the three daily services, followed by the brief prayer Acheinu Kol Beit Yisrael, calling on God to have mercy on all Jewish captives, and to bring about their release. The psalms are read antiphonally, with the shaliach tzibbur (the person leading the prayers) reading the psalm a verse at a time, pausing for the congregation to repeat each verse. This traditional method draws each congregant’s attention to each verse.

We prepared copies of a sheet with a dozen appropriate psalms, traditionally recited in times of duress, and the shaliach tzibbur is free to choose which psalms to recite. In practice, most people choose to confine themselves to two very well-known psalms, which the congregation are familiar with and which more people are likely to respond to aloud. These are Psalm 121 (Essa Einai – I will lift up my eyes) – and Psalm 130 (Mimaamakim Kraticha – From the depths I called to You – or perhaps you know it better as De Profundis) As I say, we recite these three texts after completing the set liturgy of each service; their recital adds no more than two minutes to the service.

As I was leaving shul last Friday night, a fellow congregant said he felt that the time had come for us to cut out one of the psalms, and recite only one each time. He argued that reciting two psalms was a burdensome imposition on the congregation, and he pointed out that, judged objectively, our reciting the psalms and prayer ‘religiously’ after each service had, over the last months, yielded no tangible results. He admitted that he personally finds it difficult to think consciously of the hostages every time he recites the psalms; the very routine, he finds, makes genuine focus on the hostages’ plight more difficult to achieve each time afresh.

I told him that I didn’t feel the same way, and, as I walked home,  I gave more thought to what he had said and contemplated the essence of prayer.

Our sages tell us that prayer is a substitute for the animal sacrifice in the Temple. As such, it is an expression of worship and, primarily, of thanks to God. At the same time, our liturgy clearly acknowledges that there is also a place for supplication in prayer. Our services are structured to allow us to make local, even personal, requests of God. The question I found myself asking was: What is the purpose of that supplication? My friend in shul had clearly judged our prayers for the hostages to be ‘unsuccessful’. What, I asked myself, does success look like in relation to a prayer?

I think my answer is multi-layered. First and foremost, a prayer of request or supplication is, in common with all prayers, an acknowledgement of our position as the servants of God, and of His position as the Almighty. In turning to him to show mercy to the hostages, to help us in our hour of need, to heal our sickness, to ‘answer’ our prayers, we are primarily acknowledging Him as the proper address for our prayers. God alone is capable of bringing the hostages home. As many of our prayers explicitly state, such a prayer is an expression of the hope that God will want the outcome that we want. Yehi Ratzon Milfanecha – May it be Your will, O God. Our wish will be granted only if God’s will matches our will,

If talk of ‘granting a wish’ sounds more like Aladdin and the genie than the believing Jew and his or her God, let me attempt to justify my choice of words. I deliberately chose not to write, in the last paragraph, ‘Our prayers will be answered’ because I believe that our prayers are always answered. However, they may not be answered by what we want being granted. If your parents refused to allow you a second ice-cream as a child, they did not grant your wish, but they answered your prayer. ‘No’ is an answer, and, as in the case of the ice-cream, it is the right answer. Your parents knew what was good for you better than you did.

So, the first element of a prayer being successful is that it represents, for the supplicant, an acceptance and explicit acknowledgement of the true relationship between man and God.

The second element is, I feel, the effect that the prayer has on the consciousness of the person reciting the prayer. To set aside two minutes at the end of every service to pause and reflect on the plight of the hostages is to create a structure that guards against putting them out of our mind. The mainstream media achieve the same thing by providing a platform for the voices of the families of the hostages to be heard every day. My friend admitted that he found it difficult to engage with this reflection and to be moved by it on a regular basis. I admit that I don’t have the same experience. Without this daily reminder, I would, I fear, let whole days pass without thinking of the hostages. As it is, every time I recite the psalms I reflect on their suffering.

In this connection, I find it astonishing that, in our shul, more than a few congregants regularly walk out of shul during the recitation of these psalms. I know that these are not people who do not care about the hostages. Clearly, as my interlocutor suggested, the familiarity of the recitation has bred in them, at the very least, disregard. The way to combat this disregard is, naturally, to focus consciously on the words. Prayers are, of course, much more than words; at the same time, words are what prayers are wrapped up in, and words are the only route we have into prayers. An awareness of the words, and a focussing on them, is the pre-requisite for mindful, and therefore meaningful prayer, That, I am confident, is the way of Judaism. It is certainly the way of my Judaism.

By the time my reasoning had reached this point, I had reached home and was able to immediately put my abstract reflections into practice by mindfully reciting Kiddush.

Let my close by wishing you all Gmar Hatima Tova. However you mark Yom Kippur, may it be a meaningful day for you and, if it involves the recitation of any prayers, may you find the time and the state of mind to reflect on the meaning of those words.

Blogger’s Note: In an attempt to work around the Jewish calendar, and taking great care not to commit myself, I plan, bli neder, to post for the next two weeks on Monday morning rather than Tuesday morning.

It’s now 11PM on Monday evening. Having spent most of the last week finalising the layout and graphics for the shul magazine, I was able to proofread the galleys of the English half of the magazine today, which puts me, thankfully, ahead of schedule for our publication date.

However, when I came to sit down three hours ago to write this week’s blog post, I found that my brain had more or less turned to mush. Having spent the last two days trying, and failing miserably, to decide between another depressing post bemoaning how the world is going to hell in a handgun (yes, I know) and a short riff on the cultural significance, or otherwise, of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, when push came to shove I discovered that I couldn’t actually string two sentences together about anything. If I were a real writer, I’d say I had a case of block, but I don’t flatter myself..

Ando so, in what is disturbingly starting to look like a trend, I am actually going to admit defeat this week. Now that even we lie-abed Ashkenazim have started saying selichot, and I am having to get up twenty minutes earlier in the morning, I simply can’t stay up as late as I too often do.

If you’re looking for something to read this week, I recommend Gil Troy’s latest book, which goes by the least catchy title of the year so far: The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-Hatred. For those of you who don’t know him, Troy is an academic historian who has published several works about Zionism, and writes one of the two opinion columns in the Jerusalem Post that I feel is always essential reading. His latest book is short but typically authoritative and timely. This is a book that he wants to reach as many defenders of Israel and intelligent bystanders as possible, and so he has made it available to download for free. Here’s the link:

There you go: a gateway to considerably more than my usual 1500 words, and written by someone who actually knows what he is talking about.

I’d like to reassure you that normal service will be resumed next week, but I see that Rosh Hashana starts on Monday night, so, being realistic, and barring miracles,I think that my next post will be published a day before Erev Yom Kippur.

Until then, may I wish you and us all a happy and healthy New Year, a year in which we find resolution and closure to at least some of the conflicts that are afflicting us all, and in which the world as a whole starts to emerge from the nightmares that threaten to engulf us.

“Some days”, as a wise man once said, “you’re the fly, and some days you’re the windscreen.” The secret of a contented life, I suspect, is to acknowledge and accept the truth of that observation. Of course, that probably works better if the ratio of days when you are the fly to days when you are the windscreen stays closer to 0.5 than 0.

Of course, most of the time, a day is a very crude measure for this ratio. Any given day will offer plenty of situations in which you could be the fly or the windscreen, and, in my experience, most of the time they are more or less evenly balanced. You’re held up in traffic and you miss the screening of the film you planned to catch. However, this gives you the opportunity to take a delightful late spring hour-long walk through the park. You waste half an hour looking for the glasses that are on your forehead, but then a friend you haven’t spoken to for ages gives you a call and you have a lovely chat. You get the idea.

And then there are days like today (Monday), when the light tone of those first two paragraphs is so completely inappropriate. I have just been listening to a random 60 minutes of the mainstream TV station’s evening news programme. The broadcaster’s radio news channel carries the audio of that programme every evening, usually from 7:00 to 8:30, but this evening it stayed with the feed until 9:30. Today was one of those days.

At 6:00 this morning, Hamas operatives in the outskirts of Gaza City approached an IDF shelter. They made their way, undetected, up to a tank that was parked outside the shelter, with a full crew inside the tank. Apparently, the crew were not sleeping, but were checking their surroundings and reporting to their HQ. The terrorists managed to lob a bomb into the tank, which exploded, killing the crew of four: Staff Sergeant Uri Lamed, aged 20, from Tel Mond; Sergeant Gadi Cotal, aged 20, from Kibbutz Afikim; Sergeant Amit Aryeh Regev, aged 19, from Modi’in-Maccabim-Re’ut; and a fourth soldier whose name has not been released.

The question begs to be asked: how is it possible that they didn’t spot the terrorists? Is it just the case that, on Day 703, our soldiers can no longer maintain the level of alertness that the situation demands? Whether or not, these are another four lives, ended before they had done little more than begin; four unique life adventures that will now never be followed. I see no reference online to any of the four being married. Is this a blessing? They leave no widows or orphans. Or is it a curse? They are the end of their line. Nothing of them is left here for their parents and siblings, other than an entire world of memories to be cherished and shared.

These four boys/men are the 901^st, 902^nd, 903^rd and 904^th members of the forces to have fallen since October 7^th began 23 months ago. Are all those lives paving the way to a better future? Today is not a day when I  feel strong enough to contemplate that question too deeply.

And then, just a few hours later, three terrorists armed with automatic weapons infiltrated from West Bank villages, crossing the barrier at one of the well-known crossing points used by Palestinians seeking to cross the barrier illegally and work in Israel. They made their way to one of Jerusalem’s major junctions, to a busy bus-stop that serves multiple bus lines and where, at that hour of the morning, many people crowd the pavement waiting for their buses. There they boarded a bus and opened fire, killing six civilians and wounding at least 21 more.

The six who died were: Dr Mordechai Steintzag, aged 79, who made aliya from the US in his mid-40s, and, discovering there was no ‘healthy’ bread available in Israel, started a home bakery that now supplies supermarkets throughout Israel; Sarah Mendelsohn, aged 60, who was a worker in Bnei Akiva’s head office, and was eulogized today as “sort of the movement’s mother figure”; Levi Yitzchak Pash, a 57-year-old who learnt and worked at Yeshivat Kol Torah, and was eulogized as someone who always gave to others (he apparently had accepted a lift this morning at the bus-stop from a passing motorist, but, when someone else mentioned that he needed to get to Shaarei Tzedek hospital, Pash gave up his seat and thus met his death); Yaakov Pinto, a 25-year-old who came on aliya alone from Spain as a teenager, learnt and taught at yeshiva, and married just three months ago; Rav Yosef David, aged 43, a Torah student who leaves a wife and four children; Yisrael Metzner, aged 28, a Torah student of particular intensity, seriousness and modesty.

This list reflects the fact that the bus stop is at Ramot junction, and Ramot is a religious (largely Haredi) neighbourhood of North Jerusalem. In every other respect, this list is a random list. These very special, very ordinary people were not singled out by their murderers; they were just as ordinary, and just as special, as any six Israelis, any six human beings, are.

And then, as if the day were not black enough, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu arrived at the scene of the attack, and, of all the things that they might have chosen to say, and ignoring all the ways in which this tragic event might have given Bibi an opportunity to unite this fractured nation, this is how he, and Ben-Gvir, saw fit to mark this occasion. A little background is needed.

On Sunday this week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Israel Prison Service is failing to carry out its legal obligation to provide adequate and nourishing food to security prisoners (most, though not all, of whom are, of course, Palestinians). The minister responsible for this issue is Ben-Gvir, who, at the scene of the terror attack, accused judges of encouraging terror to “raise its head”. Bibi then added to his prepared remarks by endorsing Ben-Gvir’s remarks. “With regard to the court,” he said, “you are also in this war, and we don’t make things easier for our enemies; we hit them as hard as we can, and that’s what you ought to be doing as well.” So outrageous and divisive is this that my online search shows that the mainstream media decided it would be better not to report these words.

It is worth pointing out that the law that the court found that the Prison Service and Ben-Gvir are ignoring is, of course, a law that Netanyahu’s government introduced.

Those of us with memories that go back earlier than last week will recall that, in opposition, Ben-Gvir, and Bibi, were always very quick to lay the blame for Palestinian terror attacks in Jerusalem on ineffective government. This, apparently, is no longer the case.

No, it’s been a very dark day here in Israel. The only things to raise the spirits were two statesmanlike pronouncements. The first was from Abu Mazen who was quick to condemn any attack on Israeli or Palestinian civilians. Does this include, I find myself wondering, the murderers of Israeli civilians that he pays terrorists lifetime stipends for perpetrating?

The second was from President Macron, a man of whom it might be said: ‘To lose one Prime Minister may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose three looks like carelessness.’ He looks at Palestinians murdering Israelis and sees this as an indication that now is the perfect time for a two-state solution. “What,” he has presumably asked himself, “could possibly go wrong?” There speaks a man whose country’s civil struggles were with populations conveniently separated from France by a body of water considerably wider than the Jordan river, or possibly a man who has studied no history.

Tomorrow, by the law of averages, I should be the windscreen. And so to bed.

It used to be that becoming the greatest in the world at your sport was something you pursued privately, individually, obsessively, and in a markedly low-tech manner. Don Bradman famously played no competitive cricket as a child. Instead, he spent hours throwing a golf ball at a curved irregular brick wall in his back garden and hitting it on the rebound with a cricket stump. Among other things, this gave him an extraordinary ability to react very quickly to uneven bounce, which probably accounts in part for the fact that any discussion of the greatest batsman ever is a pointless exercise.

If we judge batsmen by their average runs scored, then competition is very fierce through the ages. 45 batsmen in the history of test cricket have averaged 50 or more. 44 of them average between 50.06 and 62.66 runs, which is very respectable. And then there is Bradman, so far out on his own that he doesn’t really belong on the same chart, with a test average of 99.94. Here’s a thousand words-worth of graph to hammer the point home:

The real picture is actually even more dramatic than that. Can any of you cricket fans name the batsman with the second highest average? It’s actually PHKS Mendis of Sri Lanka, and, if you didn’t get that right, it will be partly because Mendis, in common with the next three names on the list, played fewer than 24 tests. You have to go down to No 7 Sutcliffe to find another batsman who played a statistically significant number of tests.

So that’s what used to be. Spend 12 years in your back garden with a golf ball and a stump, and, if you have the innate ability to build on, you may just end up existing in a league of your own.

Needless to say, those days are long gone. In the modern world, sports teams, and individual sports stars, hire managers and trainers and separate coaches for each set of skills, and dieticians and physiotherapists and psychotherapists and doctors and witch doctors and goodness knows what else.

In the world of motor sports, of course, we are well used to this obsessive attention being lavished not only on the players but also on the machines, and the F1 competition is arguably as much about technology as it is about driving talent and skill. The same is true, of course, of cycling, yachting, and, to a lesser degree, any sport that uses equipment.

The dramatic improvements in personal best times in swimming in the 2010s were all attributable to developments in swimsuits. First, variable elasticity of the material compressed the body, making it more streamlined and hydrodynamic. Then, newly developed water-resistant microfilament fabrics reduced drag by up to 8%. The use of bonded rather than sewn seams reduced drag by a further 6%. The impact that this had on the 2009 World Swimming Championship times was such that one particular full-body suit was banned by the sports’ authorities in 2010.

You may also remember the Nike Vaporfly controversy. In case you don’t, we are talking about a running shoe whose advanced technology, specifically carbon fiber plates and specialized foam (don’t ask me; I just google this stuff) gave runners a significant advantage in bounce off the track. The shoe, basically, was providing some of the energy that would otherwise be provided by the athlete’s muscles.

You can, of course, argue that all of these are examples of difference in degree and not kind, and that equipment developments have always enhanced and will always enhance performance. If the developments are open to all, they should be welcomed. Faster running track surfaces are an example of an even playing field. (Did you like what I did there?)

Certainly, the modern cricket bat has effectively brought the boundary rope ever closer to the batsman’s crease, as the number of 6’s scored in the average innings these days will testify. Mind you, Gary Sobers’ performance for Notts against Glamorgan at the beautiful, and now sadly no-longer, St Helens’ ground, hitting Malcolm Nash for six sixes in a single over in 1968, still stands supreme, considering the bat he was using. St Helen’s was, it is fair to say, a bijou ground, but nevertheless what an achievement!

Welcoming back my readers from beyond the reach of the old empire and the greatest game: If you’ve ever upgraded your tennis racquet or sports shoes, after an embarrassingly long time, you will doubtless have experienced first-hand the impact of advancing technology. For those of us who don’t change our car every three years, it is much the same experience, something akin to suddenly finding yourself in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You may, by now, be wondering what has set me off on this flight of fancy. Well, it is the news that I read today that science is currently engaged in pushing back the boundaries of sport in ways that I wasn’t previously aware of. Gabriel Vichera was a biotech doctoral student in 2010, when his attention was caught by a story about a cloned polo horse that had been sold for $800,000.

Polo is, of course, an elitist sport that attracts many wealthy players, not least in Argentina, and cloning, typically from highly valued polo ponies, had been developing since 2003 in Argentina. Vichera founded a company, Kheiron Biotech, with financial backing, and is now breeding and selling cloned horses, at an average of $40,000 dollars a horse. This year the company expects to produce 400 horses by cloning.

However, the interesting part of this story is that the company is also conducting research into gene editing. The company is using a technology known as CRISPR, which works like genetic scissors. (I told you not to ask me!) They are experimenting with reducing the body’s expression of the myostatin gene, a gene that limits muscle growth, with the aim of producing a polo pony that is unnaturally fast and strong.

The sports’ authorities have not yet authorised the introduction of genetically engineered ponies into the sport. What is clear is that many polo pony breeders are, understandably, very much against the development, which may produce stock that is both more improved than breeding techniques can ever hope to achieve, and that is ‘brought to market’ very much faster.

So here is a subtle philosophical question. Polo pony breeders use scientific knowledge gained over generations (and also their intuitive gut feelings) in an attempt to engineer, through selective breeding, polo ponies that are closer to the ideal. Is the use of cloning technology qualitatively different from that, or is it just a more modern iteration of it? And, today’s big question, is genetic engineering through CRISPR qualitatively or only quantitively different?

And, for those of you looking for a plotline for your next thriller, is a mad scientist somewhere, as we speak, applying CRISPR technology to produce the next heavyweight boxing champion of the world?

Let us end with a couple of reminders of times when the world of sports was more innocent, and certainly less driven. Angela Mortimer died last week. She won the Wimbledon Ladies Singles title in 1961, beating crowd favourite Christine Truman in the first all-British final since 1914 (and, to date, the last). As well as holding the trophy for a year, she also won a £20 voucher for Lillywhites, a West End sports shop, equivalent to just under £400 (1800 shekels, $535) today. This year, Iga Świątek won £3 million. Yes, but is she happy?

And finally, it is fair to say that the England cricket team of the 1980s lacked something of the dedication and discipline of more recent years (although the early 2000s had some characters as well). Allan Lamb, a magnificent batsman and a real character, recalled this week playing a tour match against Western Australia.

The Americas Cup was being held in nearby Fremantle, and one evening, after a day’s cricket, several team members met up with the English sailing team, who were sponsored by a whisky distiller. Ian Botham was involved in a whisky drinking contest, among other pranks, and was so hungover the following day that when he went out to bat he forgot to take his bat with him, and someone had to run out to the middle with it. However, being Botham, he still managed to top score with 48 off 38 balls. Golden days!

Join me next week for, possibly, another self-inulgent nostalgic wallow in another part of the gene pool. Or, just possibly, something completely different.

A week ago, I stated, in response to a comment from a friend who was having difficulty making the words of the sedra names match the tune of America, that I had actually made a recording, but that my voice was so ropey that I wasn’t prepared to share it. (I think I have air conditioning throat.)

Now here we are, a week later, knee-deep in medical appointments (just routine check-ups; all is well), magazine editing, and preparing for when we kidnap Raphael and bring him back here on Tuesday for some nana and grandpa time. All of which means that, even though I had a topic in mind for this week, I’m going to take the embarrassing but easy way out and share with you my croaky voice.

Suffice it say that Tom Lehrer remains unchallenged. I’m not giving up the day job just yet.

Normal service will, I hope, be resumed next week, but meanwhile, you can suffer the rendition here. If you feel cheated this week, just drop me a line and I’ll send you a complete refund of your subscription fee.

My big brother is getting more assertive as he gets older. Last week he set me two tasks. Normally, I don’t take kindly to being told what to do, but the first was so enticing, and his logic for suggesting the second was so persuasive, that I find myself compelled to act like a submissive younger sibling.

First, he came up with a cool idea (he didn’t actually use the word ‘cool’. He spent over 40 years as an actuary in the world of insurance, so ‘cool’ isn’t in his vocabulary.) Inspired by my rekindling of memories of Tom Lehrer last week, he suggested that, for Simchat Torah, it would be fun to set to music the names of the 54 weekly Torah portions.

So, on Sunday, instead of working on the shul magazine, I spent the day doing just that. It was an interesting challenge. First, I grouped the names of the portions into their rhyming families. I used what I hope is the standard Israeli Ashkenzi pronunciation; the last group in the following list contains all the unique final sounds that have no rhyming partner.

Beha’a lot’cha, Va’era, Vayikra, Vayera, Chayei Sara,
Beshalach, Vayishlach, Noach, Korach, Shlach,
Vayetzei, Ki Tetzei, Masa’ei, Pekudei, Re’ei,
Dvarim, Mishpatim, Nitzavim, Kedoshim, Shof’tim,
Ki Tavo, Naso, Bo, Yitro,
Acharei Mot, Matot, Shemot, Toldot,
Behar, Bamidbar,
Vaychi, Shmini,
Vayeshev, Ekev,
Balak, Vaetchanan, Pinchas, Vayigash, Chukat, Tzav, Bechukotai, Tetzave, Vayelech, Vayak’hel, Miketz, Bereshit, Haazinu, Emor,

Having done this spadework, two things were obvious. First, this was unlikely to be as daunting a task as I had first feared, because there were six groups with at least four rhyming names, which would allow for four-line verses with an AAAA rhyming scheme, and, with luck, an internal rhyme as well.

Second, thirty of the names were three-syllable words, only four were four-syllable words, fifteen were two-syllable words and one was a monosyllable. Only two of the others were six syllables long. All of this suggested that it would not be complicated to fit the names into the pattern of a song with a triple rhythm. My first thought was the theme from The Lone Ranger, or the William Tell overture by Rossini, to give it its highbrow name. I eventually rejected that because of the complicated and long finale. Then it struck me: there was a perfect triplet patter song that could tolerate the throwing in of an extra syllable here and there, pacy and racy.

If you start by singing the first two lines below to the end of the intro to America from West Side Story, starting at the line “I like the isle of Manhattan”, and then sing the four lines of the main tune (starting “I like to be in America”, followed by the first variation “I think I go back to San Juan”, followed by the main tune twice, you will find that the following arrangement works.

I have taken the same liberty Lehrer allowed himself, by throwing in a ‘ve’ or an ‘u’ (and) at the beginning of the occasional name, to aid the scansion (cf ‘and anthramum and osmium’):

Matot, Shemot veKi tetzei,
Truma, Toldot uF’kudei,

Vayigash, Vayishlach, Va’eira,
Tetzave, Beshalach, Vayikra,
Ha’azinu, Noach, Vayeira,
Va’etchanan, Korach, Ki Tisa,

Chukat, Bechukotai, Behar,
Bereishit, Pinchas, Bamidbar,
Yayak’hel, Emor, Vayeshev,
Vayeleich, Tzav, Mikeitz, Ekev’

Yitro, Devarim, Chayei Sara,
Naso, ve’Shoftim, Tazri’a
Vayetzei, Nitzavim, Lech Lecha
Masa’ei, Kedoshim, Metzora,

Balak, Vayechi, Acharei Mot,
Sh’lach, u’Mishpatim, Re’ei, Vezot
Haberacha, Shemini u’Vo
Beha’a lot’cha, Ki Tavo.

מטות, שמות, וכי תצא,
תרומה, תולדות, ופקודי,

ויגש, וישלח, וארא,
תצווה, בשלח, ויקרא,
האזינו, נח, וירא,
ואתחנן, קורח, כי תשא,

חוקת, בחוקותי, בהר,
בראשית, פינחס, במדבר, ו
יקהל, אמור, וישב,
וילך, צו, מקץ, עקב,

יתרו, דברים, חיי שרה,
נשא, ושופטים, תזריע,
ויצא, ניצבים, לך לך,
מסעי, קדושים, מצורע,

בלק, ויחי, אחרי מות,
שלח, משפטים, ראה, וזאת
הברכה, שמיני, ובא,
בהעלותך, כי תבוא.

There. That’s a little gift to you, my loyal readership. There’s plenty of time for you to memorise that and polish your performance before you amaze your friends in shul on Simchat Torah.

Unfortunately, the second task does not, in prospect, seem quite so much fun. However, Martin pointed out that I have, from time to time, ventured into the realm of geopolitics, and since, last week, Maale Adumim became the centre of the Middle East conflict for a day, he felt that I really couldn’t not write about the Israeli government approval for the planned development of the area that has been known for years as E1, that is now renamed T1 (in recognition of Trump’s support for Israel), and that will, in the future, be known, apparently, as Mevasseret Adumim, which we can translate as the Herald or Harbinger of Adumim. (Mevasseret Yerushalayim is a town on the main road to Jerusalem, the first point on the road from which you can see Jerusalem as you approach on the road.)

The development of T1 will add 3,400 housing units to the city of Maale Adumim. A new suburb within Maale Adumim is expected to add an additional over 3,500 units. Together, these two suburbs should see the city’s population grow from about 40,000 to around 75,000. Provided that this development is achieved with commensurate infrastructure development, this should be good news for the city. It certainly will bring to an end a long period when young citizens could not find affordable homes within the city.

However, none of this is the reason why the world is focused on E1. On a scale that is out of all proportion to its size, the area represents a huge battleground over territorial contiguity. The development of E1 will effectively turn Maale Adumim into what will be potentially a suburb of Jerusalem.

Incidentally, this will probably lead to a significant increase in our arnona (property tax), because the per capita sum raised by Jerusalem municipality from among its citizens is significantly less than the corresponding figure in Maale Adumim, a city with a prop-ortionately large working-age and working population. At the same time, we may find that the market value, and the saleability, of our house both increase.

Of course, contiguity of Israeli housing will result in discontiguity of Palestinian housing. For the last decades, Palestinians have maintained illegal facts on the ground, in the form of housing, to ensure that the southern part of a putative Palestinian state (including Bethlehem) is not cut off from the northern part (including Ramallah) It’s worth bearing in mind that, despite the dramatic sound of the phrase’cut off’, we are talking about a very small parcel of land.

In the map below, the Jerusalem municipality is in beige, Israeli population centres are shown in blue, Palestinian population centres are shown in brown and E1 is shown in red. The map clearly shows that, if pigs were to be seen flying tomorrow, and an agreement were reached over a Palestinian state, it would be very easy to build a tunnel under E1 providing contiguity to the two parts of Palestine. It would scarcely need to be longer than the new tunnel underpassing French Hill, which has shortened our journey to Jerusalem and beyond by at least ten minutes.

So, what is the real significance of this announcement? Here, for what it’s worth, is my take. First and foremost, this is not a maverick act by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Even though he was the government representative at the official ceremony announcing the approval of the development project, and even though he is undoubtedly personally delighted by the decision, and more than ready to take credit for pushing it through, let no one be in doubt. It is Netanyahu who has blocked the development for a couple of decades, and it is Netanyahu who has now decided that it will go through.

I believe that this change in tactics is part of Netanyahu’s concerted attempt to increase pressure on Hamas. If Hamas intransigence results in loss of Palestinian land, that represents a far greater humiliation for Hamas than the mass losses among its forces, the hardship suffered by the Gaza population (obviously) and even the elimination of multiple layers of Hamas leadership. Martyrdom is a badge of honour for Hamas: not only, I suspect, for the foot soldiers, but also for the senior leadership. They genuinely see their cause as greater than themselves and they regard it as a religious duty to be prepared and proud to die for the cause. They will embrace death.

Loss of Palestinian land, on the other hand, hits Hamas where it hurts, at the very heart of their cause. In addition, if Palestinians in the West Bank join the dots between the failure of negotiations in Gaza and the development of E1, this is potentially very bad news for Hamas.

That represents about the extent (to be honest, considerably more than the extent) of my willingness to comment on the situation. At the end of the day, I’m much more comfortable playing at making patterns with words.

I wrote last week that my reflections on the death of Tom Lehrer would “have to wait for another time”. I feel as though I want to make this week that time, not because my mind is now cleared of all that was occupying it last week; it isn’t. Nor because things on the national and international front look much rosier this week; they don’t. If anything, things are even worse. However, there’s only so much doom and gloom I can wallow in, and I really feel as though I want to escape to somewhere more….innocent? Not the first word that springs to mind when considering Lehrer. Somewhere more civilised, certainly; more urbane; less intense. More ironic.

I’m not quite sure how to approach the subject of Tom Lehrer. I doubt if there are more than a handful of my readers who are not familiar with Tom Lehrer and his modest (in size), but wide-ranging (in subject-matter) oeuvre. If the name means little to you, then perhaps the best thing you can do is go to YouTube, search for him and spend an hour or four, letting him, in his own words: “… take you now on wings of song as it were and try and help you forget, perhaps, for a while, your drab, wretched lives.”

Which leads me neatly into two initial observations. First, four hours is all you will need, more or less, to listen to Lehrer’s entire musical oeuvre, even including all of the pirated videos from live appearances. A few of Lehrer’s songs were not initially issued on record – either because of issues of good taste (of which more later) or arcaneness. At a shockingly young age, Lehrer grew tired of performing, and stopped writing songs. As he later remarked: “Satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Secondly, once you start listening to Lehrer, you find that almost everything he wrote in his songs and his equally polished introductions to them is eminently quotable and, after a few repetitions, unforgettable. The comments below his obituary in The Times were full of people doing little more than sharing their favourite quotes from the songs.

Okay. Assuming the few of you who needed to do a pre-term make-up class in Lehreriana have done so, and are now back with us, I can now attempt to explain why I am convinced that his contribution to the comic song repertoire was unique and magnificent.

Let’s get the least memorable, but still essential, element of the Lehrer cocktail out of the way first. Tom, as I cannot imagine anyone referring to him (Tom is for ordinary folk like Hanks, not elite near-geniuses who skip a year of high-school for three consecutive years and win a place at Harvard at age 15, on the strength – if we believe the internet – of an application letter in the form of a poem) was born into a nominally American Jewish home, in which the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan were often on the gramophone. Here, one assumes, Lehrer developed his ear for a good tune and his recognition that in comic song the music has as key a role as the words.

Fortunately, Lehrer was also a sufficiently accomplished pianist to be able to execute what he had written, and to do so with such effortlessness that his whole attention appeared to be focussed on his verbal interaction with the audience. Which brings me to another point. Lehrer began his career performing his songs for fellow-students at parties, and he exudes the same relaxed and comfortable aura of being among friends even when he is performing for an audience in a large theatre (and even when the audience are not native English speakers and miss some of the cultural references). In one of his in-house performances at Harvard, he reprised a song by Noel Coward, and he shares with Coward an apparent social ease.

Enough, I think, of skipping round the edge of the lake, admiring the grassy verges and the ornamental bridge. The time has come to plunge in, and talk about the lyrics. The first point to be made is perhaps the breadth of the range of subject-matter. While Lehrer wrote for a season of That Was the Week that Was and dealt, there, with social, political and geopolitical satire, he felt free to range very much further afield. Indeed, since he had no sense of propriety (a word he rhymed with ‘impiety’ and ‘variety’ in one of his memorable triplets), the world was his oyster. Few writers of comic songs cover such topics as necromancy, drug peddling, sado-masochism and what we used to call venereal disease but is now apparently known as STD (which, when I was a boy, was a feature of the telephone system and stood for subscriber trunk dialling).

Consider these lines from I Got it from Agnes (the STD song):

Max got it from Edith
Who gets it every spring
She got it from her Daddy
Who just gives her everything

She then gave it to Daniel
Whose spaniel has it now

In many ways, this is an uncharacteristic lyric from Lehrer, in that it is not self-consciously clever. However, when he wants to, Lehrer can be cleverer than anybody else in the room. Consider this quick-fire rhyming pattern from a Gilbert and Sullivan parody recounting the story of the last verse of the story of Oh, my darling Clementine!

Though I missed her, I kissed her
Young sister named Esther
This mister to pester she tried.
Now her pestering sister’s a festering blister
You’d best to resist her, say I!

Two rhyme sounds there: one used in six different words (plus one repetition), and the other in four different words (plus one repetition), all in the space of thirty one words. If you think that sounds easy, please try it at home.

But of course he made it sound easy. He made it all sound easy. I knew that Daniel Radcliffe (possibly better known to you as Harry Potter) was a bear of little brain when he woked all over JK Rowling, the woman who gave him fame and fortune, on the occasion of her pointing out that ‘woman’ is a word with a biological meaning. However, you can also get a measure of Radcliffe’s maturity from the fact that, like many of us, he has learnt the lyrics of Tom Lehrer’s Elements song, but, unlike the rest of us, he considers it suitable for trundling out not only at parties but also on prime-time television. Having admired Lehrer’s faultless, unruffled and clearly enunciated performance (while playing the piano), contrast it with Radcliffe’s fumbling, mumbling, bumbling, gauche ineptitude here. One wonders what party pieces he rejected because they weren’t quite polished enough!

Of course, The Elements is an atypical Lehrer song, for several reasons. He composed neither the music nor the words. All of our delight is in the delightful and delighted execution, and the effortless way he has rearranged the elements into an order that may have no chemical elegance, but has a literary elegance.

It is also atypical in that it is not, to some degree of gentleness or sharpness, poking fun at attitudes, institutions or personalities. All were grist to Lehrer’s mill. To illustrate this, I am going to offer links in this section rather than quoting lyrics, because Lehrer’s relish in his skewering of targets is so tangible.

Fashionable social causes that liberals pay lip service to;

The ineffectualness of social protest songs

And countless others.

If the tunes were Lehrer’s piano, then the words were his forte.

The inevitability of the nuclear apocalypse might not seem an obvious topic for a comic song, but if you ensure the rhymes are tortuously brilliant, you can pull it off.

If you attend a funeral,
It is sad to think that sooner o’ l-
ater those you love will do the same for you
And you may have thought it tragic,
Not to mention other adjec-
tives to think of all the weeping they will do

As always, it is Lehrer’s aware but insouciant delivery that shows these pearls to best effect.

Pe4haps the best marriage of form and content in his body of work is in the setting of a song that purports to give an example of what the Catholic church should have been aiming for in its (then) desire to modernise the liturgy is Vatican Rag. The ragtime tune rings absolutely authentic, and Lehrer sets himself increasingly stiff rhyming hurdles, all of which he effortlessly sails over.

We come next to Lehrer’s other career, as a mathematics professor. Although he eventually abandoned his PhD studies, he was no slouch, and he wrote several amusing songs about mathematics. They were mostly written for consumption within the Harvard math department, but he eventually found one topic that non-mathematicians could relate to, since a whole nation of parents were being exposed to and befuddled by it in their children’s homework: new math. Now, obviously, you cannot write a comic song about new math that actually demonstrates and explains the underlying mathematical concepts of new math and is at the same time hilarious. Except that Lehrer did, of course. (I think I recommend listening to this without watching the annoying animation whose primary effect is to ruin the timing of Lehrer’s delivery.)

And now here we are exactly where I knew we would be: very nearly 1500 words in and there are at least another 15 songs that I absolutely have to talk about. You know what? Go back to YouTube and listen to the master himself: Poisoning Pigeons (with its rhymes for both ‘strychnine’ and ‘cyanide’, Alma (every word of which has historical authenticity), My Home Town, Wernher von Braun, Smut (the perfect mismatch of tune and lyric, and the best collection of rhymes on the first syllable of a word that breaks across a line). Anything, really. There are no duds here.

Lehrer’s greatest line? I’ll offer two contenders, one from an introduction to a song, the other from a lyric to a mock Harvard anthem.

Taken the second first, the line is just after here in Bright College Days.

And taking the first second, here’s 90 seconds of prologue that still break me up every time. followed by some people’s favourite song, which Lehrer liked to close his concerts with, for obvious reasons.

I’ll just leave you with Lehrer’s purported admission poem to Harvard, written, remember, at the age of 15. This sounds like an urban myth, but it appears that it was definitely written by Lehrer, even if he did not use it as his application letter, but simply an amuse-bouche for his fellow high-school students. Either way, it is the earliest record of his precocious and formidable talent. It is interesting to note, by the way, that long before Lehrer rhymed ‘Harvard’ with ‘discovered’, he rhymed it with ‘larva’ed’, which is less humorous but almost as impressive.

Dissertation on Education
Education is a splendid institution,
A most important social contribution,
Which has brought about my mental destitution
By its own peculiar type of persecution.
For I try to absorb
In the midst of an orb
Of frantic instructors’ injunctions
The name of the Fates
And the forty-eight states
And the trigonometrical functions,
The figures of speech
(With the uses of each)
And the chemical symbol for lead,
The depth of the ocean,
Molecular motion,
The names of the bones in the head,
The plot of Macbeth
And Romeo’s death
And the history of the Greek drama,
Construction of graphs
And the musical staffs
And the routes of Cortez and da Gama,
The name of the Pope,
The inventor of soap,
And the oldest American college–
The use of conceits,
The poems of Keats,
And other poetical knowledge.
I’m beginning to feel
I don’t care a great deal
For the reign of the Emperor Nero,
The poems of Burns,
What the President earns,
And the value of absolute zero,
The length of a meter,
The size of a liter,
The cause of inflation and failure,
The veins and the nerves,
Geometrical curves,
And the distance from here to Australia,
Reproduction of germs,
Biological terms,
And when a pronoun is disjunctive,
The making of cheese,
The cause of disease,
And the use of the present subjunctive.
I wish that there weren’t
Electrical current,
Such places as Rome and Cathay,
And such people as Watt
And Sir Walter Scott
And Edna St. Vincent Millay.
I don’t like very much
To learn customs and such
Of people like Tibetan lamas,
And I’d like to put curbs
On irregular verbs
And the various uses for commas,
International pacts
All historical facts,
Like the dates of Columbus and Croesus,
Bunker Hill, Saratoga,
And Ticonderoga,
The War of the Peloponnesus.
But although I detest
Learning poems and the rest
Of the things one must know to have “culture,”
While each of my teachers
Makes speeches like preachers
And preys on my faults like a vulture,
I will leave movie thrillers
And watch caterpillars
Get born and pupated and larva’ed,
And I’ll work like a slave
And always behave
And maybe I’ll get into Harvard…