T S Eliot assured us that the world ends not with a bang but with a whimper, but in the last few months I have started to feel that my cultural world (or, at least, the cultural world that I inhabited and loved before making aliya in 1986, which is the cultural world that I will always regard as home) is ending not with a bang, nor with a single whimper, but, rather, with an inexorable series of whimpers, as, one by one, the cultural icons of my youth and my first decade or so of adulthood turn up on the obituary pages.

This week, it was the turn of Tom Stoppard, whose unique gifts I want to celebrate today. Before I dive deeper into his work, a couple of observations, if I may.

Many of the comments below Stoppard’s obituary on Sunday spoke about what a tremendous loss his death was. While I am sure that it is felt as a profound loss by his family and friends, this seems to me a strange description for the world as a whole. Stoppard was 88 years old at his death. He completed what he declared would be his last play – Leopoldstadt – in 2019. Over a period of 56 years, he wrote 26 plays for the theatre, and adapted or translated 10 others. He also wrote the libretto for an opera, 10 plays for radio, 5 original plays and 2 loose adaptations for television, in addition to 17 film and television screenplays adapted from books and his own and others’ plays. As well as covering a range of genres, these 70 works span a wide range of subject matter. I must confess that I feel no profound sense of loss. I am, indeed, so overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of work that Stoppard has left us that I do not feel anything is lacking.

My second observation concerns the distinction that Stoppard shares with Shaw, Pinter, Chekhov, Brecht, Shakespeare (obviously) and a few other playwrights. He has been adjectivized. This coining of a term to describe the style of plays written by X strikes me as paradoxical. Such an adjective is useful only when describing another playwright’s work – ‘I feel X’s recent work is increasingly Pinteresque’. However, such an adjective is only coined for a playwright whose style is so idiosyncratic that any work by another playwright that puts one in mind of it feels like pastiche, and not really warranting serious discussion. So, the adjectives are, in practical terms, of very limited use.

Which is a neat way into addressing the question of what makes a play ‘Stoppardian’. One obituary suggested that Stoppardian is ‘shorthand for wit, linguistic cleverness and dazzling eloquence’.

This seems to me a very incomplete definition, that fails to recognise the extreme seriousness of Stoppard’s concerns in almost all of his work. He himself once wrote: “I want to demonstrate that I can make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours.” This, I feel, is an interesting comment for two reasons. The first is that, in dismissing his ‘wit, linguistic cleverness and dazzling eloquence’ as ‘flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours’, either Stoppard was being rather archly self-deprecating, or he was so naturally and effortlessly brilliant a master of words and realiser of absurd situations that he failed to see just how dazzling his wit was.

The second thing I want to note about Stoppard’s self-assessment is that he did not write: “I can make serious points while flinging a custard pie around the stage”, but, rather, “I can make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage”. The clever, eloquent wit is not an incidental entertainment that makes the serious content palatable to a theatre audience; it is, at its best (and a frighteningly high percentage of it is at its very best), the medium through which the message is conveyed. 

And that message is sometimes very serious indeed. If all you know of Stoppard is that he wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-winning film Shakespeare in Love, then you may be surprised that university professors of social and political theory write essays with titles like Freedom and Morality in the Plays of Tom Stoppard and doctoral candidates submit theses on such subjects as Epistemology and Ethics in Tom Stoppard’s ‘Professional Foul’

This may surprise you, even if you are familiar with the work with which Stoppard strode into the public eye in 1966, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The conceit of this play is so brilliant and so rich that I have to spell it out, even though most if not all of you will already be aware of it. What, Stoppard wonders, do minor characters in a play do, between the time they exit the stage in one scene and enter it again some time later. From this one question, Stoppard weaves a play parallel to Hamlet, following the offstage exploits of Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and exploring the logic of a world that exists suspended in limbo between their brief appearances onstage in Hamlet. When a probably befuddled theatregoer asked Stoppard “What is it all about?” he replied, with characteristic lack of pomposity, “It is about to make me a lot of money.”

Before I write about a particular television play I am very fond of, I want to give a taste of Stoppard’s intellectual range. He left the school he hated at 16, and, like many other auto-didacts, his interests were wide-ranging. The themes of his play Arcadia, for example, include the philosophical implications of the second law of thermodynamics, Romantic literature, and the English picturesque style of garden design. I cannot pretend to be educated enough to know whether he was right when he said: “The thing you have to understand is that, as a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas.” Even if that is true, he certainly succeeded in making the arguments around a huge range of political, ethical and aesthetic questions appear accessible to a general audience.

Which brings me to Professional Foul, an 80-minute television play from 1977 (when mainstream British TV still commissioned and broadcast every week serious plays by leading playwrights). The play is set in Prague and follows a Cambridge ethics don, Professor Anderson, as he attends a weekend philosophical colloquium in Prague, as a guest of the Communist Czech government. What should be a fairly uneventful trip, allowing him to attend the Czechoslovakia v England football game that is the real reason for him accepting the invitation, is complicated by a visit from an ex-student who asks the professor to smuggle out his banned doctoral thesis for publication in the West. The intervention of the Communist government leads to an ethical dilemma for Anderson, a situation explored by Stoppard through the opinions of several characters.

The play was written to coincide with Amnesty International’s Prisoners of Conscience Year and is dedicated to Czech playwright Václav Havel, then periodically imprisoned by the Czech Communist authorities, and later president of a free Czechoslovakia. In the year of publication and broadcast, the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia presented the government with a formal protest against its violations of the Helsinki Accords.

Happily, this play is available on YouTube here. I really hope that you will watch it, especially if you didn’t catch it in 1977. I recommend it for many reasons, but I will mention here only two. First, it is an opportunity to watch Peter Barkworth’s flawless performance as the urbane, cultured, decent, professor, whose lifetime of hypothetical academic musings about ethical problems proves, in the end, to have equipped him to deal magnificently, and for the first time in his life, with a genuine moral dilemma. Nobody portrayed the ultimately decent, upper-middle-class Englishman more perfectly or with more natural poise than Barkworth, and here, as always, he shines.

The second joy of the play is the language. One of the play’s major themes is the uses and abuses, the possibilities and limitations, of language, and, everywhere the play turns, it finds new ways to shed light on this theme. It is incomprehension that enables us to share Anderson’s mounting unease as he finds himself apparently trapped in the home of his dissident ex-student while it is being searched by the secret police. It is some time before we and he realise exactly the situation, and one complete scene, with its multiple bit players intervening from neighbouring apartments, and arguments breaking out, is played out entirely in a language, Czech, that neither the professor, nor the audience, understand. The effect moves from confusion to menace very effectively.

In another scene, Anderson, having failed to make it to the stadium for the football match, and having listened, and understood very little of, a partial Czech live commentary on the game, finds, later that day, that the two rooms adjacent to his in the hotel are occupied by two English newspaper sports correspondents, each of whom is phoning in his copy for the next morning’s edition of his paper. Anderson wanders into each room in turn, desperate to hear the key details of the game, but is repeatedly frustrated by the correspondents’ hyperbole, which favours ornate figures of speech over the dry facts of the game. One of the correspondents, for example, describing a defender who was repeatedly swerved around by the same attacking opponent using the same move, says that he displayed “all the qualities of an elephant except memory.” This is, of course, a wonderfully witty line (although nothing drains the wit from a line that sparkles when dropped unexpectedly into the middle of a scene from a play more completely than extracting it with a pair of tweezers and pinning it, scientifically, to the display case of a written argument). However, more significantly, it offers another example of the limitations and obfuscations of language.

Which I really should take as a less than subtle hint to stop here, since I’ve probably been walking alone through this tangled undergrowth for at least a couple of paragraphs.

But, before I do, let me urge those of you still with me to join me not in mourning the loss of Tom Stoppard, but in celebrating the extraordinary wealth of entertaining food for thought, and thought-provoking entertainment, that, over six decades, he laid out for the delight of the world. If you stumble across any of his perhaps less well-known radio plays – The Dog It Was that Died, Albert’s Bridge – treat yourself to 40 minutes of sense disguised as nonsense…and I haven’t even mentioned The Real Inspector Hound…or the screenplay for Brazil…or Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, another play about dissidents, in this case commissioned by Andre Previn and featuring the London Symphony Orchestra, onstage.

I’ll shut up now, and leave that very crowded stage to a master: the late, great, Tom Stoppard. Please enjoy! The performance is only just over an hour long, and is a unique, hilarious, chilling jewel.

If we had not been off to Portugal, this is a post that I would probably have published a month ago, shortly after the mass Haredi demonstration against universal conscription in the Jewish sector, a demonstration that brought much of Jerusalem and sections of the country’s main traffic artery to a halt for several hours. Sadly, the intervening weeks have not made what I plan to say less relevant; if anything, the reverse.

Before I address the issue that concerns me today, I have to acknowledge the extraordinary developments of the weeks we were out of the country. That all of the remaining living hostages, and the bodies of all but three of those murdered and held by Hamas, have been returned to Israel and to their families is wonderful news. I confess that, as I stated repeatedly over the last 25 months, I was not able to envisage any scenario in which Hamas would agree to return the hostages. (So, if you follow me for my geopolitical expertise, you can stop now.) Of course, for the three families who have not received their loved ones for burial, the nightmare is as intense as ever, and the nation continues to work and pray for their release from their personal hell.

To work and pray: two fundamental human activities. Taken together, they reflect the attitude that, if you wish to see a particular outcome, you have to do what you can to ensure the desired outcome is achieved, and you also have to accept that it may not be within your power to achieve this. For some of us, our prayers are to the all-powerful deity in whom, and in whose beneficence, we believe; for others, ‘prayer’ represents the hope and the belief that the desired end can be achieved. (Faith comes in many forms.)

Both elements are essential. Without hope and belief, nothing will be achieved. As the (possibly atheist, and certainly secular) Herzl famously wrote: ‘If you will it, it is not a dream’. As the national anthem declares: ‘As long as Jews look towards Zion, our two-thousand-year-old hope of being a free people in our homeland is not lost.’

At the same time, hopes and beliefs and will achieve nothing by themselves. They need to be backed up by action.

He (Rabbi Tarfon) used to say: It is not up to you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it (Pirkei Avot – Ethics of our Fathers – Chapter 2:16).

All of which is a long and rambling way of reaching the conclusion that the majority of the rabbinic leaders of Haredi community are not teaching their students true Jewish values. These Rabbonim teach the Yeshiva bocher that his Torah study is the most valuable, indeed the only truly valuable, contribution he can make to the future of the Jewish people, and that it is his Torah study, and that of the tens of thousands like him, that is winning the war, and he accepts this. They declare that nothing is more important than his Torah study, and that, as long as he devotes himself entirely to Torah study, he can then rely on Hashem to act in the best interests of the Jewish people, and he accepts this.

The brutal fact, of course, is that the security of the state, and of all its inhabitants, requires that all of its inhabitants also contribute to that security by personal service, in one capacity or another. Israel has been involved in a just war, a holy war, an existential war, and to serve in that war is not only a national but also a religious obligation.

Implicitly believing and following all that his Rabbi tells him, the Haredi in the street genuinely believes that his Torah study, and the religious faith that it represents, will protect him from physical danger. We saw in the mass demonstration against Haredi conscription, tens of Haredim climbing onto the canopy over the pumps in the petrol station at the entrance to Jerusalem, or climbing onto, and sitting on, the arms of cranes tens of metres above street level. These are the actions of men (and they were not just teenage boys – who, by definition, tend to regard themselves as immortal – but included many adult men) who believe that Hashem is personally protecting them from all evil. That they can continue to believe this after the disastrous collapse of the stand at Meron is a measure of the intensity of the belief-system they live in.

And what of the leaders of the Haredi community? They are the ones who devote energy, time and resources to wielding political influence, wheeling and dealing in the corridors of power, organising campaigns that include demonstrations, posters, media appearances, appointing rabbis to serve as members of Knesset and government ministers.. They are well aware that Torah study alone does not guarantee any outcome. They recognise that the process of changing the world for the better is a partnership between man and God. While we may believe that God is the ultimate power in the world, we also must recognise that God created man to be a partner in the ongoing process of creation.

Which brings me to the other side of the counterfeit coin that is so much of Israel’s public life in 2025. With a blind devotion that rivals that of the Haredi community to its Rabbis, much of the Likud party, in the Knesset and in the country as a whole, has abrogated all personal responsibility to Bibi. Whatever Netanyahu says and does is, in their eyes, a priori right. They do not behave as adults responsible for their actions and beliefs, but as unquestioning followers of King Bibi. They willingly give up their right, and their duty, to test the value of Bibi’s words, beliefs and actions against the benchmark of their own intelligence and experience.

As for Bibi, his weakness, it seems to me, is that he has failed to recognise that our work on earth is to be partners of a greater power. For the practising Jew, our partner is God, and the purpose of our Torah study is to help us better understand how we can most effectively play our part in this partnership and continue the work of creation on a daily basis. For a secular person, the partner is a set of moral, ethical values, and the responsibility is to define and understand those values and then to devote one’s life to following, nurturing and promoting those values.

For Bibi, it increasingly seems, the supreme value is not a moral and ethical worldview that is outside of, and greater than, himself, but, rather, his own survival. In his certainty that he, and he alone, knows what is for the best, he places his own continued political survival above all else, and, in so doing, puts the entire Zionist endeavour in jeopardy.

The true Jewish way is not the self-effacing retreat from the world and its problems, nor the placing of self above values, and an over-weening arrogance in one’s indispensability. The true Jewish way is:

It is not up to you to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.

Our future as a Jewish, democratic country may well depend on all of us recognising the timeless truth in Rabbi Tarfon’s formulation.

As we pack the few items we are taking home, and prepare ourselves, and the boys, for our departure from Penamacor tomorrow (Monday) morning, it seems like a good idea to try to get this week’s post written tonight, before tomorrow’s long day. We plan to leave the house at 12 noon, and are scheduled to land in Israel at 2:30AM on Tuesday, which means we will probably turn up at Esther’s flat in Zichron around 5:30–6:00, which will seem to us like 3:30–4:00. Just what part of this seemed like a good idea when we planned it escapes me for the moment, but I’m sure it makes sense in some universe or other.

I thought I would start this week by responding to the one or two of you who have asked me how the kids’ business, their bodyweight gym, is going. I’m pleased to say that after a slow start it has, over the weeks we have been here, just started to gather a little momentum. They have acquired about fifteen regular customers. Tslil has attracted more students to her yoga classes, and has added a new pilates class, while Micha’el, in addition to having new members training in the gym, is planning to introduce two new classes: in martial arts and an introduction to bodyweight training.

Having started by concentrating their publicity on social media, they soon realised that this was not sufficiently focused. While their campaign generated a fair bit of interest, some of those who responded were based in Lisbon or other similarly far-flung locations. Since the kids started a poster and flyer campaign that is much more locally focussed, their results have been starting to translate into actual feet walking through the door.

They are, of course, in the middle of a learning process, and, with each new customer, indeed with each new prospect, they realise more about what their target customers need to be, and how best to reach them and attract them. This understanding can then help to inform their promotional materials. Each new advertising initiative is producing more useful results.

There are advantages to being based in a small community. First, there is no local competition. Gymacor is the only game in town. In addition, in a small place like Penamacor, where everybody knows everybody else, one satisfied customer is likely to generate more interest from among his or her circle. For example, the high-school student who contacted them this week might easily represent a way into a new market segment.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. The kids are still very much at the beginning of their journey, and they have a long way to go before they can say that their idea is viable. However, they have, in the last few weeks, seen enough positive signs to make even an old Eeyorean sceptic like me believe that they may well be able to build their idea into a business. We do hope so, because they have certainly invested considerable effort in getting to this point, and they both firmly believe in the quality and importance of the service that they can offer.

Beyond that, there really isn’t much to report. The major feature of the last week has been the weather. After a mild and dry first two and a half weeks of this trip, the last week or so has been very wet and fairly cold. We have not, yet, experienced the threatened thunder storms. They did reach Portugal, but seem to have hit Lisbon and the Algarve worst, and not to have travelled as far inland as Penamacor. However, the rain has been more or less constant: presenting a rich, and unrelenting variety of precipitation. We have had days of soft rain and days of driving rain. Low, swirling cloud, and cutting wind; dank mist and a quiet stillness.

Lua, who, as a local breed, should be well used to this weather, was very unnerved by the change in atmospheric pressure that preceded the change in the weather. However, the actual rain, however fierce, does not bother her at all. So, I have been very grateful for the good hooded raincoat that I have out here…and I have made a note to myself to dig out the wellington boots that I never wear in Israel and bring them out next time. Fortunately, the kids have a tumble dryer, which means that I can get through a day that is punctuated by two rain-soaked walks on two pairs of jeans and two pairs of shoes.

One plus, for us, of the colder weather, has been the magic of a wood-burning stove. I have, finally, mastered the art of starting a fire, and the evenings are much cheerier basking in the radiated heat of eucalyptus logs. The new load of wood that the kids took delivery of a week or so ago is from a supplier they have not used before. He, thankfully, cuts his logs shorter than their previous supplier, so there is no longer a struggle to wedge logs into the stove. There are also more thinner logs, which are useful when starting the fire. Now, if only there were underground access to the woodshed, so that bringing in an evening’s supply of logs did not necessitate braving the elements, life would be close to ideal.

Today has seen the start of our preparations to leave. I have left loaves and chocolate ice-cream in the freezer, and there is a good supply of my granola in the kitchen. Nan made scones for Shabbat and for teatime today, with cream and jam. We did our last supermarket shop today, leaving the house well-stocked. The empty gas bottle has been exchanged for a spare full one. Both Grandpa and Nana read the bedtime stories this evening. One of our carry-on trolleys is packed inside one of the cases, and the few things we are taking back are packed in the other. The last big laundry has been washed, dried, folded, and put away for next time.

And so, another trip has come and, before we know it, gone. The boys are still young enough for us to see some change even within one visit, and certainly from one visit to the next. Early childhood is such a fleeting time. We are lucky to be able to catch as much of it as we do.

It has long puzzled me exactly what the nature is of the unfailing attraction that puppet shows (as they are called by Nana) hold for the boys in Portugal. Every day, both Tao and Ollie ask Nana for a puppet show at least ten times, and, being Nana, she agrees to provide one at least five or six times.

These puppet shows have evolved over the years, and, indeed, the number of puppets (or, more accurately, models) is now approaching the number of cast members in the English National Theatre’s epic 1982 production of Nicholas Nickleby.

Although the shows always follow a very familiar format, the cast list has grown over time, as the kids acquire new Playmobil, Lego and other people and animals, and the boys have, recently, started handling one or two of the characters themselves, although Nana carries most of the burden of the narrative on her broad shoulders.

Blogger’s Note: At this point, I wanted to insert a cast photo. However, I am experiencing technical difficulty uploading the image to display on a laptop (it seems to display on a smartphone)), but I still want to include the legend for the image, to give you an idea of the rich tapestry of characters.

What puzzles me is that the storyline of these shows is very mundane. The characters all live in a small, quiet, town, and a typical show might involve Jackie and Cat going for a run in the park, while Woof and Lion have an argument and Mister Policeman needs to talk to them about getting along together. Increasingly, Tao attempts to hijack the narrative. He might take charge of the character of Vampire, who is a newcomer to the cast, and who has an evil streak that his neighbours have not yet managed to educate him out of.

So far, Nana has managed to steer the narrative flow away from the threat of death rays and zombies and back to such questions as what Mummy is going to make Little Boy for his tea. Remarkably, Tao succumbs to subtle grandmotherly direction, and the storyline almost always stays firmly rooted in the everyday.

It was only this week that it suddenly struck me that these puppet shows are the kitchen table equivalent of the television soap opera and clearly hold the same attraction for the boys as East Enders does for millions of Britons. The familiarity of the characters and the storyline are their very attraction. It also strikes me (not much of a revelation, this) that the comfort of familiarity also find expression in the boys, and, I suspect, all read-to children, enjoying having the same story  time and again.

Incidentally, having never read Dr Seuss to our own children, I confess that I am appreciating The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham more each time I read them….which, on this trip, has been a lot of times.

We had a video call with Raphael this week, I asked him how he had enjoyed the concert he went to. This was a special, apparently subsidised, children’s concert by a brass ensemble at a fairly local community centre. When I asked him, I had no idea what a torrent of enthusiasm I was unlocking. We were treated to mimes and impersonations of the trombonist and the one-man-band percussionist, and Esther assured us that Raphael had joined in heartily with all the songs he knew, and had applauded wildly throughout. She and Maayan had been concerned that he might be too young for a live show like this, but it seems that he lapped it up. He is a child who has always been exposed to, and has responded enthusiastically to, music, so it is not really surprising.

To have been treated, in the space of a couple of weeks, to watching two children spellbound at a dolphin show at the zoo and a third enthusing over the concert he had seen made this a very special week. May their lives be filled with being excited, enchanted and delighted by all the wonders that the world has to offer,

This week I have had another mystery unravelled. In Portuguese, the more formal greeting and farewell changes with the time of day. However, rather than ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good afternoon’, with their clear transition time of twelve noon, the first two terms are ‘Bom dias’ and ‘Boa tarde’ – ‘Good day’ and ‘Good late’. The question thus begged is, obviously: At what time does one switch from ‘Bom dias’ to ‘Boa tarde’. Every time we come to Portugal, I observe how locals use the two terms. (I get plenty of opportunities, because the supermarket cashiers, and the neighbours I pass in the street when I am walking Lua, all use these two greetings. Indeed, I would estimate that 70% of my verbal interaction with locals (and 95% of the verbal interaction I understand) consists of these two phrases.) Once I started wondering about when to switch, I soon realised that whatever the answer is, it cannot be a single time on the clock. Sometimes people wished me ‘Boa tarde’ at 2:00PM; at other times, I was wished ‘Bom dias’ at 2:30.

When a shop assistant wished me ‘Boa tarde’ as early as 1:10 this week, I realised I had no idea what was going on, and decided I had to understand the logic once and for all. When I googled, I learnt that dias ends and tarde begins at 12 noon. This was clearly nonsense, so, over Shabbat lunch, I mentioned to the kids my befuddlement. Tslil was delighted to offer the explanation, which had been given to her by a kindly neighbour when she wished him ‘Boa tarde’ and he responded ‘Bom dias’, adding, with a smile: ‘I haven’t had my lunch yet.’ So there you have it: a movable feast, as it were. I initially worried about what Portuguese Jews do on a fast day, but then, of course, I realised that on Yom Kippur we say ‘Gmar Hatima Tova’, on minor fasts they can employ ‘Tsom Kal’, and on Tisha b’Av we don’t greet each other at all.

And so we enter our last week in Portugal. With the first week spent in Lisbon, we seem to have reached this point frighteningly quickly. With our 10^th of the month 10% seniors’ discount shop completed at the super today, a winter’s supply of firewood delivered yesterday, and a big bake for the freezer completed yesterday, the kids are well on the way to preparing for us to leave. We have grandparenting duties, including a two-night sleepover for Raphael, waiting for us in Israel in the week we return, so we are planning to recharge our batteries on the plane back home. I tried to write ‘Still, it keeps us young’ at this point, but my fingers couldn’t quite manage it.

Flying to Portugal seems like an awfully long way to travel just to be insulted, and yet that seems to be the emerging theme of this particular trip.

For a long time now, my grandsons have all accused me of being silly, and, to be honest, it is a badge that I wear with pride. Riddled with insecurities, ‘silly’ is one thing I have dreaded being exposed as for most of my adult life, so it is tremendously liberating to be so labelled by grandsons who clearly regard it as an endearing trait rather than a flaw.

A less welcome development on this trip has been the constant admonishment that: “You’re old, Grandpa.” In fairness, it is a card that I play myself fairly regularly, so I can’t really complain.

However, today marked a further development. Bernice and I walked Tao to his Portuguese lesson at school. (Four days a week, all the non-native-speakers in the school learn Portuguese together in one class, and Tao, as a home-schooled pupil, is able to join them.) The school is, very conveniently, only a four-minute walk from the house. However, like 97% of Penamacor, it is downhill from the house, which means, of course, that the walk back is uphill, beginning with three flights of steps, about 25 in all. Ollie had come with us and, as we tackled the steps on the way back to the house, he was heard to declare: “Come on, Grandpa! You can do it!” My only solace is that he followed this with: “Come on, Nana! You can do it!”

Even more painful were the preparations for a game that didn’t actually materialise. Nana and Ollie were, he informed us, to be Mr Happy and Grandpa was to be Mr Miserable. Inexplicably, Bernice found this hilarious. Other opinions differed.

Life has, as you will doubtless have already realised, been very quiet since we left Lisbon nine days ago, on Sunday. Tao returned with a bug, which he then passed on to Micha’el, and Tslil has also not been firing on all cylinders. So last week was uneventful. Happily, everyone is more or less recovered now. Tao was well enough to enjoy a Hallowe’en party over the weekend, Hallowe’en being heartily celebrated in Portugal. For the last few days he has been leaping out at us in his vampire top hat and cape and gruesome face-distorting fangs, which tends to give his Nana what old people like me should probably call conniptions.

The weather has been very kind to us, with the exception of last Friday and Shabbat, when the rain bucketed down unabated for about forty hours. Today (Monday), in contrast, has been sunny and almost warm, so that the boys and Tslil and I were able to enjoy a morning stroll with Lua, which included boarding new fewer than three pirate ships, and Tao and I stayed on with the dog long enough to devise a system of simplified semaphore to enable us to communicate with each other from one mountaintop to another. And all before breakfast.

Supermarket shopping has been as mysterious as always. Two different supers offer a wide variety of bread flour, but both have run out of spelt flour. Is there a world shortage that nobody told me about? The fish counters are devoid of trout, which they always used to feature. Maybe there is some reason behind this, but it certainly eludes me.

Days here are more structured than they have been previously. Now that Tao is officially a home-schooled first-grader, he has a timetable that includes not only his Portuguese lessons at school, but also English, Hebrew, maths and a subject that I think I will translate as general studies, although the Portuguese word means ‘environment’. It includes elements of geography, history, science and civics, and is a core school subject throughout primary school. After 6^th grade, pupils study each of these subjects separately.

The first-grade syllabus does not seem to be too demanding. In fact, Tao was already well ahead of the maths syllabus before he started studying formally. However, almost certainly the most important thing at this stage is that he is enjoying all of his studies, at home and in school.

One last school story. I took Tao to school yesterday for the first time. He had Portuguese for the first two lessons of the day. We walked through the playground and into the building, at which point a short, middle-aged lady in a yellow jacket – obviously an ancillary staff member – aggressively barred our entrance and started remonstrating with me in a stream of unintelligible Portuguese. I attempted to explain why we were there, but it was not easy, given that I still have no Portuguese at all. From her continued ranting, it seems I even failed to convey the fact that I do not speak Portuguese. I’m not sure which of us was more traumatised, Tao or myself.

After a couple of minutes, a member of the academic staff arrived, and calmed the situation. Another staff member – an older man who is, I believe, the co-ordinator of the home- schooling programme – also arrived, and everything was sorted out. I now realise that my crime was to come into the school before the bell had rung. We should have waited in the playground. When the bell rang, the children lined up in their year-groups, and Tao should then have joined the first-graders and gone into school only when they did.

Today, when Bernice and I took Tao again, the same yellow-jacketed woman – who is, incidentally, short of stature (just saying, Napoleon complex and all that) – came over to us as soon as we walked through the gate into the playground, and greeted me warmly with a broad smile and a stream of obviously welcoming Portuguese. Armed today with an explanation – ‘Aula de Português lingua no matera’, which as near as damn it is comprehensible as ‘a lesson in non-mother-tongue Portuguese’ – I was ready to have it out with her, but she was very warm and welcoming (‘simpering’ is a word that springs to mind) and left Bernice and myself with the distinct impression that she had, after yesterday’s encounter, been given a very stiff talking-to by the powers that be.

The other highlight of my week was on the sporting front. Last night, it fell to me to sit with the boys while they had their bath. Bath-time is a major attraction for the boys, and they take their time over their ablutions, which have more to do with bubbles, hydraulics and pouring than with carbolic soap, flannels and scouring. Yesterday, the boys had, in the bath, a sponge ball, and we worked up a very enjoyable game that owed its format, in more or less equal proportions, to the slip cradle of the playing fields of my youth, the squash court of my teaching years and the school brick wall of Bernice’s childhood. The game was a big hit with all concerned, and threatens to become a fixture of the bathtimes that fall to me.

And that’s, more or less, my week. Quite how such slight material can be sewn together into so meaningful a week is one of life’s mysteries, but there it is.

53 years (and counting) is not a short time to have been married. It’s fair to say that, at this stage, opportunities for Bernice and I to surprise each other by our actions or words arise with ever-decreasing frequency. I should then, I suppose, embrace today’s exchange more enthusiastically. I was surprised to hear Bernice ask me, not long after I returned from my second supermarket outing of the day (it’s a long and boring story): “Is there a reason why you put the bananas in the fridge?”, just as Bernice had been surprised, a little time earlier, to discover them there. She was kind enough to speculate whether I had read something online about refrigeration enhancing the flavour of bananas, but she didn’t really believe that to be the case,

In my defence, let me say that, as soon as she asked the question, I recognised that it was a legitimate question, to which there was no truthful and sensible answer. Slightly more worryingly, as I recalled unpacking the bananas into the fridge, I remembered that, at the time, it had seemed a perfectly logical act. I was unpacking all the fruit into the fridge, after all.

However, I’m not really concerned that this may be a tell-tale sign of incipient Alzheimers. I take it, rather, as a function of my feeling particularly exhausted today. It has been a long and action-packed day, following yesterday’s 3-hour drive from Lisbon to Penamacor, and I am feeling pretty whacked, to be honest.

All of which is an elaborate way of building up to apologising for the fact that this is going to a brief, and rather tame, post. I did, in fact, write a fuller one, but I knew even before Bernice read it and confirmed the fact, that it was a real ‘What I did in my summer holidays’ piece. What follows is nothing more, I’m afraid, than the best that I can manage in my current state.

I participated in an interesting and, for me, enjoyable, experiment this last week, totally unexpectedly. On Monday afternoon, having shut up the house and driven up to Zichron, we picked Raphael up from his gan in Binyamina, and, at his request, spent what turned out to a couple of hours playing in what he calls Binyamina Park. The park has several areas that interest him, including a very good adventure playground, a small pond with fish, and a decommissioned field gun from, I suspect, the War of Independence. I really hope Raphael isn’t reading this, because he firmly believes that it is, in fact, not an artillery piece, but rather a tractor. Every time he visits the park, the ‘tractor’ has broken down, and he loves nothing better than mending it, which sometimes takes ‘days’.

Last Monday, we started at the ‘tractor’, and then made our way to the adventure park, which includes a climbing frame, incorporating a rope ladder, a fireman’s pole, a platform and a slide, together forming the shape of a boat. We spent quite a long time on the boat, engaging in play, of which more later.

Wednesday morning found Bernice and myself, together with Micha’el and family, in King Edward VII Park in central Lisbon, and a good part of our time was spent playing on a similarly equipped boat. What I found fascinating was the different approaches that our Zichron grandson and our Portuguese grandsons had to their respective boats.

Raphael is, as far as we are concerned, remarkably well travelled. At his age, neither of us had been further than the seaside close to our respective homes. He has already holidayed in Sri Lanka and Montenegro, and is currently planning, unprompted by his parents, a trip that he claims we are going to be taking to Thailand. Apparently, Nana and Grandpa will sit in one row on the aeroplane, with Raphael sitting between us, and Mummy and Ima will sit in the row behind. I can’t speak for the girls, but I can assure you that Bernice has no intention of going to Thailand, and, having been there a couple of times on business, I don’t have it on my bucket list, either.

I mention all of this because, as soon as Raphael climbed aboard the adventure playground ship on Monday, he urged us to join him because we were sailing to Thailand. For the next 15 minutes, we enjoyed a delightful cruise to South-East Asia, dining on fresh fish caught by Captain Raphael himself.

On Wednesday, by contrast, we were all pressganged into serving as the crew of Captain Tao’s pirate ship, and spent considerably longer firing cannon at rival buccaneers’ vessels and capsizing them, taking no prisoners, while intermittently hoisting mainsails and raising anchors. Two different children, offered a very similar stimulus, each made the experience their own by engaging their vivid, individual, imaginations.

I count the opportunity to watch both of those imaginations at play at close, if sometimes less than comfortable, quarters, and all in the space of 40 hours, a rare and precious privilege, even allowing for just how tight a ship Captain Tao runs. If I am to stand any chance of keeping up tomorrow, I need my full night’s sleep, so, if, you will excuse me, I am going to stop here for this week.

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.