There’s a long line of blog posts queuing up to not be chosen this week. I may have a couple of observations to make about the World Cup. Nothing to do with the actual football, you probably won’t be surprised to hear, if you know me at all. But then, it doesn’t really seem to be the matches that have been grabbing the headlines in this World Cup, does it?

Staying with a summer stuffed with sport, I seem to have let both Ben Stokes’ retirement from the international game (cricket) and Wimbledon (lawn tennis) slip through my fingers, joined this week by The Open (golf). So many missed opportunities.

In addition, this last week offered a very tasty morsel that seemed right up my alley: a trivial news story about language. In fact, I have filed that one away for later.

However, this week my mind is elsewhere, or, rather, elsewheres. None of the locations is particularly sunny, but I am finding them all inescapable. First, if all goes as planned, Micha’el and family will be landing in Israel on Thursday late afternoon for a month-long visit. This is, of course, a very exciting and sunny prospect; yet, I find that I cannot allow myself to surrender to the joy of anticipation, because, in a particularly dark recess of my mind, lurks a small voice that keeps computing the likelihood of another round of war with Iran being launched between now and then. Is this rational? Almost completely not. Does that matter? Not at all. The niggle is playing constantly in my mind, and I know it will only get steadily worse between now and when their plane, God willing, lands at Ben Gurion airport.

Moving from the domestic to the public: Last week ended with the dissolution of the first Israeli government to run its full term since 1988, but not before a string of egregious legislation was passed, as I described last week: legislation whose sole purpose for the outgoing government was to attempt to secure Haredi support for Likud in forming the next government.

This week began with the release of a video showing Rav Dov Landau, the leader of the Haredi Litvak world, addressing the heads of the Yeshivas of Mir and declaring the national religious Jews to be a bunch of “foolish”, “evil” “murderers” who send soldiers to kill Arabs, not for the sake of protecting the lives of Israelis, but “for the glory of the state”.

Yesterday, Rav Landau read a written statement on camera, in which he said: “One must be careful to avoid all ideological debates. Our outlook is clear to us from our teachers, the mighty pillars of the earth, whose waters we drink. In particular, one must be extremely cautious about debating with people who, under the guise of their beliefs, persecute the Torah and those who study it, and who are incapable of understanding or delving deeply into our outlook—the outlook of our great teachers, the Chazon Ish and Rabbi of Brisk, may the memory of the righteous be a blessing. This was demonstrated over the past day, when remarks I made in a private conversation were publicized, and, with the hatred characteristic of the ignorant, were treated in a distorted manner and with a complete lack of understanding.”

Rav Landau was effusive in insulting the knowledge, questioning the integrity and impugning the motives of those who found his words offensive. However, he refused to correct the false impression he claims his critics have of the meaning of his words, claiming they are incapable of understanding his outlook.

Earlier this week, on a morning current affairs radio show, the two presenters – one secular, the other modern Orthodox – interviewed a Haredi journalist and commentator, who attempted to explain Rav Landau’s position. At one point in what was a very civilised, but highly emotional discussion, the religious presenter, Kalman Liebskind, recounted how, at some point during the war, his son and two sons-in-law were serving on reserve army duty at the front, and his daughter and daughters-in-law, and grandchildren, had all moved in with him and his wife.

At 3 o’clock one night, he was awoken by a knock at the front door. He sat bolt upright in bed. In Israel, especially in wartime, a knock at the door in the middle of the night means only one thing. He noticed that his wife beside him had not been woken by the knock. Thinking only of his grandchildren sleeping peacefully on the second floor, above his head, he was rooted to the spot. He could not move. After ten minutes, during which there was no second knock at the door, he finally realised that he had woken from a nightmare. “I don’t resent,” he declared on national radio, “I really don’t resent that Rav Landau’s sons and grandsons don’t serve in the army. But I do find it really painful that while I sat bolt upright in bed, too terrified to move, Rav Landau was able to sleep peacefully.”

In Israel, in 2026, that is the kind of focus and deeply personal intensity you can find in a morning current affairs programme. The power of that story, and the refusal of Rav Landau to engage, or to allow his community to engage, with Israel, are measures of the huge challenges that face all of us over the next months as we move towards our autumn elections.

They are also reminders of the third elsewhere that my mind is at this week. Tomorrow (Wednesday night), we will reach Tisha b’Av, the most tragic day in the Jewish calendar, the day that marks the destruction of both the First and the Second Temples. I find myself, as this week rolls on, reflecting on those halcyon days in earlier decades when a debate about whether the time had come to remove Tisha b’Av from, the Jewish calendar seemed not completely unreasonable, even if the only sensible conclusion the debate could reach was that the time had not yet come.

This year, this decade, this week, the question seems ludicrous. To help ourselves acquire a sense of the loss of the Temple, the huge uncertainty over the future of Jewish existence, we need only follow the news from Israel or any centre of Jewish life around the globe. A more pertinent debate this year would seem to be whether the Zionist endeavour can survive the internal existential challenges it faces, and whether Jewish communities outside Israel can survive the antisemitic onslaught they face.

This will, I feel, be a very sombre Tisha b’Av. I wish you a meaningful day, and may you find comfort in the message of the readings from the prophets that will then accompany us on the seven-week ascent to Rosh Hashana.

“Torah study is a foundational value in the heritage of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.”

On the surface, this is not, you would have thought, a contentious statement. Yet life in Israel is lived on an iceberg: what is on the surface represents only a small percentage of the total mass.

This one terse statement is the final total wording of the pared-back Basic Law: Torah Study, passed this week in its second and third readings and now enshrined in law. Lacking a constitution, Israel’s legislators have, over the years, passed a number of basic laws – a classification that carries something of a constitutional status. Basic laws are intended to serve as guiding principles of government, and although their exact status is not clear, they have historically been treated within Israel’s judicial system as superseding other laws.

This week sees the Government scrambling to pass a slew of laws in what will be the last week of the sitting of the current Knesset, prior to its dissolution on July 17, in preparation for the campaign leading to the general election that is scheduled for October 27.

If you are nor abreast of political developments in Israel, you may be wondering why this apparently innocuous statement of the value of Torah study has been taking up such valuable Knesset time precisely now. The answer is simple: but the ramifications of that answer are profound.

This basic law represents the latest attempt by the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) political parties to ensure their community blanket exemption from national service. It simultaneously represents the latest attempt by Bibi Netanyahu to secure his continued leadership of the country by securing the continued support of the haredim.

I want this week to focus on the beliefs and actions of the haredim, rather than of Bibi. The Israel Defence Force, when calculating its needs, has always factored in an average of a month of annual reserve duty over a period of decades. However, this model has been sustainable only because Israel’s military campaigns have typically been short and sporadic. We are currently over 1000 days into this war, and the strain on the reservists, in terms of their family and work commitments, as well as emotionally and mentally, and on the country as a whole, has been, and continues to be, colossal. Understandably, there have been calls across Israeli society, including, this week, from the IDF commander in chief, for the haredi sector to share the burden.

The response from the haredim continues to be threefold. First, Torah study is a supreme value, such that haredim cannot take time away from it for any other purpose. Second, their Torah study has triggered divine protection of Israel as effective as the protection offered by the IDF. Third, the IDF is not structured in such a way that young haredi men can serve in it and preserve their haredi values.

I want to examine each of these arguments, and to ask whether they are valid, and what they tell us about the haredi community.

Taking the third argument first. The IDF has taken great steps to create an environment that threatens the haredi way of life as little as is possible, within the constraints of running a people’s army to stave off an existential threat. The solution the IDF offers is undoubtedly less than ideal. At the same time, this haredi position shows remarkably little confidence in the effect that 12 or more years of education within the haredi world have had on the resilience of young haredi men to resist the temptations of the outside world. John Milton put it best when he stated: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”

Turning next to their first argument. It is clear from the classic Jewish sources, from the written Torah to the Oral Law to Rambam and beyond, that the purpose of Torah study is to equip the student to fulfil the mitzvot. The virtue does not lie in the study per se, but in its application in the student’s life. When we look at the mitzvot, we see the requirement to fight in a righteous war, we see the duty to help and protect others, we see the duty to shoulder societal responsibilities. Torah study that interferes with, or prevents, or comes at the expense of, carrying out these responsibilities is not Torah study for the sake of Heaven.

I turn finally to the second argument. The haredim ask the nation to believe that their Torah study has triggered divine protection of Israel as effective as the protection offered by the IDF. This is part of their professed belief that, for one who devotes his whole life to studying Torah, God will provide. They ask the nation to believe this, but their very actions demonstrates that they themselves do not believe it. Rather than spending their every waking moment studying Torah, many haredi rabbis form political parties, spend their days in the Knesset plenum and committees, call their students away from the study halls to demonstrate in the streets, overturn and set fire to rubbish bins and police vehicles, bring traffic to a standstill, in order to achieve their political ends and to provide for their material welfare.

If they believed what they ask the rest of the nation to believe, they would simply study and trust in God. Their very presence in the nation’s political life puts the lie to their preposterous, and profoundly unJewish, claim.

For the haredim, the sole purpose of the Basic Law: Torah Study is to ensure that haredim do not serve in the IDF. For Bibi, the sole purpose is to buy him more time as prime minister. The one ray of sunshine on this bleak prospect is my hope that enough Israeli citizens, and, specifically, enough Likud supporters, will be sufficiently disgusted, at this coalition abandonment of the reservists and other defence forces who have carried this country for almost three years, to vote for a change of government on October 27. We can only hope, because, if after the election we have more of the same, the future will look even bleaker than it does now.

I’m not in general a fan of slogan t-shirts, but I own two that I am fond of. The first, which I seem to remember I bought around the time of my 40^th birthday, reads: ‘So far, this is the oldest I have ever been.’ This is a sentiment that is newly true, and strangely uplifting, every time I put the shirt on. I am even considering being buried in it, having first crossed out the opening two words.

The second bears the slogan: ‘If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bulls**t’, a philosophy that, if my memory serves me correctly, has served me well for about 63 years.

As Tuesday comes round again, and I find myself sitting facing a blank screen, I am trying to harness the power of the message of that second t-shirt, because the subject I am juggling with this week is particularly challenging. I’m fairly confident that my readership this week (in fact, most weeks) falls into two groups: those who are passionately knowledgeable about the subject, and those who know nothing and care less about it. In each week’s post, I attempt to find a way to ignite the interest of the second group while bluffing my way through with the first group.

This week, that dual task presents an even bigger challenge than usual, because my subject is football (as Group 1 know it) or soccer (for the benefit of many of those in Group 2). What you need to know at this point is that I belong in Group 2. I don’t pretend to know how that happened. I grew up in a football family, in a football community, surrounded by friends who were football fans. I played as a child – never well but never embarrassingly badly; in pick-up games, I would be chosen by one or other captain around the halfway mark of the selection process. However, I was always much more interested in playing, or watching, tennis or cricket than football.

Yet here I am, about to talk football. Or not, possibly. If you are expecting me to write about the World Cup, then you will be disappointed. Instead, I’m writing about a four-part TV drama series, James Graham’s adaptation for the BBC of his stage play: Dear England.

I first need to give the (essentially factual) background to the story. [Group 1 can skip the next three paragraphs.]

In the Euro 1996 semifinals, England footballer Gareth Southgate missed the crucial sudden-death penalty, crashing England out of the tournament and cementing decades of national footballing anxiety. Twenty years later, Southgate is unexpectedly appointed as the caretaker manager of a deeply fractured, media-battered, and underperforming England squad. Recognizing that the team is crippled by a historical fear of failure and the weight of public expectation, Southgate introduces sports psychologist Pippa Grange. Together, they challenge the traditional, aggressive culture of the dressing room and encourage the young players to face their fears, keep emotional journals, and talk openly about their vulnerabilities. This new psychological framework frees the team, culminating in an unexpected, joyful run to the semifinals at the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

The second half of the narrative deals with the mounting pressure of success and the inevitable intrusion of the real world. Heading into the Euro 2020 tournament, the team has evolved into a powerful symbol of inclusive national unity. However, England loses the final at home on penalties, and the three young black players who missed their kicks are subjected to vicious racist abuse online.

The drama tracks Southgate and his squad navigating this cultural backlash, leading into the highly controversial 2022 World Cup in Qatar. The story ultimately reaches a thematic resolution during the tournament’s quarter-final exit. When captain Harry Kane misses a crucial penalty that knocks England out, he isn’t vilified by his teammates or left isolated on the pitch. Instead, the team instantly rallies around him, offering the immediate emotional support, protection and love that Southgate himself never received in 1996.

While the team does not bring home a literal trophy, the narrative concludes that Southgate successfully rewrote England’s toxic cultural script—proving that true strength is found in recognition of vulnerability, compassion, and collective resilience.

It is almost impossible to over-estimate the degree to which identifying with the England football team contributes to English national identity, or the degree to which obsession with the fortunes of the team dominates the British media. The title of the play and TV series is the salutation of an open letter that Southgate wrote to the nation and published in the sporting press after the racist backlash that followed the missed penalties in the 2020 Euros.

He wrote: “what I want to speak about today is much bigger than football… Our players are role models. And, beyond the confines of the pitch, we must recognise the impact they can have on society. We must give them the confidence to stand up for their teammates and the things that matter to them as people…Why would you choose to insult somebody for something as ridiculous as the colour of their skin?… When England play, there’s much more at stake than [the result]. It’s about how we conduct ourselves on and off the pitch, how we bring people together, how we inspire and unite, how we create memories that last beyond the 90 minutes. That last beyond the summer. That last forever.”

All of this made the Southgate story a powerful vehicle for playwright James Graham to explore English male identity. In addition, he recognised how the story “describes a perfect narrative arc”. Film critic Mark Kermode, reviewing the TV series, aptly described the story as “a redemption narrative straight out of Shakespeare.” At that level, the series is very self-assured, and works very powerfully, even with a seven-day pause between episodes. I can only imagine the dramatic thrust of a two-hour play on stage, with a single interval,

The obligatory disclaimer screened before each episode of the TV series read: “This is a fictionalised account of the struggles and successes of England’s football teams, based on extensive research and interviews. It features characters inspired by some real-life individuals, and some composite characters entirely imagined by the author. Throughout, dialogue has been imagined by the writer.”

At the same time, of course, the documentary nature of the drama is very heavily emphasised. Joseph Fiennes plays Southgate, with the benefit of prosthetic teeth and facial hair, Southgate’s signature waistcoat and an accurate impersonation of voice and mannerisms. It isn’t always easy to distinguish the performance from the interspliced archive footage. Footage both of actual play, particularly the sudden-death penalty shootouts, and of fan reactions, on the stands, in the pubs and on the streets, add to the documentary feel.

At other times, the TV drama feels a little theatrical: for example, when the three black players take their penalties (against a black backdrop), or when Southgate takes a phone call while walking in the forest, and the caller ‘arrives’ to conduct the conversation in person as they walk side-by-side. These moments are slightly jarring, both because TV is a much more literal medium than theatre and because the series strives to emphasise its documentary credentials.

I want to mention two other telling details from the series. The first is an encounter between Gareth Southgate and then British Prime Minister John Major outside the England dressing room immediately after Southgate’s missed penalty in 1996. While attempting, unconvincingly, to console Southgate, Major frames the moment not as an individual failure, but as the last act of a summer that united the nation. He then mistakenly addresses Southgate as ‘Gary’, rather then ‘Gareth’. Much as this seems like a brilliant dramatic invention by the playwright, emphasising how out of touch the English establishment was with the mood of the nation and how isolated Southgate truly was at that moment, contemporary accounts attest that Major did actually make this clumsy gaffe.

The second detail is that, as Southgate rebuilds his team in preparation for the 2022 World Cup, the names of the ‘sacked’ players and those who are making their debut are displayed on screen, together with their legacy number – a unique, chronological number assigned to a player based on the exact order in which they made their debut for England. It is initially surprising to realise that Harry Kane, for example, England’s current captain, is #1207. I would intuitively have expected there to have been far more England players since the first international match in 1872. This detail emphasised, for me, the extraordinary achievement that each individual player’s selection represents.

As Southgate himself wrote in his Dear England letter: “The journey to earn an England cap is an incredibly difficult one, regardless of background or circumstance. Only around 1,200 players have represented England at senior men’s level. Ever. It’s a profound privilege. Don’t forget, many of our lads started out at Football League clubs like Barnsley, MK Dons and Sheffield United. Their backgrounds are humble. For them to make it to this point as one of the chosen few in England’s history … well, it simply doesn’t happen without pride. This is a special group. Humble, proud and liberated in being their true selves.”

Without ever losing its relentless focus on Southgate the man, and his difficult but ultimately liberating journey from penalty failure to national achievement, the series has interesting things to say about the English nation, and young English men, in the 21^st Century. The individual players in Southgate’s England teams, and their cohesion or lack of it, are a microcosm of English society.

I have read accounts which suggest that, on stage, the play succeeded in giving theatregoers who were not football fans a sense of the passion, the community, the peaks and troughs of following a sporting journey unfolding before your eyes, while simultaneously giving football fans who were not afficionados of the theatre a sense of the passion, the community, the peaks and troughs of following a dramatic journey unfolding before your eyes. While that experience is unavoidably diluted on the small screen, I can attest that the drama succeeded in keeping not only me, but also Bernice, on the edge of our seats, and if you think I’m not a football fan then you should see Bernice!

If you’re in Group 2, and you’re still here, I’m flattered. If you’re in Group 1, and you’re still here, I’m stunned. I must find something a bit easier to tackle next week. Meanwhile, it is beginning to look suspiciously as though it might just be not entirely inconceivable – dare I say it – that it’s coming home.

The story so far: Having eventually managed to arrange an MRI for three days’ time, I discovered that, by mistake, the clerk had booked the wrong MRI – brain instead of prostate. Despite my best efforts, the institute’s bot refused to correct the error or connect me to a human being.

Spoiler alert. This story has not one, but two, happy endings, despite appearances on the way.

On Tuesday morning, the day before the scheduled MRI, I decided to try just once more to get past the bot, and phoned at a time that I thought it most likely there might be a human being around. ready to field more challenging enquiries. Having gone through the usual routine with the bot and hit the usual impasse, I asked it to connect me to a human agent. “Certainly,” was the reply. “Just a moment.”

Fortunately, the moment turned out to be long enough for me to recover from my total shock at having achieved the equivalent of reaching the next level of Minecraft (whatever that means). I don’t know if you have ever wondered how long it takes to play the enchanting opening movement of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. In case you have, I can tell you that it runs – at least in the passable version used as background waiting music by the institute – to about 5 minutes and 18 seconds. This means that, in 18 minutes, you can listen to it all the way through a bit less than three and a half times. I know this because it was after exactly 18 minutes of waiting that my phone call was cut off.

However, having got so tantalisingly close to speaking to an actual human being, and given that the version of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik chosen was more than bearable, if suffering a little from irregular tempi, I was certainly not going to give up now. I immediately called again, raced through the same script with the bot, was put on hold with Mozart again, and, a mere one and a quarter renditions of the first movement later, a woman’s voice interrupted, asking how she could help.

Pausing only to assure her that she could have no idea the extent to which the sound of her voice had brightened my day, I explained my dilemma. Completely unphased by my account (I wonder how regular an occurrence this is), she explained that she would just have to check the system online, and asked me to hold. The music this time was considerably lighter, and, I felt, interminable, although in fact it was less than two minutes that I was left clutching my phone, barely time for my knuckles to turn white, before my guardian angel was back on the line, telling me that the correction had already been made online, and I was indeed registered for a prostate MRI.

I can only assume that my email had been read and acted on, and that the person who acted on it had thought how much more fun it would be not to email me a reply updating me, but rather to leave me stewing.

I thanked the clerk profusely, and asked her to send me the correct protocol for how I needed to prepare for the MRI. This she did immediately, and, the following afternoon, I arrived at the institute with all my papers and my innards in order. The receptionist studied my papers, called up my details on her computer, and said:
“Why are you here?”
“For a prostate MRI.”
“But you’ve just done a prostate MRI, at our other building.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Yes, you have.”.
“No, I haven’t. If you look at the date, you will see that it was last year, not this year.”
“Oh, yes.”

By this stage, I was starting to miss the bot.

However, the best was yet to come.
“This is an authorisation for a prostate MRI.”
“Yes.”
“We don’t do prostate MRIs here. I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake.”
“If a mistake has been made, then it isn’t me who’s made it. Your office contacted me and booked me in here today for a prostate MRI.”
“Wait over there. I’ll go and see whether they can carry out a prostate MRI exceptionally.”

So I waited over there, while the clerk went out, came back a few minutes later, checked some things on her computer, then started making phone calls to schedule future appointments.

About twenty minutes later, by which time it was only 15 minutes before my scheduled MRI time, I went up to the desk again and asked the clerk whether she had an answer for me. She looked at me as if she was having difficulty remembering exactly which stone I had crawled out from under.

“You’re having a prostate MRI, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” (This somehow didn’t feel like the right time for a more smart-aleck response.)
“Why are you waiting here? Go and wair in the waiting area through that door.”

I offer it as further evidence of my maturity that I silently turned and went and waited.

The MRI, once I was eventually called, went smoothly. The noise seemed marginally less strident and stressful than usual, the lighting slightly more subtle, and background piano music was provided that was just far enough on the saccharine-free side of Richard Clayderman to be soothing rather than aggravating.

There was, however, time for one more hiccough, for which I will take some responsibility. I had been required to put all of my metallic miscellania – ring, watch, piercings – in a locker, with a very hi-tech locking mechanism, for which I was given a smart card. After my 45 minutes inside the MRI tube, I walked into the labyrinth of inner rooms, found the locker room and attempted to open my locker. I remembered that mine was the middle locker, and was reassured to note that the coloured dot on the locker matched the green dot on my smart card. However, the locker door failed to respond. I eventually found a doctor, who tried and failed to open the locker. I could see that the lockers had an override socket, and asked the doctor whether he had a key for the socket. He explained that the technician with the key had just gone off-duty. He managed to call him back and the locker was opened, to reveal…somebody else’s metal items.

At this point, the doctor who had admitted me and issued me with a locker came in and pointed out that my locker room was on the other side of the corridor. When I eventually stood in front of my own locker, I was interested, but not, to be honest, surprised, to note that my green-dot card actually opened the blue-dot locker.

By the time all this was sorted out, my MRI disk had already been burnt, and so I was free to go, having been informed that I should receive the analysis of the MRI in a week: happy ending number 1.

In the event, the analysis arrived the following day. I sent it to my urologist, and Bernice and I then delivered the disk by hand to his secretary in Shaarei Zedek hospital. This was on Thursday afternoon, and he was in surgery at the time. On Monday morning, he phoned me to say that he and his colleagues had reviewed the analysis and the disk, and could see no suspicious developments since my last MRI, and nothing to warrant taking any further action. My prostate is still, for the moment, just one of the nooks and crannies of my body that some specialist or other is checking in on every so often: happy ending number 2.

Since I took this call while we were driving up to Zichron, we were in an excellent state to enjoy a wonderful afternoon with the family there.

May we all continue to hear only good news, and I promise not to give you another organ recital next week.

Botch, bother, botulism, botox. Have you noticed how many unpleasant words start with a bot? Unfunnily enough, that’s more or less the story of my week: a string of unpleasant words and unhappy experiences starting, and, it seemed for much of the week, ending with a bot. This week’s post is about one particular aspect of AI, which, I remind you, ostensibly stands for artificial intelligence. However, I have my doubts. I have spent far too much time this week in conversation with a bot whose sensitivity to language – intonation, nuance, register – were so sophisticated as to leave me in doubt whether it was artificial, but, sadly, the limitations of whose algorithms left me in no doubt that it was not intelligent.
I’m writing this midday on Monday, which feels like about two weeks since the week began, and I currently don’t know how this story ends. The upside of that is that I already have a topic for next week’s post: David’s Adventures in Botland: Part II. The downside is that, as of this moment, I don’t know how traumatic Wednesday will be.
It will certainly be traumatic: in my now considerable experience, an MRI is not a pleasant way to spend a Wednesday afternoon. The double prospect of the claustrophobia of being glided into a narrow tube, and the ridiculous cacophony of loud noise that bombards you have me tensing up already. However, as will become clear as we go on, if that is what constitutes my trauma this Wednesday, I will regard it as a good day.
One of my specialists has referred me for an MRI. The technical procedure is that when my health fund has issued a commitment to pay for the test I can make an appointment for it. Knowing that there was likely to be a long waiting list. I anxiously awaited news of the issuing of the authorization. As soon as our local clinic phoned me with the good news, last Thursday, I phoned the appointments number for the institute that carries out the test. At the other end of the phone was a bot: quite a sophisticated bot with an impressive armoury of increasingly exasperated tones of voice when it does not get its way. I carefully explained why I was phoning and the bot informed me that the Institute does not perform such a test. Since I knew this to be inaccurate, I held my ground.

As the bot was having nothing of it, I asked to speak to a human being. The bot then pointed out that it could only put me on to a human being when it was clear that it was unable to handle my request. From the bot’s point of view, since the institute didn’t perform such a test, the bot had handled my request. It therefore refused to pass me on to a human being. There is only so long you can go on arguing with a bot, although in my experience it’s a little longer than you should bother with. In the end, it was the bot who said, in a very reasonable simulation of a huff: “I’m going to have to conclude this conversation now. This will take a moment.” I allowed myself the satisfaction of hanging up before the bot’s moment was through. I’m damned if I’m going to let a bot hang up on me.

Obviously what I needed to do was to find a way to get through directly to a human being at the institute. A thorough online search of their site and various other avenues revealed nothing more than the one phone number which only leads to a bot. I therefore phoned my own clinic where after initially suggesting that I phoned the institute, the clock soon agreed to send a message to the institute asking them to contact me.

On Sunday, as I was still trying to figure out a way to actually get through to a human being, i received a phone call from the institute to tell me that they had received the authorization from my health clinic and the very pleasant clerk at the end of the line told me that he was phoning to make an appointment I took the liberty of explaining the problem with their bot to him before making an appointment, which was probably a tactical error, although he seemed very appreciative of the fact that I was making him cognizant of the limitations in the bot’s algorithm.

Within a matter of minutes, we had made an appointment which was, to my absolute astonishment, not for three months’ time as I had suspected would be the case, or even three weeks’ time, as I had hoped, but rather three days’ time. Moreover, it was for an eminently reasonable time of day 2:00 p.m. I thanked the clerk profusely and waited to receive the SMS confirmation of the appointment with all of the details of how I had to prepare for the test

Within minutes the confirmation arrived. However, the SMS referred to an MRI subtly but very significantly different from the one that I was authorized to have and that I had made an appointment for with the clerk. Indeed, the test specified was about half of my body distance away from where it should have been, rendering it more or less absolutely superfluous.

I immediately called the number from which the clerk had called me; none of you will be surprised to hear that a recorded message informed me that this number was out of service. Pausing only to pour myself a large whisky, I phoned the appointment telephone number of the institute and spoke to the bot. I carefully explained what I needed and the bot explained with equal care just what my options were: if I was calling about an existing appointment, I could change the date, the time or the location, but not the type of test. In a classic demonstration of the triumph of optimism over bitter experience, I asked the bot to put me through to a human being. I leave you to complete the rest of the conversation.
In addition, having finally found online an email address for the institute, I sent an email explaining the situation and enclosing both the authorization from my health fund stating clearly the nature of the test and a screenshot of the SMS stating clearly the nature of a completely different test for which I had received confirmation from the institute. I wonder if any of you have received a phone call from the institute or a response to my email, because, having just checked, I can tell you that I have not. In fact, after a brief discussion, Bernice and I have decided that driving to the institute tomorrow, Tuesday, to sort this out in person on the day before the test, is a marginally less depressing prospect than turning up on Wednesday for a test which I may be told I cannot take because they have prepared for a completely different test. Rather than my typing this week’s post on Tuesday I am dictating it into my phone as Bernice and I drive to Zichron Yaakov on Monday in the hope of leaving myself free enough on Tuesday to be able to waste three or four hours going to a far from central part of Jerusalem to try and get this sorted out so that I can actually have the test on Wednesday, weeks, if not months, before I dreamed I would be able to have it.
I promise next week to bring you up to date, however depressing or delightful the update proves to be. [Spoiler alert: as of Tuesday evening, things look very promising.]
Meanwhile, I really hope we all have a good week

One can only imagine the jubilation on the streets of Kiev and Moscow this week, with the news that Trump has sorted out the Middle East and is now free to turn his attention to resolving the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Before I consider the pesky little details of that sorting out of the Middle East, let me give you two little tastes of what living in a war zone feels like, on a day-to-day basis. The influence of the war can be felt in all sorts of unexpected places. Here are two of them.

(A quick word of background to the first little taste. For decades now, apartment buildings (or blocks of flats, as I  realise with a slight shock I used to call them) in Israel have been constructed with a dedicated communal bomb shelter in the basement. More recently, new homes have been built with each apartment having a ‘safe room’, essentially a one-family bomb-proof room that is an integral part of the family apartment and functions in normal times (whatever they are) as an additional room.)

Israeli media, like, I suspect, those of most of the first world, are full of adverts for retirement homes, golden age resorts, assisted living, and so forth. In Israel, many of these complexes are fairly high-end, and the advertising often targets the 55+, still very active and independent, pre-retirement population. A radio advert currently running gives much prominence to the fact that ‘every apartment in our complex has its own integral safe room with a sea view, so that, when the sirens sound, you don’t even have to move.’ In Israel, in 2026, an integral safe room is a top priority selling point for a retirement home.

As for your second appetiser: a lead story on this week’s news was a warning from Israel’s Transportation minister. As the chief administrator of Ben Gurion airport explained, the world’s airlines are now expected to be flying to Israel this summer, and 2.4 million air tickets have been sold for flights into and out of Ben Gurion airport in July. However, the airport is currently able to handle only 1.6 million passengers, because it has insufficient space for planes to park. The reason for this is that about two-thirds of the airport’s aircraft parking capacity is currently occupied by 70 USAF refuelling and transport planes.

With peace having broken out when I wasn’t looking the other day, these 70 planes may all go back to where they are usually parked. If they don’t, 800,000 passengers may have their flights cancelled on them, since the airline cannot fly them to Israel because the plane park is full. This, I suppose, puts into perspective my own annoyance when I headed for our local mall on Sunday and drove around for 5 minutes unable to find a parking space and finally gave up and parked a five-minute walk away.

With a sinking feeling, I see that I have only achieved, with that preamble, 460 words, which means I have no alternative but to address ‘the deal’. This is problematic, and only partly because it is likely to put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. ‘Addressing the deal’, it emerges, is about as meaningful a term as ‘recognising Palestine’

You probably don’t remember my blog post from 25 August last year. But, then, you probably don’t file all my blog posts in a folder on your desktop, as I do. Let me refresh your memory. I wrote then about that week’s European fad, to recognise the state of Palestine. I quoted, on that occasion, the following verse:

As I was going down the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish that man would go away!

Last time, the man who wasn’t there had metamorphosed into a country. This time, he has transformed himself into a peace agreement.

I can’t speak with absolute authority, since we mere mortals have not been privileged to have the details of the peace agreement – sorry, I can’t keep this charade up any longer: it’s not a peace agreement; it’s a ‘peace agreement’ – to have the details of the ‘peace agreement’ shared with them. However, it seems clear that what this thing is is nothing more than two lists, representing the positions of Trump and the IRGC, which will form the basis of discussions over the next 60 days, at the end of which the IRGC will not have moved a centimetre from their listed position, and, in order to have any chance of emerging from the mid-terms in November with a shred of respectability, Trump will sell out Israel, the US and the rest of the free world, by accepting the IRGC position, and then, if not sooner, release money to enable the IRGC to resume full funding of its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza.

JD Vance tells us that the ‘peace agreement’ is “a very general document” and is “about a page and a half” long, so it is clearly nothing more than a series of bullet points to form the basis of discussions toward a peace agreement (or, more accurately away from a peace agreement and toward a Trump sell-out).

It’s fair to say that I’m not widely known for the insightfulness of my geopolitical analysis. So, if I say that I have serious doubts about Iran’s willingness to make the nuclear concession Trump is trumpeting (“Iran has agreed to never have a Nuclear Weapon” [Trump’s caps], you are entitled to question my credentials. Fortunately for my argument, reports are that it isn’t just me saying this, but also the director of the CIA, whose street creds are presumably significantly greater than mine.

The Times of London reports that a source told the American news website Axios that “the intelligence reflects that the Iranian intentions are not in line with their commitments under the deal”. In the real world, we call that lying and cheating. The source stated that “the intelligence agencies concluded that the way Iranian officials were discussing the deal among themselves was inconsistent with what they were telling the mediators”. I know: almost impossible to believe, isn’t it!

If I needed any more convincing that this week’s developments are deeply concerning, confirmation came in the form of messages from the leaders of Germany, France, the UK and Italy, welcoming the signing of the memorandum. Usually a very reliable yardstick these days: If the West European football giants agree on something, it’s never a good sign.

America’s primary concern was stated with engaging honesty by Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer: “What exactly is in this understanding? Will service members remain in harm’s way? What have we actually gained here from Trump’s war?” What a telling framing of concerns that is. For the Senate minority leader, the primary concern is ensuring that US military personnel are not in any danger. The secondary concern is whether the free world is safer or not. Forgive me if I seem callous, and I truly would not wish to belittle even a single soldier’s death, but the primary purpose of an army is not to be kept safe, but to keep its country safe. By the very nature of the concept of a military, the safety of troops cannot be a country’s primary consideration.

Even Trump’s supporters among Republicans in the Senate seem sceptical about the deal. Republican senator Lindsey Graham said he was “somewhat concerned that Iran’s view of the agreement seems different than what the American negotiation team is claiming”. So, he agrees with the CIA assessment. America and Iran are co-signing an agreement (initially digitally and, this coming Friday, physically) on whose meaning and interpretation they do not agree.

There are times in history when enemy states wish to end a conflict honourably and pursue a path of peace. Sometimes, they achieve this by signing an agreement whose ambiguity allows each of them to avoid losing face with its own people.

There are other times in history when one state wishes to end a conflict honourably and pursue a path of peace, and the other wishes to resume, unhindered, its belligerent march towards regional domination and the destruction of its enemies. Any leader who signs an ambiguous agreement with such a state is not safe to be trusted with a fountain pen.

Tellingly, Senator Graham went on to identify VP Vance as the “architect of the deal”. This reads remarkably like recognising this ‘deal’ as the charade it is. In readiness for handling the fiasco that is bound to ensue, Vance is being set up to be pushed under the bus when it starts careering out of control.

The trouble, from where I’m sitting, is that Vance is not the only one who is in grave danger of being pushed under this careering bus. In common with every last Israeli, I am feeling a lot closer to that bus’s wheels than I was a few days ago.

Blogger’s Note: I know that many of you will be opening this post eager for geo-political analysis of the latest mid-East complications. My analysis and advice are pithy: Don’t waste your time reading or listening to anything any of the leaders involved writes or says. You will be no less well-informed, and you will have saved precious moments of your valuable time.

Today’s admittedly obscure title references an excellent joke that I won’t tell you, because it doesn’t work in writing. However, I’ll pause for a moment, to give your lateral-thinking braincells a chance to work out in what way blood tests could possibly be like comedy.

I suspect that most long-running marriages gradually settle into a rough division of responsibilities between the parties. Among those that our specific marriage has settled into is that Bernice ‘does’ health. In practical terms, this means that she, who enjoys fly-on-the-wall video documentaries of medical procedures and case-studies, and who keeps up to date with medical breakthroughs, is our family’s expert on good, and ill, health. I tend to focus more on the ill than the good, and also to focus on the practical, rather than the theoretical side. Basically, I develop the conditions, and she tells me all about them.

Bernice has a mantra that she has drummed into me over the years, which is: ‘Do not take a blood test within two months of an impending trip to Portugal’. This is very sound advice, as I will explain at length in this post. However, it is very much theoretical advice, and not always practical.

So, when I developed a couple of symptoms three weeks ago (four weeks before we were due to fly to Portugal for a month), we both knew that it made no sense to ignore them, and I paid a visit to our family doctor. He sent me for blood tests, and, when the results gave a little cause for concern, repeat blood tests. I made sure to revise more thoroughly before the resits, and, sure enough, I improved my marks sufficiently to ease those concerns.

Unfortunately, I was then afflicted with another ailment, and was sent for a third set of blood tests last week. My doctor cunningly slipped in another test this time, without telling me. So, of course, I had been unable to revise for it, and I failed even more spectacularly than last time I failed this particular test 15 months ago. My doctor was immediately on the phone to me, instructing me to make appointments with two specialists. I pointed out that I had routine appointments with both of them in the next couple of months, but my doctor was not impressed. I then explained that we were flying in 10 days’ time, at which point he informed me that this needed to be resolved before we flew.

I was fairly confident that I knew what would happen: a repeat of what happened 15 months ago. The first specialist will send me for a couple of tests, that will take six weeks to line up, undergo, and receive results from. He will then look at the results and inform me that all is OK, I should cancel the appointment with the other specialist, and make a repeat appointment in a year’s time to monitor progress.

I was, as I say, fairly confident…but then, I’m not the one who ‘does’ health in this marriage, so it was reassuring when Bernice more or less shared my cautious optimism.

However, despite our optimism, it was perfectly clear to us that, even in Israel, I would not be able to complete this process in ten days. We would need something more like four weeks at the very least. The earliest specialist appointment I could get was for the day after we were due to fly. The last time this happened, the negative results of the second test the specialist sent me for came back just in time for the specialist to phone me after Bernice and I had checked in for our flight to Portugal, and for me to report this result to the senior executive in the travel insurance company we use, so that he could approve our travel insurance and issue the policy while we were queuing for the security check before proceeding to the departure gate. That is not an experience either of us particularly wants to relive. At the same time, without those results, I would not be able to get medical travel insurance while there is a question mark, however small, over my blood test results,, and it would take somebody much younger, fitter and more foolhardy than me to travel without insurance.

The bottom line is that we have reluctantly cancelled our trip to Portugal, thus proving that blood tests are, as Bernice contends, indeed like comedy: the secret is in the timing. What would have been a minor inconvenience, and a way of getting out and meeting people (even if only fellow patients, medical specialists and technicians) has instead become a major disruption.

However (and what a huge and delightful however this is), like all clouds, this one has a silver lining. In this case, that takes the shape of Tslil, Micha’el, Tao and Ollie coming over to Israel instead – probably for the last week or so of July and the first three weeks of August. This is twice as long as their planned trip in March, which the last war but one (or is it two?) shot to pieces. It is even rumoured that my nephew and his family may be visiting Israel from England at the same time, and all four cousins and their families may be able to be together for the first time since I can’t remember when.

This arrangement has the added bonus that I will be able to laugh at Micha’el and Tslil packing to go back with all their luggage, including the one or two or forty things Bernice bought for us to take out, and knowing that I won’t have to lift any of it into or out of car boots or airport carousels. At this point, I am more than happy to take enjoyment wherever I can find it.

Housekeeping: I am still resolving the issue of subscribers receiving the weekly email automatically. I hope to complete it this week., You can help me (if you want to continue receiving the email) by clicking the Follow us button below, filling in your email, and clicking Follow. (Despite what is written there, you will only receive one email once a week, when I publish a new post.) You will then receive a Confirmation email, asking you to confirm your email address. Thanks in advance.

We need to talk birthday parties, for two principal reasons.

The first concerns specificity. We have heard, recently, of the birthday parties of the grandchildren of friends and family, one in the UK and the other in the US, which took us mildly by surprise.

The US party was a slime party. For any of you who have no children/grandchildren of an appropriate age, and who live on desert islands, you can get an idea of what ‘slime’ is from the excruciatingly syrupy promotional video here. I’m not really sure what exact shape the slime party took, but I imagine the birthday boy’s parents must have needed to buy a considerable quantity of slime to keep all the party guests occupied. Of course, at the end of the day they had a plentiful supply of slime for their own children to play with in the future, although, in my experience, once all of the lurid pastel shades have been mixed together, the resulting sludge-coloured mass seems considerably less attractive.

I am reminded of mixing paint colours in primary school. While my more creative classmates produced rich, vibrant purples, and umbers, or subtle shades of forest green, I, however hard I tried, always seemed to end up with sludge brown. Indeed, the intensity of the sludginess seemed always to match the intensity of the effort.

The UK party was a trampolining party. I’m not quite sure of the logistics of this. It makes no sense that the guests spent two hours queueing for their turn on the one trampoline the hosts own, so I imagine the hosts invited all of the guests to a trampolining centre. It is even possible, given what I know of the hosts, that they and their friends run a trampoline g’mach (charitable non-profit provider), and their back garden was filled for the afternoon with ten assorted trampolines borrowed from friends.

What puzzles me about these parties is that I find it difficult to imagine how the parents construct a balanced party progranme around such a constricting theme. Back in the day, one of the things that Bernice and I most enjoyed was collaborating on themed birthday parties for the kids. I particularly remember a pirate birthday party for Micha’el. All four of us dressed in pirate costume; we laid out a treasure hunt complete with map; Bernice read a suitable pirate story; I made pirate hats with all the children (from the ubiquitous sol, or EVA foam craft sheets, of course); the birthday cake was a magnificent treasure chest, with the open lid revealing a kingly fortune of sweet jewels and chocolate coins. Try as I might, I can’t mentally construct a birthday party around the theme of trampolining, but perhaps I am simply even less creative than I was mixing paints in primary school.

All this talk of parties recently led Bernice to remark that, as a child, she never had a birthday party. Thinking about it, I realised that I couldn’t recall ever having one either. However, just to be safe, I consulted my brother, Martin. I half-expected him to reveal that, as the favoured elder son, he always had a party, but I was locked in the scullery on those occasions, Instead, he confirmed that he also had no recollection of any birthday parties. Now, this may of course simply be a consequence of our dwindling mental faculties, but, in my brother’s case particularly, I very much doubt it.

During this phone conversation, Martin then pointed out that he couldn’t remember going to any friends’ birthday parties either, a non-memory that I shared. Bernice suggested this might have been because I was not very popular as a child, but I was having none of that. (There’s a nasty side to Bernice that very few of you are ever exposed to.) As we considered this topic, it became clear to us that children’s birthday parties were something that austerity Britain didn’t indulge in. At least in our circles. Bernice, who grew up in South Wales, remembers being invited to other children’s parties. However, in our social circle, people clearly didn’t ‘do’ birthday parties.

I suspect that may have been partly because fathers were not, or did not feel themselves to be, in a position to take time off work to co-host, and, to be honest, being a single-parent child’s birthday party host seems a massive undertaking. Anyway, whatever, the reason, I never had, and was never invited to, a birthday party.

Except once. And this is a confession that is going to cost me a good deal of embarrassment, so please show some consideration. A not-particularly-close friend did once invite me to his party. I must have been around 9 years old. I got dressed up in my smart clothes, clutched the carefully bought and wrapped present under my arm, and set off on the ten-minute walk to his home, which I had never been to.

On the way, I got lost, and despite wandering around increasingly desperately for the next half-an-hour, I failed to find the house. Still clutching the present, I considered my options. Continuing to wander aimlessly seemed increasingly pointless. Even if I now found the house, I would arrive ridiculously late, and would be compelled to explain the reason for my lateness. Returning home would mean confessing to my mother that I was incapable of following clear directions. Neither option seemed particularly attractive

In the end, I went into the nearby park, sat on a bench, felt very sorry for myself for an hour and a half, hid the present under a bush, and found my way home, where I lied shamefacedly to my mother about the party.

There! Apart from Bernice, and my brother on the phone a few days ago, you are the first people I have ever told this sad story to. Now you know just how insecure and devious a person I am. I will not be surprised, or indeed offended, if, after we next shake hands in shul, I catch you surreptitiously counting your fingers.

And, having arrived at this point, I am, not for the first time, amazed at the confessional effect writing this blog has on me. I would have bet a large sum of money on me never sharing this story publicly… and, it is now clear, I would have lost. Perhaps it would be best to give up this blog-writing.

For reasons that don’t need to concern you, I find myself, this week, with very little time to write a blog post. I realise that this may come as a shock. You have probably grown accustomed, over the last six-and-a-half years, to me sharing all sorts of intimate details with you. You may also have come to the not unreasonable conclusion that writing my blog post takes priority over any of the other, less important, activities I may have to devote my time to.

Well, not this week, I’m afraid. I currently have a very small window of opportunity, and a suitably slim topic to squeeze through it. So, expect neither linguistic pyrotechnics nor elegant witticisms, neither deep geo-political analysis nor an assorted bundle of ephemera. If I had to select an adjective to describe what I expect the next 600 words to turn out to be, I might well go with ‘prosaic’, which is, at least, I suppose, not inappropriate for 600 words of prose.

I want to recommend a book to you this week – a collection of American short stories. I am not, in the normal run of things, a great fan of short stories; I usually prefer feeling completely immersed in the deeper waters of an elaborate and leisurely novel. However, from time to time, a light buffet lunch appeals more than a formal, four-course sit-down, slap-up meal. This last couple of weeks has been such a time.

Incidentally, before we get to the book (and I can see that, despite my best intentions, this is indeed turning into an assorted bundle of ephemera), you are undoubtedly, like me, wondering about the origin of that phrase ‘a slap-up meal’. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable quotes Thackeray as stating, in his 1853 novel The Newcomes that “The more slap-up still have two shields painted on the panel with the coronet over”, with the meaning of ‘first-rate’ or ‘grand’. In 1864, Dickens, in Our Mutual Friend, describes the character Bella Wilfer receiving a surprise gift of £50 and treating her impoverished father to a complete makeover and a luxurious meal. She rolls up in a fancy carriage to surprise him – “…a slap-up gal in a bang-up chariot” and treats him to a “slap-up luncheon”.

Over the years, the adjective ‘slap-up’ became confined to descriptions of food. Why was that, and where did the phrase come from? The most plausible explanation (which, given the nature of etymology, is not necessarily the most likely one, but is certainly the most interesting) is that the phrase grew out of the earlier phrase ‘slap-bang’, which described a meal purchased in the kind of dining establishment where you walk in and slap down your money, and the waiter bangs down your meal immediately. This is, as you may have deduced, not exactly fine dining.

This kind of meal was also described as a ‘slap-down’ meal, and it seems plausible that the phrase ‘slap-up’ was originally coined, as a humorous opposite of ‘slap-down’, to describe a meal ordered and consumed in a much grander establishment.’

But I digress. Let us turn our attention to the short stories. This is a collection wittily entitled Uncommon Type – the wit will be revealed soon – and the quickest way to describe the stories, individually and as a whole, is to say that, if Tom Hanks were a short-story writer rather than an actor, then these are exactly the sort of short stories you would expect him to write. Many are wryly amusing; all are full of telling observational detail; the characters and settings are almost all wholesomely American and celebratory of American values of family, integrity, decency. Even the darker stories leave the central characters more mature and enriched, and the lighter ones are as comforting as warm apple pie.

Here I must confess that I have been misleading you. There is a good reason why they reminded me so much of the values Hanks portrays on screen; he is, in fact, the author of the stories, A Steve Martin quote on the back cover reads: “It turns out that Tom Hanks is also a wise and hilarious writer with an endlessly surprising mind. Damn it.” That just about sums it up.

Other than wholesomeness, the stories are notionally bound together by the odd fact that each contains a reference to a specific typewriter. In some stories the typewriter plays a key (apologies) role; in others, it is only mentioned in passing. However, each machine is carefully described, and if Hanks were not the wholesome character that he is, I would be tempted to suspect that he has a typewriter fetish.

You must imagine, between the last paragraph and this, a five-minute break, during which I followed a hunch, and Googled ‘Tom Hanks typewriters.’ And what do you know? He does have a typewriter fetish! Tom Hanks has a collection of over 250 typewriters, some genuine collectors’ items, but others humble workhorses. He explained his passion in an interview, in the following words:

“There’s something about – I don’t know, it’s a hex in my brain – there is something I find reassuring, comforting, dazzling in that here is a very specific apparatus that is meant to do one thing, and it does it perfectly. And that one thing is to translate the thoughts in your head down to paper. Now that means everything from a shopping list to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Short of carving words into stone with a hammer and chisel, not much is more permanent than a paragraph or a sentence or a love letter or a story typed on paper.”

I should emphasise that sharing Hanks’ passion is not a prerequisite for enjoying the stories. As he ranges widely in time and setting, Hanks offers a series of interesting and engaging characters. He has a lightness of literary touch that makes the stories very readable, but there is a lot here that deserves to be savoured more slowly. As we move inexorably into the languorous heat of an Israeli summer, this feels like the sort of read to be recommending.

If you find Hanks’ character portrayals on the screen a little cloying and syrupy, then you should probably stick with Dostoevsky. However, if you appreciate the warm glow he gives you, then I invite you to curl up with Uncommon Type (the cleverness of whose title you are now in a position to appreciate).

I heard a presenter on Israel radio this week bemoaning the prevalence of car-owners using their phones while driving. He claimed, although he was clearly joking, that he personally always kept both hands on the wheel in what I would call the ‘ten-to-two’ position. Only he called it ‘עשר ועשרה’ (which transliterates as ‘esser v’assarah’ and translates as ‘ten past ten’), and which, unwittingly, set me on the path to all I need for a complete blog post this week. I apologise to those of you who have no Hebrew, because there will be bits here that won’t be easy to follow, but I have tried to imagine myself reading a similar blog post that someone else had written comparing language usage in Swahili and English, and I have managed to convince myself, if I stand back a bit, and squint, that I would find it fascinating. So, here goes…and if you’re leaving already, I’ll hope to see you next week: same time, same place.

The presenter actually set me on two paths. One is fairly well-trodden, easy to follow and hardly meanders at all, so we’ll take that one first. I found myself, first, filing the phrase ‘esser v’assarah’ away as one of those examples of a non-literal translation. Hebrew-speakers look at the position of the hands, and read the ‘time’ as ten past ten; English-speakers read it as ten to two. Neither, of course, is more inherently correct than the other, since, in most cases, the driver’s two arms are of equal length, so there is no determinable minute hand or hour hand here.

One other pair of phrases in the same file concerns how Hebrew and English describe perfect vision. In English, we speak of ‘twenty-twenty vision’, while Hebrew refers to ‘seeing six-six’ ((‘רואים שש-שש’. The reason for the difference here is rather more obvious: 6 (metric) metres being close to 20 (imperial) feet. (Just for the record, the difference is 3.78 inches (or, if you prefer, 9.6 centimetres, a difference small enough to inappropriately turn a blind eye to.)

It strikes me that there are two plausible reasons for English opting for ‘ten to two’. First, the alliteration (the triple initial ‘t’ sound) is euphonious. Second, ‘ten past ten’, correctly enunciated, requires a slight pause between the final ‘t’ of ‘past’ and the initial ‘t’ of ‘ten’ that is not easy to achieve cleanly without slowing down; whereas ‘ten to two’ trips off the tongue.

While I don’t really feel qualified to comment similarly on plausible reasons for the Hebrew choice, it does seem to me that there is something pleasing in using both the masculine and feminine forms of the word for ‘ten’ (‘assarah’ and ‘esser’) consecutively.

No sooner had I thought of this explanation than I consciously registered something that I have never, as far as I am aware, noticed before. When telling the time in Hebrew, the number representing the minutes in expressed in the masculine, while the number representing the hour is expressed in the feminine. I did what I usually do in these situations. First, I questioned both my go-to literate native-Hebrew-speaker friend (thank you, Hagit), and the handier one of my two literate native-Hebrew-speaker daughters-in-law (four hyphens in six words – an ‘Is-this-a-record?’ moment). I got from both of them the answer that I more or less expected, given that this use of numbers (in telling the time) is such a fundamental piece of language usage. They both basically said: “Wow! That’s interesting! I’ve never really noticed. I don’t know why.”

In earlier times, Hagit would then have asked her Hebrew-language teacher mother, but she sadly died a few years ago. Maayan asked her pet AI, Claude, who gave an answer that was as smug and, simultaneously, as unsatisfyingly incomplete as one would expect from something with an effete French name.

Left to my own devices, I did what I always do in these situations, and explored the excellent website of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, which brings erudition and sensitivity, but not a trace of one-upmanship, to the question of ruling on recommended Hebrew usage. I realise with a shock that I have been asking questions of the academy for 36 years, since I was employed as the founding Director of the British Council’s English Language School. When I drafted our first posters in Hebrew advertising classes, I had no idea whether to write the lesson times (for example 19:00–20:30) left-to-right (as one does in English) or right-to-left (for example 20:30–19:00). At the time, the Academy informed me that both conventions were acceptable, which seemed a little bizarre to me. In the end, I opted for right-to-left, so as not to interrupt the natural reading direction.

On the question of number gender for telling the time, the Academy has a lot to say about the peculiarities of number-gender in Hebrew in general, but nothing specifically about telling the time. It is an odd feature of Hebrew (and, apparently, all Semitic languages, so it is an odd feature that began in antiquity) that the normal method of forming the feminine in Hebrew is stood on its head when it comes to numbers. The usual root form for an adjective is the masculine: ‘tov’, for example, means ‘good’. The feminine is then typically formed by adding a ‘ה’ to the end of the word, pronounced ‘ah’. A similar form is used if nouns have a masculine and feminine form. So, a good male friend is ‘haver tov’, whereas a good female friend is ‘haverah tovah’.

Numbers behave rather differently. The masculine and feminine forms of numbers 1 and 2 are irregular. Those forms of 3–10 are the reverse of the normal rule: the feminine is the simple root form, and the masculine is formed by adding a ‘ה’. The numbers 11–19 are formed as compounds: ‘one-ten’, ‘two-ten’…’nine-ten’, with the ‘ten’ having different compound forms for masculine and feminine. From 20 upwards, the masculine and feminine forms are identical.

So, 4 is ‘arba’ah’ (masculine) or ‘arba’ (feminine) and 14 is ‘arba’ah assar’ (M) or ‘arba essrai’ (F).

This allows a number used as an adjective to agree in gender with the noun it describes. So, ‘hamishah banim’ (5 boys) but ‘hamesh banot’ (5 girls). Since the number that looks and sounds feminine is in fact masculine, and vice versa, learners of Hebrew have great difficulty using numbers correctly.

Turning our attention to telling the time, when we say ’10 past 10’, we mean, of course, ‘ten minutes past ten o’clock’. Clearly, the first 10 is an adjective describing the ‘understood’ ‘minutes’. Since minutes is ‘dakot’ in Hebrew, a feminine noun, logic demands that we should say ‘esser l’esser’ and not ‘assarah l’esser’.

Incidentally, the second ‘10’ is not an adjective describing ‘hours’, but a ‘standalone’ number, like the number of a bus route or a road. In Hebrew, these numbers are, by convention, always feminine (for numbers 3–10, the simpler form of the number). So, even though ‘kvish’ (road) and ‘kav’ (bus route) are both masculine, Hebrew speaks of ‘kav shalosh’ and ‘kvish shesh’.

Going back to that first 10 – the one that ‘ought’ to be feminine but is masculine – I could not think of any reason to explain this usage, and I could not find an answer on the Academy’s website. So, I used their ridiculously straightforward messaging system on the site, and asked the question. Within ten minutes, I received an email. I assumed that it was an automatic acknowledgement of receipt. However, when I opened it, I found it contained a link to an article on their website that fully explained the peculiar usage.

Let me just say that again: in response to an online query, an Israeli quasi-governmental national institution responded within 10 minutes with a precise and exhaustive reply to my query.

For the benefit of those of you (or should that be the one of you) who want (or, perhaps, wants) to admire the thoroughness and erudition of the response, I am including a link here.

For the other one or perhaps two of you who are still reading, here is a summary of the Academy’s response.

This usage is probably a relic of the past when the unit of time ‘daka’ was called by another name, and more precisely by other names. The more familiar name is ‘rega’ (M). In the language of the Biblical sources, a rega is a very short time. It was then used generally to mean any period of time smaller than an hour. In later generations, it began to be used to mean ‘one sixtieth of an hour’. The word rega in the sense of ‘minute’ was accepted until recent generations, and is still heard here and there, especially in phrases such as ‘Wait a minute!’

Another word that was used to denote one sixtieth of an hour is dak (M). This word found its way into Hebrew poetry:

In modern times, the feminine form daka began to be used alongside the word dak. In the end, daka prevailed. However, the regaַ and dak that were used here in the past left their mark in the common patterns ‘esser v’assara’, ‘hamisha l’chamesh’ and so on. A similar phenomenon also occurs in the field of money (when talking about a unit that is 0ne-hundredth of a shekel: the grush (in the masculine) was indeed replaced by the agora (in the feminine), but it retained its masculinity in formulations such as ‘shekel v’assarah’.

These linguistic practices are deeply rooted in speech, and it is doubtful whether there is any point in seeing them as a real disruption and fighting them. However, those who are careful with their language would prefer ‘esser dakot l’esser’, ‘hamesh v’shalosh dakot’, and so on.

So there you have it. The Academy provides a scholarly analysis. The original even quotes the Talmud’s use of ‘rega’ and also two early-modern Hebrew poems that use ‘dak’. However, as a bottom line, it recognises that a spoken language belongs to its speakers, and that attempting to rectify this ‘mistake’ would be a divisive and lost cause, and so, it concludes that, realistically, ‘esser v’assarah’ is here to stay.

And today’s most important takeaway is, in the words of the immortal Avons’ British hit of 1959:

Keep your mind on your driving
Keep your hands on the wheel
And keep your snoopy eyes on the road ahead.

And, with a scarcely detectable segue, I wish those of you celebrating later this week: Hag Shavuot Sameah.