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.

If you are reading this, then it means that it has made it through several portals. As I am writing it, I am not at all sure what its final resting place will be. I may decide that it is nothing more (and, at the same time, nothing less) than an entry in the diary that I do not keep. On the other hand, I may decide to show it to Bernice, and then to discuss with her whether it should go any further. Separately, and together, we will probably discuss whether it will be shared with two other pairs of eyes. We may even, although that will be a huge step, both feel that it is appropriate for a general audience. In that case, you will be reading it…indeed you are reading it, which, I suppose, means that both Bernice and I felt that was the way to go.

Our story begins on Monday afternoon, when we were, as usual, in Zichron. Maayan asked me a question about bringing bikkurim to Bet Hamikdash (bringing first fruits to the Temple), and, after I had answered, Raphael then asked her what Bet Hamikdash was, a question that Maayan passed on to me.

(Both of my daughters-in-law often ask questions connected with Jewish religious practice. Since they both come from secular homes, but both grew up in the Israeli mainstream, their questions are difficult to predict, and, often, challenging to answer. This was not something I realised I had signed up for until it started happening, but it keeps my on my toes.)

I should explain that Bernice was, at that point, in the bedroom, attempting to persuade Adam that it was in his best interests to go to sleep. (He tends to be, during the day, a catnapper, believing that 10 or 15 minutes is all the sleep he needs.) If Bernice had been available, this would have been a question for her. She, after all, was a ganenet for decades, whereas I don’t have a lot of experience explaining such concepts to four-year-olds. Still, needs must when the Devil, or, indeed, God, drives, so I took a deep breath and a step back.

I began by asking Raphael whether he knew anything about Hashem, and, from his response, I decided that needed to be my starting point. Both of our children, and their partners, are respectful of our religious beliefs, and also welcome us exposing our grandchildren to their Jewish heritage, so there was no tension of any kind in my talking to Raphael about God and the Temple. I presented Hashem as the Prime Mover and Creator of the universe and everything in it (not quite in those terms, but you get the idea), including the mechanisms by which the universe continually recreates itself. I then explained that Hashem loves everything he has made, but has a special relationship with the Jews, and has given us the Torah, to explain to us how we should behave, treating everyone and everything kindly, and thanking God for all He has provided us with. The Jews built the Temple as a place where they could come to meet God and thank Him for all the wonderful things He has created and provided for us.

This seemed to satisfy Raphael, and the conversation soon turned to whether it was time yet to eat something sweet. I found myself revisiting this conversation this morning. I started the day by harvesting the last of our loquats and the first of our nectarines. On the kitchen table, I set out the fruit in order to take trumot and ma’asrot, the tithes that, in Temple times, would be given to the priests. As I went through the ritual that is, over the years, starting to feel familiar, I suddenly found it refreshed and invested with its full meaning by the explanation I had given Raphael the previous day. I was struck by the thought that we need to see the world more often through the eyes of a four-year-old, to guard against our becoming jaded, and taking the everyday world for granted. As one of the sayings of the day offered me by my computer this week put it, in a phrasing attributed to Einstein, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

I can attest that in setting aside the tithes this morning, I was far more actively conscious than I usually am of how minor is my role in producing the fruit that our garden yields, and how much it is a gift from God. I was very grateful to Maayan for having created the opportunity, and yielded me the place, to think, at a fundamental level, about our relationship with Hashem.

Later this morning, I found myself reflecting on the life choices that our two children have made. I recognise now that, when the children were growing up, whenever I visualised their adult lives, I always imagined them growing up to become much better versions of myself. As I write that last sentence, I am appalled by the egocentricity it reveals.

As things turned out, both Esther and Micha’el, in their very different ways, made life choices as they matured that brought them to very different places from the ones I might have chosen for them. Along the way, there were moments when my egocentricity made it more difficult for me to be entirely happy in their happiness. But I realised, very quickly, the rightness of those choices for them. Each of them has found a life partner who truly completes them. Each of them has built a wonderful family. Each of them is shaping a life of meaning, commitment, purpose and values.

Above all, of course, each of them has grown into not a better version of me (what an awful idea), but, rather, a better version of themselves, which is, at bottom, what we are all put on earth to achieve. The precious time that Bernice and I spend with our family is an opportunity to enjoy watching not only our grandchildren grow up, but also our grown-up children build a meaningful life. I relish the prospect of many more years of watching those adventures unfold.

Blogger’s Note: On Thursday of this week, local elections are taking place for 136 ; authorities in England, including some of the largest cities and the whole of London. I have a very real fear that, once the results of those elections are announced, it may be a very long time before I feel like writing a light-hearted blog post again. So, this week, I am making the most of the sunshine while it lasts.

Here in Maale Adumim, the season has very definitely changed. Last week saw me in open-toed sandals, and even in shorts on a couple of days. It is true that, since then, we have had a light sprinkling of rain, and, as I write, on Tuesday afternoon, the wind is once again setting the towering cypress swaying gracefully and our screen door banging gracelessly. However, it is impossible to miss the fact that spring is very firmly here.

In our front garden, the birds had clearly decided last week that the loquats were ripe enough to eat. Despite my clearly explaining to them every year that they are more than welcome to any fruit over three metres high, they still insist on having a taste of the lower-hanging fruit as well.

Fortunately, our tree yields enough fruit to keep both the birds and us happy. I have now, in three batches, harvested all but the last couple of kilo of fruit. Our total yield this year is likely to be about 13 kilo, which is more than enough for me to add a half-a-dozen loquat to our morning fruit salad for a few weeks, for us to offer bags of fruit to our neighbours (at least those who don’t have their own tree), for me to freeze several two-cup portions to make batches of ice-cream through the year, for us to take a bag every week for three weeks to Esther, and, as I decided last week, for me to make 3 kilo of jam.

All of which explains why I spent a good couple of hours last week removing the seeds and the innards from about 5 kilo of loquat. As always, I washed the seeds and laid them out to dry in the sun for a week, before soaking them for a month in alcohol, with lemon zest and vanilla pods, to make my loquat liqueur, which, unsurprisingly, is very similar in flavour to amaretto. Unfortunately, the seeds were exposed to yesterday’s brief rain shower while we were in Zichron, so I may have to give them an extra day or two to dry out completely. I don’t actually have a lot of wiggle room, because, as I realised with a shock after laying out the stones, if they are to sit in the alcohol for a month before I add a sugar syrup and bottle the liqueur, I will be completing the process only a couple of days before our next trip to Portugal, in mid-June.

All of which, of course, assumes that we will actually be going to Portugal in mid-June, and not, once again, running from home to air-raid shelter, or, another possibility presumably, being grounded because of a world oil crisis. These are possibilities we are trying, for the moment, not to contemplate.

After I had finished all of my loquat prep, I became aware, over the next day, of two distinct pains in my right thumb. I soon realised that I must be suffering from what I have termed LGBT – loquat-gutter’s buggered thumb.

For you to understand the pathology of LGBT, I should tell you (or, rather, remind you, since I did explain this on this very site just over five years ago) my technique for preparing loquats. The most important point is that, for ice-cream and jam, I don’t skin them. In preparing ice-cream, my Vitamix zaps the skin without missing a beat; in jam-making, the skin enhances both the flavour and the texture. My technique for ‘filleting’ the fruit is to hold a loquat between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, with the stalk facing up. I then place the thumb of my right hand on the calyx (the opposite end from the stalk), and push that thumb up through the centre of the fruit; almost as if by magic, the seeds, the membrane and the calyx all emerge cleanly from the stalk end of the fruit.

To clean 5 kilo of fruit, repeat this process about 200 times. You will end up with 5 kilo of very juicy, succulent fruit, a large bowl of innards and calyces, 2 litres of smooth, shiny seeds, and, of course, LGBT, which manifests as two separate conditions.

The first, and more immediate, condition is a fairly acute pain deep under the right thumbnail. I eventually decided this must be caused by tiny pieces of grit, twig and plant fibre that I had repeatedly pushed deeper and deeper under my thumbnail. I spent much of the next day with a nailbrush and a manicure set, trying, with limited success, to dislodge the more stubborn flecks of detritus. I am happy to report that, over the course of four or five days, the matter has decomposed sufficiently to no longer be an irritant.

The second condition I was vaguely conscious of by the end of the day, but only became fully aware of when, on Shabbat, I shook the hands of one or two shul members who have what we used to call a manly grip. This condition is thumbsprain – a word I am particularly pleased with for its five consecutive consonants. Incidentally, and coincidentally, the word in English with the greatest number of consecutive consonants (eight) is also a medical condition: congenital aganglionosis of the gut goes by the name of Hirschsprung’s disease. (Some people will claim that aspartyltryptophan – the dipeptide formed from the amino acids aspartic acid and tryptophan – has nine consecutive consonants, but the two y’s are both actually vowels in that word.

Eight days later, my thumb is now fully recovered, and I know that the jam, the ice-cream and the liqueur will more than compensate for the temporary incapacity. Even if our art is only culinary, we artists must, it appears, be prepared to suffer for it.

There are at least three urgent topics from this week’s news that have to be addressed, but…you know what, I just don’t have the strength. I take my hat off to Daniel Gordis, who, week in, week out, draws his followers’ attention to the questions that matter, both the obvious and the less obvious. If you want to know what those questions are this week, and, indeed, every week, then I recommend you subscribe to his podcast, Israel from the Inside.

Which leaves me free to focus on the questions that really don’t matter. For example, what constitutes acceptable audience behaviour at a classical music concert: more specifically, at the Proms, London’s annual, eight-week long, summer festival of daily concerts of classical music? Each season consists of concerts in the Royal Albert Hall, chamber music concerts at a couple of London venues, and many ancillary events. The season is a significant event in British culture and in classical music, and has been fairly described as “the world’s largest and most democratic musical festival.”

As the classical music world prepares for the 2026 season, debate has arisen over appropriate audience behaviour during concerts. The Proms have had some success in attracting a new, younger audience to classical music, but this has apparently created some conflict. Last week a debate started in the media over mobile phone usage at classical music recitals, which, according to the boss of the BBC Proms, threatens to alienate new fans. Sam Jackson has encouraged seasoned classical music lovers to embrace a new audience of listeners who may film with their smartphones, amid debate that the use of mobiles during these live fixtures can cheapen the moment and prove a distraction.

“Anything which makes them feel the Proms is welcoming to them is a good thing,” Jackson said when asked by The Times about excessive phone use. “What I am not saying is that I want everyone to have their phones out. It is absolutely not that. But there is a real risk in the classical music world that we hold back from welcoming new people.”

Let me make my position clear. I am, by temperament, firmly in the camp of those who clutch their metaphorical pearls at the prospect of audience members filming a concert, or, the other contentious issue, applauding between movements of a single piece of music. And yet, and yet, at the same time I recognise that my personal preference is just that, and not the only conceivable approach to listening to music.

Perhaps a little historical perspective, and a dash of etymology, are appropriate here, as they so often are.

Late eighteenth-century composers such as Mozart expected that people would talk, particularly when audience members took dinner (which many had served during the performance), and took delight in audiences clapping at once in response to a nice musical effect. Individual movements were encored in response to audience applause. Mozart would almost certainly have expected food, drink, gossip, and a rowdy 18th-century crowd.

The nineteenth century brought a shift in venue from aristocratic gatherings to public concerts along with works featuring an unprecedentedly wide dynamic range. Mahler clamped down on claques (groups of people hired to applaud a particular performer), and specified in the score of his Kindertotenlieder that its movements should not be punctuated by applause.

With the arrival of recording technology in the twentieth century, applause between the movements of a symphony or suite came to be regarded as a distraction from the momentum and unity of a work. With the background silence of 20th-century recording studios, audience noise has come to be viewed as intrusive to performers and patrons alike.

That this is a convention and not the only logical approach to listening to music can be clearly seen if we consider what constitutes appropriate audience behaviour when listening to jazz. It is regarded as good etiquette to applaud after each solo within a single piece or song, in acknowledgement of the soloist, and also, particularly when the instrumentalists play an elaborate intro to a well-known standard, the moment the audience recognises the tune they may well applaud.

To give one last example: applauding after an operatic aria is a time-honoured tradition.  In truth, it makes no more or less sense than applauding after a single movement of a multi-movement symphony or concerto, particularly in a dramatic opera. Applauding after an aria is the musical equivalent of applauding after a fine rendition of a Shakespearean speech – Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, or Henry V’s ‘One more unto the breach, dear friends’ address to his troops. In the one context, it is regarded as acceptable; in the other, it is not.

To be honest, in both cases it seems to me to destroy the dramatic flow of the piece, and I would much prefer it if it never happened. Mind you, it is not as bad as the pernicious habit of applauding a star performer in a play when they first come on stage. I suspect that that is a habit driven by West End or Broadway theatregoers desperately wanting to convince themselves of the uncontainable excitement of the experience for which they have paid a mouth-watering sum of money.

In the context of the BBC Proms, which is where we started, promming refers to the use of the standing areas inside the Royal Albert Hall (the Arena and Gallery) for which ticket prices are much lower than for the seating. Prom concert-goers, particularly those who stand, are sometimes referred to as “Prommers” or “Promenaders”.

The businessman and musical impresario who launched the Proms, Robert Newman, wished to generate a wider audience for concert hall music by offering low ticket prices and an informal atmosphere, where eating, drinking and smoking were permitted to the Promenaders. He stated his aim to the founding conductor, Henry Wood, in 1894 as follows:

I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music.

In light of all this, Sam Jackson’s call for tolerance to be shown toward an inexperienced audience seems very much in the Proms tradition.

I should perhaps also point out that there is a long Proms tradition of Promenaders following a very specific etiquette at the final Prom concert of the season. The Last Night of the Proms is, shall we say, an irreverent occasion, as you can see here and here. (In the second clip, you may not immediately realise that the audience are humming along with the oboe soloist, but you can’t possibly miss them whistling along with the flute section and singing along with the brass.) Placed alongside the Last Night shenanigans, a little cellphone filming seems fairly tame.

So, despite my personal preference for near-sterile concert-hall conditions, I suppose I have to admit that audiences need to show a certain amount of tolerance. There is no substitute for being in the presence of a great live performance, and if the electricity that generates also creates a little static from time to time, that is, in honesty, a small price to pay.

Popcorn in the cinema, on the other hand….

My readership is split into two main groups: those to whom this week’s title will seem intriguing, and those who knew as soon as they read the first figure in the equation above what I am writing about today. I am writing on Tuesday morning, a little after 11AM, which means that the 2-minute siren sounded throughout Israel has not long died away. This is not a rising and falling siren, the kind that sends us immediately to our safe rooms and shelters, but the one that quickly rises to a steady pitch, and stays there, unwavering, for 120 seconds, to mark the daytime observance of silence for Israel’s fallen, both military and security forces and civilian victims of terror, who have been killed defending Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel since 1860.

Today is not the day to point out that the start of the modern assault on Jews in the Land of Israel began not in 1967 but in 1860. Today is the day to reflect on the 30,961 members of the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement before the state was established in 1948) and Israelis (since 1948) who have made the ultimate sacrifice for the Zionist ideal. This year, for the first time, each second of the two-minute siren carries the weight of 250 lives, and each life, as Jewish tradition holds, carries the weight of an entire world.

Listening to the state radio broadcaster’s treatment of Memorial Day this morning, I found myself wondering how to characterise it in today’s blog post. The first thing that struck me was to test our national feeling of the disproportionate enormity of the numbers against the experience of the only other nation I know at all. Taking the yardstick of deaths due to conflict since 1860, Israel has lost the equivalent of 0.33% of its current population. Britain, over the same period, has lost 1.86% of its current population, over five times as large a proportion.

Again, on October 7, 2023, on the day of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, just over a quarter of one per cent of the population was killed. On July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme in World War 1, over two-fifths of a percent of the British population was killed. The Israelis were mostly civilians, massacred in their homes and at a dance party, while the Britons were conscripts, massacred in the Flanders mud. Nevertheless, as a proportion of the nation’s population, over one and a half times as many died on July 1, 1916 as on October 7, 2023.

Of course, the impact of that first day of the Battle of the Somme was not felt as immediately, as nationally, as graphically in 1916 as October 7 was felt in Israel. The world and its inter-connectivity are of course so different today from a century ago.

However, there is another difference. To illustrate it, I want to draw on the finest work of the finest of the poets forged in the furnace of the First World War: Wilfred Owen.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

By Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
 And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

What sings through Owen’s verse is the futility of the war and the meaninglessness of the loss. He views the dying soldiers as passive and powerless victims. Unsurprisingly, he does not for a moment see them as individuals.

None of this, I hasten to add, is intended as a criticism of the poem, or a suggestion that Owen was unfeeling. However, it is difficult to imagine a ‘treatment’ of soldiers’ deaths that is more different from what happens on Israel’s Memorial Day, in the public arena of newspaper features and radio interviews, just as much as in the private space of a mourning family. In Israel, every year, the unique path of each one of a host of individual soldiers is, with love and appreciation, traced by family and friends. This may seem like hagiography, but the hard evidence confirms that it is, rather, a celebration of an extraordinary group of individuals. 

Time after time after time, the stories illustrate the truth: a disproportionate number of the fallen are officers, leading their troops by personal example; a disproportionate number of those who volunteer or are selected for the kind of combat roles that bear the heaviest losses are the natural leaders, the idealists, the visionaries of their generation. So many of the fallen leave behind them diaries, journals, poems, songs, ethical wills that are inspiring. So many of them drank as fully as they could of the deepest joys that life holds: whether a closeness to nature, a tireless desire to help others, a deep love for another human being, a deep well of creativity: and, for so many of them, a simple, unbendable, recognition that they must serve their country.

Every year, Memorial Day uncovers more and more stories not only of bravery on the battlefield, of sacrifice for others, but also of lives, however brief, lived as fully and as well as they could be. Every year, we weep for the potential that has been lost, and wonder that there is so much potential and even, despite their youth, achievement, in the present generation of young soldiers. Every year, we wearily ask how long we need to ask our youth to make this sacrifice, and, at the same time, marvel at their readiness, if needed, to do so.

And, of course, alongside the commitment of youth, every year we measure, in astonishment and gratitude, the untiring readiness to serve of the reservists from previous generations. Who can weigh in the scale the sacrifice of a twenty-year-old with their whole life before them against the sacrifice of a parent in their forties with a young family? As, indeed, who can weigh in the scale the grief of a parent burying a young adult child against the grief of a young child burying a parent?

Which brings me to my last observation. On Memorial Day, the vessel in which the memory of the fallen is offered to us is the bereft family. Two voices stood out for me this morning. The first was that of a woman in her nineties, retelling the story of her father’s heroism in one of the key battles of the War of Independence, and of his death in action in 1948, when she was 14. This same woman was packing emergency supplies for the people of the Gaza envelope on October 9, 2023, when she was almost 90, when she was told that her grandson had fallen in action in the Gaza envelope. She fought successfully to have him buried next to his great-grandfather in the military ceremony on Mount Herzl, and she now visits the graves of her father and grandson together.

At 10 this morning, Liat Regev, the presenter of a daily interview programme, began by saying, with no introduction: “I visited the military cemetery on Mount Herzl with my father the other day. He is now in his eighties, and he can’t cope with the crowds of bereft families on Memorial Day itself, so a couple of years ago I starting taking him a few days before.” It wasn’t initially clear to me whether she was reading an account by someone else, but it soon became clear that she was telling her own family’s story, of her father’s own father falling in the early years of the state, leaving a widow and two sons, the younger of whom, Liat’s father, had hardly any memories of his father. All Liat has is two black and white photographs, and her grandmother’s and uncle’s stories.

This is Israel’s Memorial Day, when, it seems, almost everyone has an individual, deeply personal, national story to tell, even the radio presenter, and everyone listens. By the time you read these words, we will have transitioned, not, as I wrote last week, jarringly, but, rather, naturally sand inevitably, into the celebrations of Independence Day. If their journals, last letters, and ethical wills are anything to go by, this is only what those who paid the ultimate sacrifice would want. They leave behind them a collective message, urging us to embrace life.

I leave you with the wish, even though I am not foolhardy enough to think for a moment that it is a realistic wish, that next year, as this year, we will mourn 30,963 again, and not one unique life more.