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.

For some unaccountable reason, my thoughts have been turning recently to the question of continued Jewish existence. I know: bizarre, isn’t it? Don’t ask me what triggered it, but there you are.

What struck me very forcibly is that the Jewish view of time is that the path of Jewish history unfolds along a spiral staircase. The path that we take, viewed from above, is circular, and that circle is the Jewish year. Historically, we step onto the staircase at Pesach, with the Exodus from Egypt, when Jacob’s children became the Children of Israel, and move through Shavuot and the covenant at Sinai when the Torah was given and received. At Sukkot we celebrate the protection God afforded the desert generation on their long journey to the Land of Israel, while at Chanukah and Purim we recall the miracles of the Maccabees’ defeat of the Greeks, and Esther and Mordechai’s earlier thwarting of Haman’s plans to exterminate the Jews.

Parallel to these historical memories is our annual exploration of our personal and national relationship with God. As a celebration of the agricultural year, the three pilgrim festivals are also a celebration of God’s relationship with the people of the Land, as expressed in the bounty of the Land. They are also, of course, reminders of the mass ascent of the people from their homes throughout the Land, an ascent to the Temple at those three festivals. At Yom Kippur, also, we remind ourselves of the role of the High Priest in the Temple, asking God to forgive the sins of the people. Further along the staircase, we commemorate the Maccabees’ rededication of the Second Temple, and, a little later in the year, the courage, faith and resourcefulness required when God hides his face and the Jews live in exile, with no Temple.

As I said earlier, viewed from above our path is a circle through the cycle of the year. However, viewed from the side, we are made aware of the vertical dimension of the staircase. The fact is that if, at every Pesach, we find ourselves exactly where we were spiritually last Pesach, then we have expended energy on the staircase, but we haven’t used it for the purpose it was designed to serve, spiritual ascent. Indeed, for some of us the staircase sometimes seems to be designed by M C Escher: as we walk along it, we are sure we are ascending, and yet, a year later, we find ourselves in exactly the same place as we were the previous year.

Within that annual cycle, there are smaller, self-contained, flights of stairs, that represent a historical ascent that we are invited to take inspiration from. The 10 Days of Awe, from the start of Rosh Hashana until the end of Yom Kippur, is one such brief and intense period of personal and communal repentance.

A longer period, the counting of the Omer, marks the seven weeks from the second day of Pesach until Shavuot, the period from the Exodus to the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. We learn how the Children of Israel, through their initial experiences before, during and immediately after the Exodus, were able to rise from slavery in Egypt to entering the covenant with God, and we strive to emulate that ascent.

There is another, flight of stairs, packed into the first part of the seven weeks of the Omer. I was going to call this Israeli, but the fact is that I don’t really see a distinction between Israeli and Jewish here, and the Jewish nature of this particular flight of stairs is completely undeniable.

We start with the first night of Pesach, the moment at which the Jewish people was formed. On the last day of Pesach, we remember the splitting of the Reed Sea and the drowning of the Egyptian army. A week later, we mark Yom Hashoah, the day of remembrance of the Holocaust and the Heroism. The survivors giving testimony are every year increasingly drawn from the millions of Jewish children swept up in the Holocaust (those survivors who were even as young as 16 in 1942 are now celebrating their 100^th birthday.) Naturally, most survivors were not old enough to be active in resisting the Nazis. And so, equally naturally, the stories that dominate the media in Israel throughout Yom Hashoah are stories of suffering, of hiding, of fleeing, of surviving, rather than of resisting. In the early years of the State, this view of the Shoah was at odds with the message of the Zionist endeavour. Modern Jewish military heroes wanted, and ‘needed’, to be provided with suitable models for imitation.

Thankfully, Israel matured, and became sufficiently confident in its military strength, to be able to relax the official line, and to give proportionate voice to the suffering and helplessness of the vast majority of victims of the Holocaust. The pejorative depiction of Jews going ‘like lambs to the slaughter’ was recognised as the factual distortion that it clearly is. On Yom Hashoah, and this has been true for many years, the nation mourns and honours all of those who were murdered in the Shoah, without distinguishing the helpless victims from the defiant resisters or the resourceful or fortunate survivors.

A week after Yom Hashoah, the nation again pauses, on Yom Hazikaron, to remember all those who fell in the years leading to the Declaration of Independence, and in all of the wars from the War of Independence until today, as well as all victims of terrorist attacks. As a friend observed on their Whats App status today: In Israel, we have two memorial days every year: the first to remind us of the cost of not having a state, and the second one to remind us of the cost of having a state. The timing of these two days, a week apart, has always hammered home that message very powerfully. However, since October 7, 2023, I have found it more and more difficult to contemplate that message without wondering, in a corner of my mind, whether there is not a dangerous smugness in the neatness of the message. ‘Never again’ sounds a little glib in the wake of the massacre at the Nova festival, and, after two and a half years of fighting, and despite some stirring tactical victories, to still have northern communities suffering daily bombardment from Lebanon, and troops still needing constant vigilance on the Gazan border, and heroes being killed and injured in Lebanon, and Iran with its nuclear threat still intact, is sometimes, in the cooler hours of a dark night, to wonder whether Israel does really offer every Jew in the world the promise of security.

Is the Jewish world in a better place now than during the Shoah? Without a shadow of a doubt! Is that difference qualitative or only quantitative? On October 6, 2023, I would have answered, without a moment’s hesitation: ‘Qualitative!’ And now, in the world after October 7? And in the world after October 8, by the end of which day it was clear that antisemitism had come out of the closet worldwide? I would still answer: ‘Qualitative,’ but only after thinking about it for a little while.

From Yom Hazikaron, we move instantly into Yom Ha’atzma’ut, and celebrate Israel’s independence. Some find that transition jarring. However, I think it makes perfect sense. You cannot in any way live with the terrible price the Jews and other citizens of Israel have paid to ensure the establishment and the continued existence of the Jewish state unless you celebrate the miracle that is that state. And, of course, Israel is not a perfect state. What country is? For some reason, many other nations demand that Israel, uniquely among the family of nations, be a perfect state, or forfeit its right to exist. They can demand, but we are not obliged to accede to their demand.

Nevertheless, there is so much to celebrate in Israel’s continued existence. Its unequalled absorption of refugees; its thriving economy; its incredible advances in agriculture, water purification, technology, medical science; its recreation of Hebrew as a vibrant living language; its thriving religious and cultural life. I could go on and on.

And so, at the end of a period of three weeks that began with the Exodus, we reach our modern world. Almost 3000 years brought us to the depths of the Shoah. Three more years brought us to the Declaration of the State of Israel. A further 78 years have brought us to where we are now: achieving miracles on a regular basis, partnering with a world superpower in a struggle to save Western civilisation from an existential threat, Is everything rosy? Far from it. Is the future secure? No. Would the State’s achievements to date have been imaginable in 1948? I think not.

Driving home from Zichron last night, still basking in the sunlight of Raphael’s energy and Adam’s chattering away in fluent rubbish, Bernice and I listened to a couple of instalments of Daniel Gordis’s essential listening: Israel from the Inside. After we listened to the second, I turned to Bernice and said: ‘There’s one word that leapt out at me from that discussion.’ ‘What word?’, she asked me. ‘Yet,’ I replied, and, from my mention of that one word, Bernice knew exactly the sentence of the 63-minute podcast I was referring to. Discussing how the current resurgence of antisemitism makes the Zionist idea as relevant now as it was to Herzl and Jabotinsky, Gordis said: ‘I don’t think Jews are going to get rounded up by train in America. I just don’t think that America has the capacity to do that…yet, but I don’t know what’s down the road.’

I simply cannot imagine anyone with Gordis’s intellectual stature and intimate understanding of Jewish American life making a statement like that at any time before 2023. I was even shocked to hear it now in 2026, after all that has happened in the last three years. However, if that’s what Gordis feels, then I’m certainly not in a position to question his judgement.

There may be moments when I have my doubts about the future of Israel as a Jewish, democratic state. However, when weighed against the prospects of future viable Jewish communities in the Diaspora, Israel still looks like the only genuine game in town. So, I shall be raising my glass next Wednesday, and drinking a toast to her second 78 years.

Blogger’s Note: Because the second Chag of Pesach begins this evening, I am posting 19 hours early this week. Next week should see normal service resumed. Meanwhile, Chag Sameach.

Earlier this week, I made a phone call to England, to speak to my cousin Marilyn, whom I love dearly. It’s a call I had been putting off making, as, it transpired, she had as well, because we were both afraid that if we spoke, in these very difficult days, we would find it impossible to avoid talking about ‘the situation’, and we both knew that would probably be a very difficult conversation, which we both feared might sour our relationship.

We bravely broached the subject of whether we should broach the subject early in our conversation, and, having more or less decided that we would avoid the issue, we then, briefly, didn’t avoid it. During this short exchange, Marilyn expressed her disappointment that in my blog posts, I, whom she knows as a person of some sensibility, have not, among all my references to the tragedy of the Israeli deaths since October 7, 2023, felt the need to mention even once the deaths of innocent Palestinians.

I want, today, to explore that observation, which is, objectively, undeniably true, and to ask myself whether that is something I should be ashamed of, and something I need to rectify. I will, as always in my blog, be thinking aloud. I have never seriously revised a first draft of a blog post, and I don’t intend to do so with this one. So, if it seems as though I am feeling my way, it is because I am.

My initial reaction was to consider the factors that contribute to the chasm that yawns between Marilyn and myself. Sixty years ago, we were probably pretty closely aligned as fairly typical children of the Britain of the sixties, although I was always (as anyone who knows either of us will not be surprised to hear) considerably more conventional – a Morris Minor to Marilyn’s Mini Cooper. Since then, a combination of factors has contributed to our views diverging. I became more religious, in the Orthodox Jewish stream; Marilyn’s Jewishness remained more a question of peoplehood. I came on aliya; Marilyn stayed in Britain. Marilyn continued to embrace left-wing, feminist, multi-cultural, pacifist values; I embraced increasingly mainstream Israeli nationalist values. I suspect Marilyn supports the idea of a Jewish state (although that’s part of the conversation I haven’t dared have in the last few decades), but not at the expense of any other people’s right to self-determination. 

All that is implied by that last paragraph is also, obviously, heightened by each of us inhabiting the echo-chamber of our life choices. I might note the wide range of political viewpoints represented in the Jerusalem Post, and the anti-Bibi sentiment expressed by many presenters on the state radio and TV network, but I only need to glance at Haaretz’s online headlines to see that there is a slew of stories and alternative opinions that I do not follow daily.

All of which leads me to two conclusions that pull in opposite directions.  Marilyn may not understand the reality of life in the Middle East, both because she does not live here and because she gains only partial and distorted insight from the media she accesses. At the same time, I may lack the emotional and physical distance to judge the situation here objectively, and the media I access are equally partial and distorted.

Events since October 7, 2023 have only heightened this media distance between us, in a way that is very relevant to this discussion. I understand from family in Britain that, during the war in Gaza, pictures of Gazan children, injured, killed, made homeless, in the aftermath of Israeli attacks, were a constant presence on British mainstream media. At the same time, these images were almost completely absent from Israeli mainstream media.

It appears that there is a lot of truth in the adage: Out of sight, out of mind. It is a lot easier not to think of suffering Palestinian children when they are not visible.

There are additional factors at play here. Throughout the war, the only figures provided of deaths and injuries suffered by Palestinians in Gaza were the figures provided by the Hamas-operated Gazan Health Service. Given the climate of vocal public opinion in the Arab world and in the West, Hamas were only too aware that any figures they issued would be accepted by large swathes of the West’s liberal population. There was certainly nothing stopping them exaggerating those figures: no independent body was in a position to authoritatively challenge them, and, as became apparent in the immediate aftermath of October 7, even before Israel counter-attacked Gaza, the world was very ready to accept Hamas’s version of the truth.

In the figures of casualties published by Hamas, no distinction was made between combatants and civilians. Indeed, as is very well documented, Hamas makes no distinction between civilian and military at any level. Rocket launchers were hidden in residential homes’ sheds. Hostages were hidden in residential homes. Hamas control centres were integrated into the buildings and communication systems of hospitals. Tunnel entrances were located in mosques and schools. Arms caches were hidden under children’s beds.

Faced with an enemy that fights this way, it is incredibly difficult not to accept the enemy’s own definition, and, instead, to make no distinction between Hamas and Gaza. In any war between nation states, not only the enemy’s armed forces, but all the enemy’s nationals, are the enemy. To be expected to play by different rules when the enemy is a terrorist group is a very big ask. It is, in addition, true that Hamas was elected in 2006, winning 74 of the 132 seats, Fatah winning 45. Hamas was democratically elected by the people of Gaza. They must take responsibility for that.

In addition, while it is not easy to gauge the truth in Gaza, it is undeniable that after the first wave of Hamas terrorists drove through the breached security fence on October 7, they were followed by thousands of ‘civilian’ Gazans, who behaved with a bestial savagery that matched that of Hamas. Similarly, the successful concealing of the hostages for months and months points to a high level of collaboration from the Gazan in the street.

Going back to the official Hamas fatality figures, they did make a distinction between the sexes and between adults and minors. The reported figures are as follows:
Men: 39,606; Women: 12,500; Children (under 18): 20,179

I turned to Country Reports, a website that provides facts and figures for the countries of the world, and extracted the following figures for the Gaza Strip:

Median age: 18.1; Sex Ratio at birth (male/female): 1.06

Applying that data to the official Hamas figures, if Gazans were killed entirely indiscriminately by Israel, we would expect the breakdown of deaths in the war to be as follows:

Men: 19,052; Women: 17,973; Children (under 18): 35,260.

It seems reasonable to assume that the ‘extra’ 20,000 men (and, sadly, some of the 20,179 under 18-year-olds) were Hamas military.

Ignoring the under-18 combatants, the ratio of combatants to civilians killed is, by this calculation, very slightly worse than 1:2.5. This is, as experts in urban combat have stated, an incredibly low ratio of civilian casualties. (In fact, there is some evidence that the Gazan authorities included all deaths from all causes in the above statistics, and that the true ratio is close to 1:1, which would be astonishing.)

Does any of the above make any less tragic each individual death of a child under the rubble of a collapsed home under aerial bombardment, or the death of a young woman mistakenly identified as a terrorist by automatic rifle fire? Categorically, no. Am I proud of not having acknowledged that earlier? No. Am I ashamed of not having acknowledged that earlier? I think not. We are at war, and the people of Gaza have done nothing to indicate that they do not support all of the actions of Hamas on and since October 7, 2023.

I end by reflecting on the words of a woman who was both considerably tougher than I am and considerably more compassionate, and so wise. Golda Meir is quoted as saying: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.” I thank my cousin Marilyn for provoking/inspiring/triggering this post; I mourn the insensitivity to human suffering that living in the reality of the Middle East has tempted me into. I mourn the death of innocents in Gaza, at the same time as I defend Israel’s right to risk inflicting those deaths as an inevitable consequence of its justified decision to engage in an existential war. I weep for a world in which war is necessary, while also recognising that that is the world we live in, whatever Pope Leo might prefer to think. War is necessary, because to have liberal, democratic pacifists on one side of a conflict is not enough. It takes two to tango. I weep for the way the world is, but wishing it otherwise does not make it so, and Israel cannot afford the luxury of ignoring reality.

Dateline Tuesday afternoon. That this week’s blog post comes to you at all is little short of miraculous. Under normal circumstances, I can, most days, give a passing imitation of a functioning human being. However, the last four weeks of war have taken their toll on me. Not that we have had a tough time in Maale Adumim. On the contrary: our 54 sirens, and our total time of 14 hours 36 minutes in the shelter, place us in 361st place in the national ranking. Kiryat Shmone, in first place, has had 171 sirens and has spent over 44 hours in shelters. Add to that the fact that residents of Kiryat Shmone, being fired on at very close range from Lebanon, have, typically, no heads-up warning, and, effectively, no time to reach a shelter after the siren sounds, whereas we usually have five minutes or so between heads-up and siren, and, after the siren starts, 90 precious seconds to reach the shelter.

Effectively, this means that at night, we have time to add a layer of clothing, go downstairs, put shoes on, pick up coats and keys, and then sit and wait for the siren that may or may not come. We are not in the best place in the country: Mitzpe Ramon, down south in the middle of nowhere, shares 701st and last place (or should that be first place), having had its first and so far only siren on Shabbat, courtesy of the late-to-the-party Houthis.

Incidentally, you may remember me mentioning that we recently adopted the habit of wearing slippers rather than shoes in the house. This is out of deference to our new lounge suite with the reclining seats, whose footrests we are determined not to sully. One consequence of the war is that we now seem to spend a significant part of our day (and, sometimes, night) putting on shoes in anticipation of a siren and taking them off again when the heads-up fails to convert. It would be an exaggeration to say that it is a disappointment, after ten minutes sitting downstairs in tracksuit and shoes, clutching a coat, at 2AM, for the siren to fail to materialise, but a little of the edge of relief is taken off by all that retrospectively unnecessary effort.

Not that we are getting complacent. We diligently follow Home Front guidelines for every incident. Even when we were driving to Esther last week, and a siren caught us on the motorway, we moved into the nearside lane as soon as the heads-up sounded, and then, when the siren started, we stopped the car, got out, moved into the field by the side of the road, lay down, and 50% of us kept our heads down with our hands over our head for the full 15 minutes until the all-clear sounded, For much of that 15 minutes, 50% of us were occupied with saying: “Will you please keep your head down and covered by your hands!”, while the other 50% countered with: “A fat lot of good that will do if a half-tonne missile lands on me!”

It is not entirely clear to me which of us is Eeyore and which Piglet, in this scenario. Bernice firmly believes that if the missile has her number on it (she, who doesn’t even have an army number), then she might as well stay in the car in comfort and wait for it. I, on the other hand, am eager to take whatever meagre steps I can to mitigate the impact of a single small piece of shrapnel travelling eight inches above the ground.

I have to report that, apart from us, only one other driver, as far as we could see, stopped his car, and even he, after ten minutes of lying down, got up and resumed his journey. During the 15 minutes, upwards of 100 vehicles must have driven past us heading north.

At least everyone seemed to be driving sensibly. On other occasions, after a heads-up and before a siren that never came, we have seen drivers travelling 30 or 40 kph above the 120 kph speed limit, weaving in and out of traffic, in what was, presumably, an attempt to outrun the missile. Conversely, we have seen other drivers swerve into the nearside line and skid to a stop on the hard shoulder, narrowly avoiding causing an accident. There have, in fact, been several accidents caused by drivers reacting unsafely to a siren.

I see it is now 750 words since I mentioned that the war has taken its toll on me mentally: me and many others, I think it is fair to say. Let me pluck just a couple of examples from the many available. Bernice and I have whiled away a couple of afternoons trying to work out whether today was Tuesday or Wednesday. Last night, having changed over the kitchen for Pesach but not having time to cook, we decided to try out an Asian restaurant in our local mall. We spent the five-minute drive to the mall trying to remember whether the restaurant was called Oshi-Koshi (Wasn’t Oshen-Koshen a children’s clothing manufacturer?). It is, in fact, Oshi-Oshi (I think – let me check with Bernice – yes, it is) and surprisingly good, if, unlike me, you find the idea of eating in a mall attractive. In the end, I sat with my back to the passing pedestrian traffic, and the food was easily good enough for me to block out the background noise.

One last example. After our meal, we went to a cheap homeware store to buy something we needed, and then spent a couple of minutes in front of the store trying to remember what it was we wanted. We did eventually remember, although they did not have it in stock. Nevertheless, we chalked that up as a win, having remembered what we were there for.

Today, we had an early morning siren, around 5:30, and when we returned home at 5:50 we went back to bed. Bernice, thankfully, managed to go back to sleep, whereas I eventually gave up trying and got up to make what should have been an early start on my Pesach cake and biscuit baking. These days, I find I need hours just to get going in the morning, so it was actually 10:00 when I started.

I have a set routine that I follow every year. On paper, once I have prepared the mixture for the chocolate cake, the oven should be in constant use. If I work efficiently, I should be able to prepare the next item within the time the previous item is baking. The key words in that previous sentence are, of course, the first four: If I work efficiently.

If, on the other hand, when I am separating, the eggs a piece of shell falls in the bowl containing the whites, it takes time to fish it out. Bags of sugar in Israel are designed so that the glue bond on the top of the bag is slightly stronger than the paper, so that the bag, if you are not very careful, will split and require you to pause for clean-up and transfer to a plastic bag. The mock Tupperware I store the biscuits in is packed away very tightly after Pesach, and it can take a precious minute or two to prise apart two boxes that are wedged tightly together, and another full minute to get the lid to close once the biscuits are packed in. The pack of baking paper sometimes decides to play hide and seek in the kitchen. The baking powder and icing sugar sachets are almost indistinguishable from each other.

In a perfect world, I would have taken the last item, the cinnamon balls, out of the oven at 1:30. That I did so at 2:30 I regard as a definite win. Of course, the other thing my beautiful timetable fails to take into account is that, once the cooled and double-tossed-in-icing-sugar cinnamon balls are packed away, the countertops (or rather the polygal plastic that we tape down over the countertops for Pesach) looks like the scene, in Spielberg’s wonderful Peter Pan film Hook, where the lost boys have a food fight. Clean-up took another hour. Still, we now have a cupboard full of dessert to see us through chag.

Which seems like a good lead-in to wishing you all Chag Sameach. Wherever you are going to be, however you plan to celebrate the chag, and even if the war has changed your plans, as it certainly has changed ours, we hope that you will find meaning and joy in the holiday. My head isn’t there yet, but maybe next week I will reflect on some of that meaning in Israel in 2026.