Bernice and I went up to Zichron yesterday, as we have been doing every Sunday, to spend the day with Esther and Raphael. Esther’s very good about this, playing along with our charade of being keen to help her out during Maayan’s long day at work, even though anyone with an ounce of sense can see that Esther and Maayan already have this parenting malarkey down pat, and need no help at all, and all we’re really interested in doing is having cuddles with the baby. He, for his part, is unbelievably obliging, convivial and snuggly. Even when the outside temperature is in the 30s, as it was yesterday, and Raphael is like a very soft and gurgly hot-water bottle, still nothing can beat a good cuddle. The Welsh have a lovely word for it – ‘cwtsh’ (pronounced more or less to rhyme with ‘butch’). Happy days!

As I know I’ve mentioned before, on the journey up, while Bernice drives, I usually read aloud. As it happens, yesterday we finished reading Margaret Attwood’s The Testaments. It is such a good read that we had been trying to eke out the last pages, and only read one short section a day; however, with a journey of almost two hours in front of us, and the novel’s denouement tantalizingly close, we could not resist pushing on to the finish. Quite apart from the fact that we both thought it was a wonderful book, I’m not sure I have enjoyed reading aloud so much since I used to read Jane Austen to Bernice when we were first married. Indeed, the deliciousness of the reading was a very similar experience: one of the three narrators of the story has an ironic tone worthy of Austen herself. I was particularly struck by how effortlessly Attwood balanced delicious ironic humour with a nail-biting adventure story, all within a chilling yet cerebral novel of ideas.

Our return journey was, as usual, in the dark, which precluded reading – not that we would have wanted to start a new book so soon after finishing The Testaments. I suspect we may now have to reread The Handmaid’s Tale, to refresh our memory (as we should probably have done before starting The Testaments). However, I think we need a break before we plunge back into Gilead, and I rather fancy Bill Bryson’s further look at Britain, The Road to Little Dribbling. I’m a little concerned, after reading some reviews, that it will prove more curmudgeonly and less affectionate than the original Notes from a Small Island (‘rather like travelling round Britain with your grumpy father-in-law’, wrote one reviewer), but it’s still very likely to be laugh-out-loud and read-out-loud funny. Probably about as far from Gilead as it is possible to get, and probably not as many distinct voices for me to attempt to remember. (How did Stephen Fry ever manage the entire cast of the Harry Potter audiobook heptalogy?)

On our journey home, we initially resorted to talking, which we still occasionally do, although, to be honest, after almost fifty years, we feel we’ve said most of what we wanted to say to each other. So, after a while, I found a Joni Mitchell concert album on Spotify, including a couple of very unusual songs, one a capella, the other with piano accompaniment, both setting words to melodic lines by Charlie Mingus. For the piano accompaniment, Mitchell has one of the most one-upmanship intro lines I’ve ever heard: ‘I’d like to bring Herbie Hancock on’. I was struck, as I increasingly am, by how much fascinating music I have not become familiar with over the last 60 years. It is inevitable, I suppose, but no less tantalizing, that every path you take, in the arts as elsewhere, involves not taking at least one other path. At the risk of discovering that I’m the only person here who doesn’t know the album, here is a link to the second of these songs recorded Live at the Bread and Roses Festival 1978.

While we were chatting with Esther about the journey, she reminded us that when she and Micha’el were children we had a set of songs that we only sang in the car on long journeys. These were almost all, not surprisingly, songs with multiple verses, including Ilkla Moor baht ‘at (no complaints about misspelling, please: that particular rendering of Ilkley has been chosen after considerable research online). This Yorkshire folksong (although originally a Kentish hymn tune) is, of course, perfect wholesome family fun, being a tale of love and death with a quasi-cannibalistic twist at the end that never fails to appeal to the streak of savagery that runs through every healthy child.

We usually followed that up with Where Will We Be in a Hundred Years from Now, a song so ghoulish that you can probably be arrested these days for teaching it to your children.

Then there was Be Kind to Your Web-footed Friends, an early introduction to surreal lyrics, meta-referencing and, as each verse was pitched higher, falsetto singing.

When we tired of singing (which we seldom did) there was always I-Spy to fall back on. On one memorable occasion, when Micha’el was still too young to know his letters or, indeed, to fully grasp the nuances of the game, he announced, when it was his turn, that ‘I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with green!’ After several minutes of increasingly desperate guessing, when we had exhausted all of the obvious ideas – grass, trees, apple, frog – (whether we could actually see them or not) and were clutching at such straws as ‘a wide, toothy green’, we eventually all gave up, and asked Micha’el what he was thinking of. It was at this point that it became clear that he hadn’t actually grasped that the game required him to be thinking of something.

As the years passed, we reached what was, for me, a sweet spot: a window of opportunity when we could play the Hebrew game הוא והיא. For the benefit of those of you who don’t live in Israel, let me explain. All nouns in Hebrew are either masculine or feminine and, typically, feminine nouns end in an ‘ah’ sound. So, for example, ‘ish is ‘a man’ and ‘isha’ is ‘a woman’. The game consists of finding a pair that sound like a masculine and a feminine noun formed from the same root, but that are, in fact completely unconnected, and then offering a verbal description of each. The remaining players have to guess, from these descriptive clues, what the two words are. So, for example, ‘etz’ is ‘a tree’ and ‘etza’ is ‘advice’. You might then say: “He grows out of the ground very tall and she is something that a sensible friend might give you.” There was a period of a few years in their childhoods when my greater intellectual powers were perfectly balanced by the kids’ greater Hebrew vocabulary, and we were able to play the game on a fairly level playing field. Those days, sadly, are long past.

My own childhood car journeys were less musical and more exclusively cerebral. I can remember playing I-Spy, and, at a slightly later period, trying to complete my I-Spy books, as written by Big Chief I-Spy and his friends at the News Chronicle. This was, for me, a precursor to trainspotting, offering the challenge of ticking off items illustrated in the books as you spotted them in real life.

I also remember car number-plate games. At the time, British car registration-plates had a sequence of three letters followed by three numbers, and my favourite game was taking it in turns to pick a car and then think of a word that used the three letters of the number plate in the order in which they appeared, though not necessarily consecutively. For example: TWL 524 would yield ‘towel’.

Three numbers were not really enough to do anything useful with, but, when we travelled by bus, we were issued a ticket with a 4-digit number. We would first add the four digits. If the sum was 21, this was extremely good fortune. If it wasn’t (and it rarely was), we would then work at manipulating the digits, using the 4 arithmetic operations, to try somehow to arrive at 21. As our knowledge of maths grew, we would add exponentials, digit sums and factorials. (I clearly needed to get out more!)

Up to this point, when we have taken Tao on longer car journeys in Portugal he has usually fallen asleep, but I think he must now be getting to the age where we will be able to once again enjoy the pleasures of travelling with conscious and cognizant children.

Meanwhile, in case you were wondering whether we’re nearly there yet….we’ve arrived.

Trigger warning: This post contains serious content, which might shock readers expecting my usual flippancy.

Today I am a camel, and I want to tell you about the straw that broke my back last week.

Like all straws, it may seem, viewed in isolation, a wispy, lightweight thing, but I would suggest that, taken as the representative of the thousands of other straws in this particular camel-load, it is a very weighty matter indeed.

I want to explore with you the meaning of a good old Anglo-Saxon four-letter word: ‘safe’. Not much to get excited about there, you might think. It is, ostensibly, a fairly simple word with a straightforward meaning.

Come with me, if you will, to an unnamed private girls’ school in England where, a few months ago, a female member of the House of Lords was invited to speak to the sixth form (pupils in their last two years of high school). During the event, the speaker took questions, and one pupil questioned what she understood to be the speaker’s implication that (I quote the pupil’s words here): “critical theory took precedence over biological reality in defining women. When I questioned that, she said it wasn’t an issue of semantics. She said trans people don’t have basic human rights in this country.”

Without having been present, I can’t, of course, categorically state what the mood of the room was. However, I can offer you the assessment of the pupil who asked the question and the peer who answered it.

The pupil: “Afterwards I spoke to her and said I’m sorry if I came across as rude. We parted amicably.”

The peer: “I spoke about a wide range of human rights issues. One young woman challenged some of my views and was treated with the same courtesy as everyone else who took part. I was not aware of any consequences from our interactions and thought that we had parted on amicable terms.”

Later the same day, in the sixth-form common room, the pupil was surrounded by up to 60 other pupils who shouted, screamed and spat at her, accusing her of being transphobic. She escaped and collapsed, unable to breathe properly. Despite some initial support from teachers, the pupil was later told that she would have to work in the library if she said anything provocative in lessons, and she subsequently faced bullying and accusations of transphobia from pupils throughout the school. She spent break and lunch times in the library, rather than the common room. The girl left school in December and is now studying at home.

The story broke this week when a teacher at the school wrote an account of the incident for a blog published by Transgender Trend, a group whose website states: “We are an organisation of  parents, professionals and academics based in the UK who are concerned about the current trend to diagnose children as transgender, including the unprecedented number of teenage girls suddenly self-identifying as ‘trans’ (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria or ROGD). We are also concerned about legislation which places transgender rights above the right to safety for girls and young women in public toilets and changing rooms along with fairness for girls in sport.”

The teacher wrote: “There was a time when the school invited in Christian and other religious speakers to address moral and ethical issues and to provide food for thought and contemplation. It was usually the practice to follow these up with Q&A sessions during which the students could share their own feelings and opinions on the issues, and even disagree if they wanted to.”

He added that it was the similarity of transgender ideology to religious fundamentalism that “alerted me to the danger of what has been going on in our schools over the last few years. It was the whispered and frequent use of the terms transphobe and transphobic during that after-school activity that alerted me to the depressing fact that these girls were going along with the narrative that our heretic was, as far as they were concerned, indeed a heretic — and that she was thoroughly deserving of the roasting that she had just received before caving in and running off in a panicked and hyperventilating state.”

All of this is very disturbing. However, it saddens me to say that, since I have been following recent developments in Britain, none of it is very surprising to me. What disturbed me even more is what happened next, which was that the school headteacher issued a statement apologising for the school’s failure to maintain a “safe space” for students.

I thought this was simply a rather lame reaction, until I realised that the school was apologising not to the girl who was attacked for asking a question but rather to the 60 screaming, spitting attackers who have effectively driven her out of school. It was claiming that allowing the pupil to ask a polite and reasonable question about the relative significance of biological reality and critical theory in determining the sex of a woman made the school an unsafe space for the 17- and 18-year-old pupils.

In exploring what is going on here, I would like to call three literary expert witnesses. My first is Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking Glass.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

So, when the school authorities appropriated the word ‘safe’ in the phrase ‘safe space’, what did they choose it to mean? I suggest they meant something like ‘a place where you will never be exposed to a view that challenges the orthodoxy as determined by mob-rule’. However, that is not what ‘safe’ means, and certainly not in the context of an educational institution. I will return to this point later to explore it further.

My second witness is George Orwell, in 1984.

“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.”

So, the ‘safe space’ that the school wishes to create is actually a dangerous space, a space where independent thought and open discussion are risky perilous activities. The school authorities deliberately choose this phrase as an exercise in doublethink because of the effect it has on the minds and actions of the students.

The time has come, I think, for us to examine what the purpose of a school is. There are, of course, several possible answers to that question, not necessarily exclusive or mutually incompatible. Bearing in mind that this particular school is a private school, I would suggest that some possible answers are:

To prepare its pupils to be leaders of society.
To develop in its pupils the ability to think logically and critically.
To foster in its pupils independence of thought.
To prepare its pupils to make intelligent choices in their future lives.

An essential part of all that, I would argue, is exposure to a range of different ideas. That, surely, is what distinguishes education from indoctrination. We presumably want the younger generation to have principles by which they live, but equally surely we want them to understand what leads different people to hold different principles, to adopt the principles that they believe in consciously and after due consideration, and to be able to defend those principles through reasoned argument.

My final witness is John Milton, whose Areopagitica is a pamphlet arguing against censorship and licensing of printing. It is an impassioned philosophical defence of the principle of the right to freedom of speech and expression, and a beautifully wrought piece of prose.

“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”

It is no bad thing to be taken out of your comfort zone, and to have your views challenged. The action of defending those views can clarify them for you and can reinforce your own conviction in them, or, alternatively, lead you to realise that you do not hold those views as strongly as you assumed you did.

Now, I don’t for one moment believe that the headteacher or the school authorities believe in the position that they have officially taken. They are all people who benefitted from a liberal education themselves, who were trained in critical thinking and in engaging in vigorous debate in defence of their beliefs.

No, theirs is, I am sure, an act of craven cowardice; they believed (with considerable justification, it must be said) that taking a stand against the mob that drove a classmate out of school would create so much trouble that they preferred to take the path of least resistance. Rather than disciplining the wrongdoers, and asserting the true function of the school, they chose to allow one innocent to suffer.

This is precisely why this single small act has affected me so deeply. The path of least resistance taken by the school will, I fear, be echoed – indeed, is already being echoed – in educational institutions, and workplaces, throughout Britain. In this way, transgender ideology will become further entrenched as the new orthodoxy.

The only way that this can be avoided, it seems to me, is if, very soon, a critical mass of educators and employers all act together to reject this ideology. Some brave individuals are standing firm, but, unfortunately, as individuals, they can all be, and indeed are all being, picked off one by one. University professors, school teachers, other professionals and industry managers are all being dismissed and are finding themselves unemployable.

Within a short time, no school-leaver or university graduate who rejects transgender ideology will choose to become a teacher. Once that happens, the conditions will exist for an entire generation of schoolchildren to be officially raised in the ideology.

I am very happy that I am not the parent of school-age children in Britain, and I worry about the world that my grandchildren will grow up into. I try to live in their moment of innocence, but it is not always easy.

First, I owe you an explanation as to why I have moved publication day from Monday to Tuesday. Sunday is Ma’ayan’s long day at work, and, therefore, Esther and Raphael’s long day at home alone together. Sunday has therefore become the day we spend with them in Zichron. We leave home after breakfast, around 10 (dawn doesn’t crack as early around here as it did when we were both working) and usually arrive at 12. We then tear ourselves away soon after Maayan returns home, around 7:30, and reach home again before 9:30.

One of the only two downsides to this arrangement is that we don’t get to spend more than a few minutes with Maayan, but we do get hours of time with Raphael, a chance to catch up with Esther, and even the opportunity to feel that we are virtuously helping her out, a story she is kind enough to go along with.

The other downside to this arrangement, and the one that is relevant here, is that Sunday has traditionally been my blog-writing day. I typically start thinking about possible subjects on Friday, and then, on my walks to and from shul on Friday night and twice on Shabbat, I decide on one topic and play around with ideas. Then, on Sunday morning, after breakfast, I sit down and start writing. In a good week, I have a draft to show Bernice by lunchtime.

If things are going less well, or if I need to do a lot of online research to keep up the appearance of being a remarkably well-informed fellow, it may take me until the evening, but, even on the hardest week, the post is done and dusted and ready to publish by mid-evening.

Since our Zichron Sundays started, before we moved the clocks, I sometimes managed to write my blog after Shabbat went out on Saturday evening. Over the last few weeks, I managed once or twice to get a complete and reasonable first draft before shabbat on Friday. However, last week we set out for Zichron on Sunday morning with me having no idea what I was going to write about. I took my laptop with, but wasn’t prepared to waste valuable grandpa time there hunched over a keyboard.

And so, at 7:45 last Sunday evening, we drove off home, Bernice behind the wheel and me behind the laptop. The prospect of the Monday morning deadline focused the mind, as it always does. However, the physical task of typing was not the easiest. As many of you know, I am not a touch typist, but rather a two-finger pecker (albeit a fairly speedy one), and typing while driving on Israeli roads presented something of a challenge. In fact, I’m inclined to suggest that motoring journalists, when comparing the suspension of various models, should use a tph coefficient, measuring the number of typos per hour made by a typist sitting in the passenger seat of a given car travelling at a given speed.

I might also add – treading just about as carefully as I can – that even a driver as defensively skilled as Bernice is sometimes compelled by other Israeli drivers to brake a little more suddenly than is ideal. If, as a front-seat passenger, you are watching the road, and, even more so, if you are gripping the side of your seat, as one does, then you can easily brace yourself against the impact of the braking. If, on the other hand, your eyes are focused on the laptop screen in front of you as your fingers stagger across the keyboard and your brain gropes unsuccessfully for the mot juste, then you are in grave danger of somersaulting over the screen and into the dashboard.

Suffice to say that I arrived home that Sunday evening just a tad frazzled. However, I was in significantly better shape than the blog. In fact, it took me another three hours at home, and an hour or so on Monday morning, to bring the post to a state where I felt I could publish it.

At which point I vowed that I would not go through that experience again. So, I decided that I would switch the publication date back to Tuesday, and that, in terms of the blog, Monday would be my new Sunday. Of course, when I mentioned this to Esther, she told me that there is a good chance that Maayan’s work schedule may be changing soon, and Sunday may no longer be her long day. In that case, we will probably be going up to Zichron on a different day, and I will probably change publication day back to Monday.

Meanwhile, since Shavuot, in two weeks’ time, falls on a Sunday, the switch to Tuesday will be doubly convenient.

So much for the theory. As I settled down to sleep last night (Sunday), I felt really good that I would have all day today (Monday) to write.

And then….stuff, as they say, happened. First, I overslept, waking only at 8 in the morning. Despite the late start, I felt I really had to go for a walk, a daily morning regimen I restarted last week after far too long a break. By the time I got back from the walk, Bernice had left the house to meet a friend for breakfast. So I sat down to have a quick look at the paper before showering. The quick look, needless to say, became an in-depth read. Eventually, I tore myself away and went upstairs.

As I stepped out of the shower later, my phone rang. It was a travel insurance rep contacting me to discuss how large a mortgage we will need to take out to cover ourselves against all the dreadful disasters that lurk round every travel corner these days. I asked him to call back in 15 minutes, by which time I had managed to dress and to dig out my latest medical statement from my family doctor. Bernice’s state of health is laughably straightforward, but mine reads more like a Gothic novel, with multiple complications and convolutions.

While I was waiting for the rep to call again, I received a call back from the orthopaedic department of the hospital where I had my second hip replacement done, a year ago. I have been trying to schedule a one-year check-up. However, the secretary told me that I should make the appointment directly with the hospital clinic, and not through the department, so I tried to get through to them. Eventually, I got the option to leave my number for a call-back.

I then started chopping the fruit for breakfast. While I was halfway through this, the travel insurance rep called back, and I spent the next 20 minutes recounting my medical history. When I came to the end, and he asked: ‘Is that everything?’, I replied, as I always do: ‘Well, I think that’s enough, don’t you?’, and then, as they always do, he proceeded to read a list of other, more serious, conditions, and to ask me to interrupt him if I suffered from any of them. This was a chastening experience, as it always is, and at the end I apologized for my previous flippancy and acknowledged, as I always do, how lucky I am to have only the few conditions I have, all effectively controlled by medication. All that remained was for him to ask me whether we would be engaging in any extreme sports, as they always do, and for me to say, as I always do: ‘No, but thank you so much for asking’.

And then the bottom line, which our travel insurance agent, who was also on the call, assured me was a very competitive price. When I had recovered sufficiently, I accepted the price and returned to preparing breakfast.

By this time, Bernice had returned, and, since it was now about 12:30, she decided to join me in what would be for her lunch and for me brunch. Once that was out the way, we set off for a brisk visit to the local Rami Levi supermarket, ‘and then I really have to get down to my blog!’

The super wasn’t too crowded and we finished shopping fairly quickly. However, when we got to the checkouts, there seemed to be very long queues. After a couple of minutes, we discovered that the checkout we had chosen had a problem with connectivity to the store’s computer system, and the cashier was only accepting cash or cheques. Between us, Bernice and I had about 100 shekels in cash (for an approximately 600-shekel bill). We do still have a chequebook, but neither of us had brought it with us, obviously. As we checked the status of other tills in the store, it became clear that the system was down throughout the store. I asked Bernice whether she wanted to abandon the trolley and go home, or whether I should drive back to the centre of town and draw cash out of the bank ATM. We agreed that was the more sensible option, and so I set off.

As I drove away, I contemplated going to the liquor store (off-licence just doesn’t sound right) we sometimes use, buying a bottle of whisky and asking the owner whether he would let me have 700 shekels in cash on my credit card. I decided that would be putting him in an unfair position. A minute later, it occurred to me that there is an ATM at DCity, the brand new and very grandiose design centre that is only two minutes from Rami Levy. So I turned around at the next roundabout and headed back, trying desperately to remember where exactly on the sprawling campus I had seen an ATM.

Luck was with me. I parked right by an escalator that brought me to within 100 metres of the ATM, and, within minutes, I had withdrawn cash and was back at the supermarket checkout just as Bernice was unloading our trolley onto the conveyor belt. Of course, the cashier did not have any change, and had to go to the main desk to get a cash float. However, we were at least able to leave, eventually, with our shopping.

All of which explains why I am afraid that I simply have not had enough time this week to write a post. However, I hope that next week will prove a little less traumatic.

*In case you’re wondering what on earth the title of this week’s post refers to, it’s a typically arcane reference to the 1969 film: ‘If It’s Tuesday, This Must be Belgium’. If that means nothing to you, then a quick view of the trailer here will make you realise how lucky you are.

More for my benefit than yours, here are two happy reminders as to why we are only too willing to drive up to Zichron every Sunday and to endure the trials and tribulations of air travel to get to Portugal every few months. Both are absolute no-brainers,

We have to go to IKEA tomorrow! ‘Have to?’, I hear you ask, if you live outside Israel. (At least, I hope I hear you ask, otherwise I can’t continue the blog.) Yes, dear reader, have to: for paper serviettes (napkins), of course, as everyone always does (at least, in Israel, where the serviettes sold in most shops are the size of a sheet of toilet paper, and the thickness of a sheet of tissue paper)., for lunch (of course – no longer as good as it used to be, but still the cheapest hot salmon dish in Israel) and, as always, for at least one latest project.

Incidentally, I find much to admire about IKEA’s marketing. They manage to present as a new and exciting way to shop the concept that customers should collect their own furniture items from the warehouse, deliver them to their own homes, and then construct them themselves. This is a display of such stereotypically Israeli chutzpah that I can never quite believe that IKEA being a Swedish company is not just a story invented by the marketing department.

Offering lunch as a loss leader is a novel ploy that certainly works in Israel; we know people who will drive 45 minutes to IKEA just to eat lunch. However, their most impressive achievement, it seems to me, is that, having identified a niche market in thick, large serviettes, their stores are always packed with people who come for the serviettes, yet never manage to leave without also buying a bed, a wardrobe, a bookcase or, at the very least, a shelf.

So what, I hear you ask, is our latest project? (At least, I hope I hear you ask, as above.)

Well, since you ask, inspired by seeing them at Esther’s, sitting pristinely in the chest of drawers just waiting for a new baby to be changed on the top, the project is drawer insert dividers, or organisers, for our underwear and sock drawers.

I have a sock drawer, in which I neatly compartmentalise my balled pairs of socks into black, brown, dark blue and sundries.

(Sundries, since you ask – and I bless you again for asking – includes: a poppy red pair of socks worn with black trousers, a red silk-finish roll-neck shirt and a grey jacket for a wedding two decades ago…but seldom since; a pair of grey socks emblazoned with ruby-red hot lips, bought for me rather than by me and worn very rarely, you probably won’t be surprised to hear; another grey pair with an image of Grumpy, one of Snow White’s Disney dwarves, bought and worn as above; and a bottle-green pair that go with bottle-green flares that unaccountably shrank in the wash decades ago, and failed to meet at the waist to a degree that destined them for the recycling bin. The socks, curiously, still fit, and so, despite the fact that they go with no trousers in my wardrobe, they haven’t been discarded.)

The problem that I face on many mornings is that in the half-light, with the open wardrobe door blocking the natural light, it is not easy to tell the blue socks from the black. I have discovered that my socks are gregarious and multi-cultural fellows. Despite the fact that I arrange the brown socks as a distinguishable barrier between the blue and the black, when left to their own devices the black and blue will shamelessly intermingle.

So what I need is a system of corrals or pens, in the hope that the socks will not learn how to climb over the barriers. Hence the burning need to visit IKEA.

Last Thursday, straight after breakfast, Bernice disappeared upstairs to shower and dress. After about an hour, when I realised she still hadn’t reappeared, I thought I ought to go upstairs to check that all was OK. I discovered her in the bedroom, still not showered or dressed, with our bed entirely covered in jewellery. She was, she informed me, just organising her jewellery shelf. This was clearly a knock-on effect of our impending trip to IKEA.

I left her to it and, little more than two hours later, she staggered downstairs, carrying a large plastic bag with all of the jewellery that, she informed me, she was giving away to a charity shop. (I hasten to add that Bernice buys a lot of her jewellery in the cut-price accessories shops that abound in Israel. Part of her astute taste in fashion has always been the ability to recognise how good an item can look without being influenced by the price tag. I can no longer calculate how many thousands of shekels this has saved us over the decades.)

I then accompanied Bernice upstairs, to admire her now minimalist jewellery collection. I was more than a little surprised to discover that I couldn’t actually tell the difference. The shelf seemed to me to be just as full as before. When I questioned her about this, she explained that she wore almost all of what she had kept (although some of it is obviously for special occasions only). In addition, she has some pieces inherited from her mother, which she obviously wouldn’t dream of parting with, and some pieces made by the children when they were younger, which she equally obviously wouldn’t dream of parting with.

I was about to make some cheap comment about the senselessness of keeping all this stuff when I remembered the contents of my own equivalent drawer. I won’t bore you with all the details, but two items will serve to demonstrate that what we have here is a case of pots and kettles and accusations of blackness.

Exhibit A is the ties. In my defence, I got rid of all but 3 of my ties several years ago. However, since, at that point, it was about 20 years since I had worn a tie, this was less of an achievement than it might sound at first. Of the ties I kept, one goes with blue or black, one with brown or green, and one I kept for sentimental reasons. It is a tie with a pattern of two different parrots. This represents a level of flamboyance that is so atypical of me that I must explain why I bought it.

It was principally as a lead-in to what I regarded at the time as a particularly brilliant piece of wit. Whenever I wore my parrot tie, I would explain to people that this was the tie I wore whenever I was abroad on business, because it reminded me of the family. This parrot, I would explain, is Polly Bernice, this smaller one is Polly Micha’el and the whole tie is Polly Esther. (I’ll get my coat, shall I?)

Exhibit B is my four pairs of cufflinks. Three of them were barmitzvah presents, and all have my initials on them. The fourth is a cheap, blingy, chunky gold pair I bought probably forty-five years ago. The only occasions on which I have worn cufflinks over the last 36 years have been barmitzvah and wedding parties in Britain, together with a dress shirt and dinner jacket. How many cufflinks does a man really need? Two, I suppose – unless he’s Lord Nelson. Of my four pairs, there is only one that I really like and that is the only one I would ever wear, yet I cannot imagine parting with any of them.

Now, four pairs of cufflinks is not the same as an entire shelf of jewellery. However, four pairs of cufflinks of which I will never wear three is at least recognizable as a symptom of the same reluctance to part with stuff. We all have our weaknesses. For some, it is electronic equipment that no longer works; for others, it is assorted screws that have lost a great deal of their cleanness of thread and slot through repeated use; for others, it is lengths of assorted string.

For me, it is all of the above and more. In my defence, I am a lot better than I used to be – or perhaps I should say that I used to be even worse than I am now. Unfortunately, in the intervening decades during which I have improved, I have accumulated so much more stuff that it is difficult to notice that improvement.

There is no cure, but we can only hope that IKEA’s organisers will offer me some level of remission.

This week’s photos offer not only our two grandsons, but also a first glimpse of our expected next arrival. It’s good to see everyone smiling!

We Jews tend to live our lives by the calendar. It’s not a very straightforward calendar, constructed as it is of the separate and disparately cyclical elements of the lunar month and the solar year. Alignment of the two requires some pretty nifty lunar footwork, in the form of two months of adjustable length (29 or 30 days) and seven inserted months in each 19-year cycle.

All of which accounts for the fact that this year (a leap year) Pesach was almost as late as it can be in the solar year and for the fact that I am writing this post at what could be considered one of the two darkest moments of the Jewish year. On the 9^th of Av, we mark the low point of the three-week mourning period commemorating the destruction of both Temples. On the 30^th of Nissan, today, we are in the middle of what I heard described last week as Asseret Y’mei T’shua, the ten days of redemption, a phrase coined as an untranslatable echo of Asseret Y’mei T’shuva (the ten days of repentance that start with Rosh Hashana and end with Yom Kippur).

This (actually eight-day) period in which we find ourselves started last Wednesday evening, as we entered Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Day, marked on 27 Nissan, and will end this Thursday evening, at the end of Yom Haatzmaut, Independence Day, marked  on 5 Iyar. The period alsocontains Yom Hazikaron, the Memorial Day for those who fell fighting for the establishment of the state, or in defence of the state, and for the victims of acts of terrorism in Israel. This last always falls on the day before Yom Ha’atzma’ut, and its dying moments lead, with no break, into the celebrations of Yom Ha’atzma’ut.

I know that there are many who find this juxtaposition jarring, and that there are bereaved families who find it difficult to navigate this transition. However, I believe that this very juxtaposition is the most Jewish expression of our understanding of the meaning of our life here on earth.

To explain what I mean, let me go back just over two weeks, to the evening when almost all of my readers (I suspect) sat down to some form or other of Seder night. At many of those tables, we will have told the story of the Exodus from Egypt. We will, however, have started the story much earlier, and covered the descent into Egypt and then into slavery. In this way, our retelling of the Pesach story traces the path from the nadir of slavery to the zenith of the parting of the sea, then looks forward briefly to Mount SInai and even hints at the continuation of our national story.

The slavery in Egypt was, indeed, revealed to Abraham right at the beginning of the Jewish story, at the Brit bein Habetarim, the Covenant of the Parts. We are, it seems, to understand that the slavery was an inevitable part of the historical process that led to the Exodus, the revelation at Sinai, the entry to the Land of Israel. This, we are called on to believe, is all part of the Divine plan, a plan whose intricacies we certainly cannot expect to be able to understand, but whose existence we are required to acknowledge as we go about our daily lives.  

I try to approach Yom Hashoah every year in this spirit: in the knowledge that the Shoah is incomprehensible and unfathomable, but in the hope that I may be able to draw from the stories that emerge from it some guidance as to how to live my life. What is remarkable is that, every year, new stories emerge and are revealed on Israel’s radio and TV and in the newspapers: stories of unimaginable heroism and inconceivable evil, of sacrifice and deliverance. There has been, in recent years, a increasingly tangible sense of urgency in the gathering and telling of these stories. The youngest survivors who can remember anything of the Shoah are now in their mid-eighties, and the point at which no survivors will still be alive is only a generation away.

This was brought home to us vividly this year. At the central ceremony that opens Yom Hashoah every year, each of six torches is lit by a different survivor, accompanied and supported by a second- or third-generation family member, as that survivor’s personal story is told in their own voice and family pictures. This year, one of the six survivors chosen died less than two weeks before Yom Hashoah, and his flame was kindled by his son alone, as we watched film of the late father narrating his account.

Some time soon, then, the Holocaust will become, in historical terms, like the Exodus; it will live on only to the extent that the folk memory is nurtured. The capturing on film of personal testimonies, the survivors speaking in schools and accompanying trips to the death camps, are all initiatives that were started many years, even decades ago. New initiatives are now being launched where individual youth ‘take responsibility for’ the story of individual survivors. In these ways, we must strive to guarantee that the story of the Shoah is passed from generation to generation, exactly as the Exodus has been. Over the approximately 3,500 years since our ancestors left Egypt, that story has been handed down through an estimated 130 or so generations. It always seems to me astonishing that such a small number of fathers to daughters, mothers to sons are needed to form links in a chain that can span that long a history.

When Bernice was working, she always taught her three- and four-year-old pupils about the Shoah. When parents came into the kindergarten and saw, for the first time, (age-appropriate) photographs on the walls, some were horrified. Bernice always pointed out that, for these children, the events of the Shoah were no more immediate than the events of the Purim or the Pesach story; Hitler was no less, and no more, incomprehensible a villain than Haman and Pharaoh. It is, of course, true that not all of the children grasped the story equally well. One came in one morning to tell Bernice that the previous afternoon he had watched with his family the musical Hitler on the Roof. However, it is undeniable that, if we understand that Haman and Pharaoh can be presented in some meaningful way to four-year-olds as villains, then so can Hitler.

There seems to be less complexity in understanding the significance in the path of our history of the deaths of those who fell fighting for the State. A few days after the United Nations voted to create the State of Israel in November, 1947, Chaim Weizmann, who was to become the state’s first president a few months later, famously warned of the bitter struggle that lay ahead, saying: ‘The State of Israel will not be given to the Jewish people on a silver platter.’ Journalist and poet Nathan Alterman, inspired by these words, composed the poem that has become one of the anthems of Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, when he imagined the young men and women who would soon step up and lay down their lives fighting for the creation of the state. Asked who they are, these future warriors – still alive in 1947 but soon to die – answer, in Alterman’s prophetic imagination, from beyond their future grave: “We are the silver platter / Upon which the Jewish State was served to you.”

What even Alterman may not have foreseen, but what his poem continues to prepare the nation for, is that each generation must still be ready to become the silver platter for the future.

That stark realisation informs a day that is composed of what seems an endless succession of individual stories of so often young lives, aflame with promise, cut off in, or indeed before, their prime, leaving entire families bereft: a day of parents grieving for children and orphans mourning fathers they never knew. Every year new names are added to the sombre roll call – the total has now reached over 24,000 security personnel. The transition from that national act of remembrance to the celebrations of Israel’s independence is not easy. However, it is an essentially Jewish transition.

I am writing these words on the first of the two days of Rosh Chodesh Iyar. Every month, we celebrate the New Moon, because we see in the monthly waxing and waning of the moon a metaphor for the waxing and waning fortunes of the Jewish people. If I look for the moon in the sky tonight, I will probably be unable to see it, but I know that, from this low point, it will grow stronger, brighter, more clearly visible, every night.

This last Shabbat, we read the Haftara, the extract from Prophets, that we always read when Shabbat is the day before Rosh Chodesh: the story of David fleeing from the wrath of Saul, a moment that marks a low point, perhaps the lowest point, in David’s fortunes. No longer adored as the slayer of Goliath, no longer able to soothe Saul’s troubled soul with his harp, David has only one friend in the world, Jonathan, from whom he must separate himself to run and hide.

As we read this story, we know that David will rise from these depths to a glorious future as the King of Israel, the conqueror of Jerusalem, the author of the psalms that give eternally magnificent expression to all of humanity’s hopes, despair and triumphs. This story, too, is emblematic of the entire sweep of Jewish history.*

I find myself thinking of the quote made famous by Martin Luther King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

At first sight, MLK seems to be encouraging complacency. If, indeed, the arc bends towards justice, then all we need is patience. However, both his life’s work, and the original sermon from which he adapted the quote, make it clear that he saw it as his followers’ duty to use the faith and optimism that this belief gave them to fuel their actions as they made their own contribution to bending the arc. As the well-known joke has it: ‘Who do you think sent the boat and the helicopter?’ [In the unlikely event that you don’t know the joke, just google: ‘ Who do you think sent the boat, and take your choice of the versions offered.] It is, I would argue, the Jewish way to see the seeds of redemption even in the suffering of exile, and to strive to maintain the faith to act in such a way that we help to hasten that redemption. As we read in Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers: “Rabbi Tarfon would say: ‘It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it’.”

It remains only for me to wish you all a meaningful Yom Hazikaron and a celebratory Yom Ha’atzma’ut….and, speaking of helicopters….

*For these insights on the haftara, I am indebted to an essay by my friend Mark Schneider.