And so we leave the frenetic holiday season and settle into the long haul until Chanukah. (Actually, I’ve just checked on the calendar, and that unbelievably long stretch of nothing appears to be just nine weeks! I’m sure it was longer in my youth.)

One of the last flourishes of the festival season on Shmini Atzeret/Simchat Torah is the prayer for rain. Although fairly short, this prayer is charged with significance. As an indication of the seriousness with which we are asking for God’s favourable judgement regarding rain for the coming year, the chazzan leading the prayer wears a kittel, the white cotton or linen robe worn on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur,

In a world where few of us are farmers, it is easy to underestimate the significance of rain, in the appropriate season and in the appropriate quantities, for an agricultural society. However, in 2022, when we are being warned that events in the Ukraine may lead to a world grain shortage, the potential impact of crop failure may soon be brought home to us.

The immediate effect of saying the prayer for rain is that we change the relevant one-line addition to the amida prayer that we say three times daily from ‘He causes the dew to fall’ to ‘He makes the wind blow and the rain fall’. You might expect that a reasonably intelligent human being would be able to make this switch without too much difficulty. However, the cumulative effect of reciting the summer formula three times daily, day in, day out, for the previous six months, embarrassingly often means that people make a mistake.

As the days go on, the mistakes (one hopes) become rarer; there is usually a point where you switch from being fairly sure you used the wrong formula to being completely unsure which formula you used (probably the most humiliating state), and then, some time later, being fairly confident you used the right formula. Of course, if one always recited the Amida with full mindfulness and intent, and if one always read every word from the prayer book, one would be much less likely to slip, but…

(Ed Note: Perceptive readers will have realised that, in the previous paragraphs, ‘people’, ‘you’ and ”one’ are all euphemisms for ‘me’, ‘myself’ and ‘I’.)

The change in our prayers is utterly dependable. However, in Israel, the change in the weather is considerably less so. This year has been, in this sense, immensely satisfying. In the days following Simchat Torah, we have been blessed – even in edge-of-the-desert Maale Adumim – with rain. Those of us who were sufficiently on the ball to take down our sukka (or at least the decorations) soon after the festival managed to beat the rain, at least here, which made me, for one, feel very smug.

This is, incidentally, quite separate from the smugness I feel because I don’t actually have anything much in the way of a sukka to take down. Our sukka is defined by three sturdy and permanent walls and our pergola roof. Decorations are about all I have to put up and take down, apart from a straightforward symbolic removal and immediate replacement of a few pergola slats to represent placing the schach (roof covering.

The initial rain was a drop or two, nothing more. Then, on Thursday evening, just as Bernice and I were finishing supper outside in our backyard, I felt a drop of rain on my arm. This was followed by a long minute when Bernice was not fully convinced that the drop was no more than hallucination on my part – and, to be honest, even I was starting to have my doubts – but then there were a couple more drops. We decided a move inside would be judicious and, not long after we had cleared up, we had several minutes of light rain, even accompanied by a distant rumble of thunder, but no lightning.

It rained on and off through the night, with, this time, thunder and lightning, allowing me to calculate that the centre of the storm was nine miles away. What an excellent investment my copy of the Schoolboy’s Pocket Book was in 1961. Of course some of its information is now out of date: it still lists the Commonwealth’s monarch as Elizabeth, for example.

However, much of its information is still jolly useful for all sorts of projects: I find it hard to imagine, for example, going through life without knowing that the bending allowance for a metal sheet with an S.W.G. of 22 and a 1/16 inch rad. is 0.115. (Don’t write to ask me – I have no idea. And don’t write to tell me – I have no interest.) Suffice to say that if you ever need to know the frequency in Mc/s at which the BBC broadcast radio from Crystal Palace, or the system used for numbering steam engines on the Southern Region railway, I’m your man! But I digress.

For someone who lives in Manchester (or even Seattle), it is not easy to explain the impact of this first rain of the winter in Israel. It has its own name – yoreh – and, indeed, it seems to have its own ‘green’ smell as it freshens the plants in the garden. It is usually gentle, short-lived, temperate (where our mid-winter rains, even in Maale Adumim, can be skin-tinglingly, bone-chillingly icy, driven almost horizontal by fierce winds, and sometimes falling as stinging sleet or hail). It feels absolutely like the blessing that we pray for, holding, as it does, the promise – albeit not always fulfilled – of rain in its season throughout the winter and a good harvest next summer.

Our only personal skin in this game is a small garden of mostly green plants with an automatic drip-irrigation system and four trees – a loquat, a lemon, and small peach and necatrine (which last two yield only about 25 fruits between them). At a push you can count the synthetic grass, since it also looks considerably perkier after the rain. However, even for us, seeing, hearing and smelling the yoreh is deeply fulfilling.

Here I should pause to apologise to Micha’el and the family in Portugal. When I wrote on our family WhatsApp group on Thursday evening with the exciting news about our first rain, Esther chipped in enthusiastically from Zichron where it had also just started raining. The following morning, Micha’el informed us that Penamacor was on its third day of non-stop rain. As we say in the prayer for rain: ‘For a blessing and not for a curse.’

The rain (in its season) is only one aspect of the natural cycle of the year that is so central to Jewish liturgy and religious practice. This last shabbat we announced the new moon that will be born (as the Hebrew has it) on Tuesday morning, shortly after this post is due to be published. Growing up traditional but not observant in Britain, I admit to having had no idea when the new moon fell. Nor did I ever realise that the moon rose in different parts of the sky and at different hours, at different times of year. I never even noticed that the orientation of the crescent of the moon towards the beginning and end of each lunar month was different at different times of year.

I have just checked, and even my Schoolboy’s Pocket Book completely ignores this topic. (I think I shall ask for my money back.) All I will say in my defence is that, growing up in suburban Ilford, not much of the sky close to the horizon was visible. Of course, in the words of the music-hall song, ‘Wiv a ladder and some glasses, you could see to ‘Ackney Marshes, if it wasn’t for the ‘ouses in-between.’

Now, of course, we live in a city that offers unrestricted views over the Judean desert toward the Dead Sea, and, in the other direction, indeed from the window of the room where I am typing this, a view of the hills between us and Jerusalem, eight miles away. In Maale Adumim, and living a life more in harmony with the rhythms of the natural world, nature seems very much more immediate than it ever did in Ilford.

Meanwhile, in rainswept Penamacor, the brothers are keeping each other’s spirits up, despite being confined indoors with the sniffles.

51 weeks ago, I offered you A Healthy Portion of Salmagundi, being a ragbag of odds and ends. I find myself having to resort to the same cheap trick today. I thought the least I could do is find a different dish this time, and so I offer you a gallimaufry.

What a gallimaufry is is a hash of various kinds of meat, and what this post threatens to be is a hash of a number of stray thoughts that, despite several trawls of a brain addled by 25 hours of Shmini Atzeret/Simchat Torah, are all that I can manage to dredge up. I apologise in advance for the lack of internal cohesion – and possibly interest – but the fact remains that some weeks this blog virtually writes itself, and other times it….doesn’t.

Incidentally, my research suggests that the probable etymology of ‘gallimaufry’ is the Old French ‘galer’, meaning ‘to have fun’ or ‘to enjoy oneself’ and the Old Northern French (or Picard) for ‘to eat gluttonously’. (Presumably, Picard was the language spoken in the region of France where the First World War Battle of the Somme was fought and, more felicitously, where roses are blooming.)

Let’s tuck in, starting with Simchat Torah. I speak here only for myself, of course. The idea that the Torah can make me joyous is one that I can certainly understand. The idea that I would be led to express that joy by dancing with the scrolls is one that I personally find I cannot connect with. The 19^th-Century Anglo-Jewish artist Solomon Alexander Hart portrayed The Feast of the Rejoicing of the Law at the Synagogue in Leghorn, Italy. I present his painting here as evidence that I am not alone in finding it difficult to summon the requisite joy. Perhaps I should find an Italian shul to go to on Simchat Torah.

Clearly the Italian tradition is rather different from the (presumably Spanish-Portuguese) that Samuel Pepys witnessed when he had the (mis)fortune to visit a synagogue on (of all days) Simchat Torah. I quote from his diary entry for Wednesday, 14 October, 1663 (in case you were wondering when Simchat Torah fell outside Israel in that year).

And anon their Laws that they take out of the press are carried by several men, four or five several burthens in all, and they do relieve one another; and whether it is that every one desires to have the carrying of it, I cannot tell, thus they carried it round about the room while such a service is singing. But, Lord! to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service, more like brutes than people knowing the true God, would make a man forswear ever seeing them more and indeed I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this.

Many would argue that Simchat Torah is a festival primarily for the children. When I was a young father, I certainly played the part. (But it was always conscious and self-conscious; any joy that I felt was in seeing the children’s excitement and in feeling a part of the community; none of it really had much, if anything, to do with the Torah.) These days, I choose to make a very early and, I always hope, discreet, exit from the festivities, and sit upstairs in the (appropriately named) sanctuary, reading one or other of various commentaries on the Torah.

This year I read a number of the refreshingly short chapters in Rabbi Sacks and the Community We Built Together, a tribute collection to Rabbi Sacks z”l in which some one hundred rabbis and other members of the Anglo-Jewish community who knew him professionally and personally share teachings of Rabbi Sacks that speak to them, and record their appreciation of him. The contributors range from dayanim to the publishing manager of Rabbi Sacks’ prayer book for children and one of the Rabbi’s protection officers.

As is almost always the case when I study Rabbi Sacks’ insights into Judaism and Torah, there were one or two moments yesterday when I did indeed feel joy at the truth and resonant clarity of his insights. What also comes through powerfully from this collection is Rabbi Sacks’ extraordinary ability to connect warmly with a very wide range of people. Not for the first time did I find myself wishing that I could take on board not only more of his extraordinary teachings, but also more of his humanity.

Before and after the chag, I have been busy preparing for our shul’s annual general meeting tomorrow night, which I have reluctantly agreed to chair, and which will see us appoint chairman and board for the next year. Reflecting on that, I thought about writing this week about leadership struggles, what with the ongoing fiasco that is the Conservative Government in Britain, and the relentlessly acrimonious and cynical Israeli election campaign, which is entering its final two weeks before the November 1 general election.

However, even in my wildest fantasies I don’t rate myself as a political commentator. Let me simply say that it seems to me that in Britain as in Israel, the standard of national political debate and leadership has shown a steady decline in the last 20 years. It is not easy for me to see a way back from the current abysmally low state of discourse in either country. In comparison, our shul seems a model of functioning democracy.

Moving swiftly on: when I bought a macchinetta in Madrid, it did not occur to me that I would be able to use it on chag. Then, when Esther and Maayan were here on Rosh Hashana, they found that the electric hotplate we use on shabbat and chag was hot enough to boil the water in the macchinetta. So, my Sukkot was enhanced by fresh coffee. All that is required is the foresight to grind a sufficient quantity of beans before the chag, and to remember to put the macchinetta on the hotplate sufficiently early, before it is extinguished by the timeswitch.

That certainly sounds easy as I write it here. In fact, I am very proud to say that so far I have remembered every time to grind the coffee before chag, and have a 50% success rate with timing the actual heating. Now, all I need to do is to find a rabbi who will agree that I can perform the same trick on shabbat.

It appears that not only is this week’s dish a gallimaufry, but it is also one influenced by cuisine minceur, being served in a noticeably smaller portion than usual. I vow to make every effort to offer a full-size helping next week.

I can at least offer you two photos. Raphael reached another milestone this week: he is now seven months old. He has recently mastered sitting up, although he still seems to be even happier lying down.

Three weeks ago, I invited you to accompany me on the first three days of our stay in Madrid. You left us recovering on the coach after a half-day trip to Toledo on the Wednesday. I know that some of you have hardly been able to sleep, waiting for the other shoe to drop. So today, as a public service, I bring you another day and a half in the Spanish capital.

Having reached the tranquillity of our hotel room, there was just time to shower and change, and coo over some photos Micha’el had sent of the new baby (who, it now seems almost inconceivable, had, at this stage, no name that we were aware of) before walking again to the kosher hoomusiya (which is actually a level or two above a plain and simple hoomusiya). We arrived a couple of minutes before the restaurant opened and struck up a conversation with an Israeli woman in her thirties who was also waiting for opening time.

She was, at that stage, two months into a trimester in Spain, in connection with her post-doctoral research into the relationship between the Jewish communities of Iberia and the authorities in the period before the Expulsion. She was very much enjoying the wealth of archive material that she was able to study first-hand, while at the same time she was clearly missing speaking Hebrew, being in Israel, and, she had been amazed to discover, cooking. We invited her to eat with us, and spent an enjoyable evening gaining insight into such topics as the Spanish academic work ethic (‘Come in to the office at 9’ is apparently Spanish for ‘Someone else may possibly arrive before 10’) and the local Jewish community (very warm and welcoming).

Having checked how far our hotel was from the synagogue, and having decided that a walk of that length in Shabbat clothes in 43^o heat was out of the question, we had already decided that we would spend Shabbat in the hotel. In fact, since the hotel corridor featured motion-sensitive lighting, we had realised by this stage that we would be trapped in our hotel room for the whole of Shabbat.

To put that into context: we would be confined to a spacious air-conditioned apartment with a kitchen, a sofa and armchair, and a view of the city, and would be completely deprived of walking around in the searing heat, unable to carry with us a bottle of water or to buy one. Since we had by this stage (in the 3 days since landing in Madrid) walked 50,000 steps, we reckoned we would be ready for a relaxing Shabbat by Friday evening.

So, before settling our bill at the end of another delicious meal, we ordered some hummus, felafel and pitot ‘to go’. Armed with these contributions to our Shabbat table, we parted from our unplanned dining companion and set off at a gentle pace for our hotel room, air conditioning, and a comfortable bed.

The following morning (Thursday), after breakfast we walked to the Prado Museum, for which we had booked tickets online. We had actually tried to visit on Tuesday afternoon, after I had discovered that there is free admission for the last two hours of visiting every day. This seemed like a good idea at the time. However, when we arrived at the museum two hours before closing time, we discovered that we were, astonishingly, in the height of summer, at the 13^th most visited museum in the world, not the only cheapskates in town. It took us five minutes to walk to the back of the queue, which snaked round two sides of the museum and around the adjacent park.

After a few minutes waiting in the still fierce sunshine, and having calculated that, since only a limited number of queuers were let in every 15 minutes, we would probably not reach the front of the queue before closing time, we decided to bite the bullet and book a mid-morning timeslot as paying customers. Incidentally, as senior citizens, we enjoyed a healthy discount.

This gave me the time to do my homework online on Tuesday evening, which involved as a first step locating a map of the Prado, which I asked the clerk at reception to print out. (This has long been one of my measures of the quality of a hotel’s service. Over the years, reactions have ranged from ‘Yes, of course!’, through ‘I’m really not sure. I’ll have to check’ to ‘I’m afraid that we have no facility to do that’ to ‘No’.) On this occasion, I was delighted to get a ‘Yes, of course’.

Further online research involved a comparison of a few sites listing the 8/12/15/20 ‘must see’ paintings in the Prado, and the selection of the 12 most frequently cited ones. All I then needed to do was mark on my map the locations of the 12 paintings, plan a route through the museum (taking note, of course, of the location of public toilets) and read up enough about each painting to be able to amaze Bernice with my erudition.

In the event, we hired excellent audio guides, and enjoyed a wonderful and uplifting two-and-a-half hours in the museum. From the moment you begin the ascent of the grand staircase that leads to the entrance, the building’s scale and classical architecture help to put you in the right frame of mind for a stroll past some of the greatest artworks ever created. The measured admissions every 15 minutes ensure that there is never too much of a crowd around any one painting, and walking through the high-ceilinged colonnaded galleries is a pleasure in itself.

As for the artworks, they are for the most part the Royal Spanish collection. Not only does the museum boast, unsurprisingly, the most comprehensive and finest single collection of Spanish art in the world; it also, largely because of Velasquez’ stature and influence among his contemporaries, boasts the finest collection of Italian classical art outside Italy. For me, it was an experience like reading the King James Bible or watching Shakespeare: as we made our way from one of our featured paintings to the next one, we would find ourselves time and again passing at least one masterpiece that we immediately recognised. Like the National Gallery in London, the Prado is full of the pictorial equivalent of famous quotes.

None of the paintings that I had selected disappointed either of us, and several of them were thrilling. The brilliantly intriguing composition of Velazquez’ Las Meninas I found magnificent, especially since, I am ashamed to say, it was not a painting I had previously known other than very sketchily. Here, the audio guide was particularly enlightening. Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights and Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, on the other hand, felt like old friends, although, as always, seeing the real thing after so many reproductions and interpretations was a slightly surreal experience.

If you ever visit the Prado, I recommend taking the lift to Gallery 11B. Once you are in the lift, make sure you are standing facing the lift doors, since, as they open, you will be overwhelmed by the painting on the opposite wall: the huge, sumptuous expanse (almost three metres tall and over nine metres(!) wide) of The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist and Herod’s Banquet by the Silesian artist Bartholomeus Strobel. This glorious feast of composition, with its richness of detail, is a painting whose every mini-grouping vies for your attention.

Your eye is probably drawn first to the dazzlingly lit female figure left of centre near the end of the table, with her elaborately pouffed hairstyle. You may then notice the partly mirroring female figure of Salome right of centre, carrying the tray with the grey head of John the Baptist. From there you may be drawn to the turbaned Herod at the head of the table, shying away from the disembodied head. It will probably be some time before you look to the right of the column that isolates the right-hand edge of the painting; in that corner, the executioner poses, with an ugly grin, over the blood-drained headless corpse.

Wherever you look, there are tiny points of interest: a few of the 80 or so figures portrayed stare straight at you, some in unabashed innocence, others in curiosity, a few in sneering disdain; a lapdog poses on its hind legs; a richly-bearded figure reaches forward to remove a cloth covering the platters of fruit on a side-table. On almost every figure there is an embarrassment of richness of highly-decorated cloth. It is indeed a banquet, not only for Herod, but also for our eyes.

Feeling suitably sated, we left the Prado, and, just outside, caught a tour bus, which took us on a 90-minute circular route with an audio commentary that was clearly controlled by GPS, so that the correct piece of commentary started playing whenever the bus approached a site. Unfortunately, the traffic was, presumably, not quite as heavy as expected, with the unfortunate result that repeatedly a commentary would be cut short and the recording would jump to the next segment. Despite this rather disorientating and disconcerting fact, the tour was informative and enjoyable. (By this stage, anything that involved a seat was automatically enjoyable.)

We then walked back to the hotel. When we had walked this route previously, we had passed the Madrid City Council Debating Chamber, where a television outside broadcast unit was setting up, and a few police vans were parked. On this occasion, we had to make our way through the dispersing crowds from a demonstration outside the chamber.

This was a timely reminder that, however relaxed, fun-loving and 21^st Century Madrid is, it was only in 1977 or 8, a couple of years after Franco’s death, that Spain fully transitioned from a dictatorship to a democracy. The CCOO was, unsurprisingly, banned under Franco, and only relegalised after his death. From a brief conversation with our walking-tour guide, I gained the impression that the political activism of madrileños (the citizens of Madrid) is still coloured by the fact that their parents lived their lives under the repression of Franco, and that Madrid is, not far below the surface, a city that likes to confront authority.

On that note, let’s take a rest, and save our last couple of days in Madrid for another time.

Meanwhile, in Penamacor, it’s good to see that Tao was paying attention to all those nursery rhymes we never tired of reciting, and is putting his knowledge to good use.

If you listen carefully, you may notice that Tao, for whom ‘roast beef’ is a meaningless concept, has vegetarianised it. Personally, I prefer my version, but I’m in a minority in this family.

I was about to comment on how rare it is for me to reference contemporary music. Then I decided that, before I did so, I should just check the publication date of the song I nod at in the title of this week’s post. I hope you’re sitting down: July 1968, which, however you count it, is over 54 years ago. As if I needed depressing even more, Revolution is as far back in history now as Belgium Put the Kibosh on the Kaiser was in July 1968. (Incidentally, it’s worth reading the lyrics of this 1914 patriotic war song, to wonder at its light-hearted optimism at the start of World War I, a mood that was so far out of step with both reality and, I believe, the British public at large.)

But I digress…and we find ourselves this week at the exact point in this season in the Jewish year when digression is the one thing we don’t want. As we approach the end of the seven days that carry us from Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur, from the New Year to the Day of Atonement, what we want is to focus on the matters at hand.

At a Q&A session that we held after morning services in our synagogue last Shabbat, the moderator invited us all to share what resolutions we had made for the New Year. My initial reaction was to reflect that New Year resolutions are surely a non-Jewish phenomenon. (Ed. Note: Actually, that’s not true; my initial reaction was: ‘In your dreams! I’m not sharing my resolutions with anyone!’ – and judging by the number of people who passed, I’m guessing I wasn’t the only person who reacted in that way.)

However, as I listened to the ten or twelve people who were happy to share their resolutions, I started wondering about the whole phenomenon, and I have come to the conclusion that, far from it being a non-Jewish thing, there is something in the whole experience of making and striving to keep resolutions that is quintessentially Jewish.

By way of introduction, let me present some of the resolutions that were voiced on Shabbat. There were several that were specifically related to raising the resolver’s level of Jewish observance: to take on more religious learning; to strive to pray more often in a minyan and not alone. Some were more broadly concerned with general behaviour (although these were also very much in harmony with ideas central to Judaism): to perform more acts of simple charity; to be a better neighbour. Still others were even more general: to find a husband who embodies the qualities I am seeking; to lose 10 kilo.

This was the moment at which I started wondering generally about the whole point of resolutions. When that last resolution was shared, half of those present nodded or grunted acknowledgement, and you could almost hear a general murmur of: ‘Been there! Done that! Repeatedly!’ Discussing this with Bernice afterwards, I was not surprised to hear her reject, for herself, the whole concept of resolutions: either you decide to do something and do it, or you don’t…and don’t. Resolving to do something sets up an entire extra unnecessary layer, that adds nothing.

There is a level at which I agree with Bernice. I certainly remember vividly a decade or more of resolving to give up smoking, and either never getting any further than the resolution, or making a half-hearted attempt, which fizzled out within a day or two. Then, one day, with no specific trigger, I woke up and decided not that I was going to stop smoking but that I had stopped smoking, and, lo and behold, I had. Since then, I have always maintained that stopping smoking is the easiest thing in the world; you just have to want to.

And yet…At another level, I believe that there is a genuine significance in making resolutions. A resolution is a declaration that we make to ourselves (and, if we choose to, to others, but that is not the important part) that we are going to change. The act of making that declaration is an affirmation that we have the power and ability to change. That is a profound affirmation.

There is a famous Victorian Christian hymn – All Things Bright and Beautiful – written by the Anglo-Irish Cecil Frances Alexander. She was tireless in her charitable work for the deaf and dumb, the poor and the sick. There is a verse in the hymn that was subsequently rejected by the Church, and omitted from standard hymnbooks. The verse reads:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.

This explicit endorsement of the class system, elevating it to the level of Divine will, is certainly alien to Judaism. Blind acceptance of one’s fate is not the Jewish way. The resounding message of this period of the year is that every person’s fate is in his own hands. If we genuinely repent our sins, then God will gladly accept our repentance. Repentance, prayer and charity, we declare in the High Holyday liturgy, avert the evil decree.

On Yom Kippur itself, most people that I know, whether they are traditionally religious or not, to a greater or a lesser degree, step back from their everyday life and make for themselves a space where they can reflect on the place that they are in. Speaking personally, in a ‘good’ year, where I feel I have been able to make that space and experience that reflection, I find myself, at the end of Yom Kippur, feeling that I can indeed work to become a better person in this new year.

For those of us who lack the strength of character of Bernice, or at least for myself, the act of making a resolution can help to sustain that feeling over the coming days, as the pressures of everyday life rush back in, and I feel the spiritual force that I experienced on Yom Kippur dissipating. A resolution translates the general feeling of ‘wanting to do better’ into a specific action item to be carried out. It also, as I stated above, affirms my belief that I can change.

I could make the argument that making a resolution only to fail to carry it out is a waste of time, and is merely an opportunity to make myself aware of my inadequacies. As the congregant said last shabbat: ‘My resolution is the same resolution I make every year – to lose 10 kilo.’ You could see that as just a repeated failure, and even as satisfying what was apparently not Einstein’s definition: ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.’

However, I would argue that if, every year, we reach the point after Yom Kippur where our faith in our ability to change is renewed, where we have shed our cynicism and our despair, and where we genuinely believe that this year we can indeed become a better person, then that is something to be celebrated rather than mocked. Regardless of whether we succeed in converting the resolution into life-changing action, the mere act of faith contained in the resolution is a thing of value. I say we want a resolution!

Raphael, meanwhile, seems untroubled by the awesomeness of the period we are currently going through.