Ed Note: To help you read that heading correctly, imagine that it is followed, after a pause by: ‘When do we want it?’, to which the answer is, of course, ‘Now!’

As I sit attempting to write this week’s post, I am, uncharacteristically, listening to the rolling news programme on the radio, and following this (Monday) morning’s events.

I imagine most of you are keeping up, more or less, with developments in Israel, and, of course, by the time you read this post, any ‘update’ I offer will be at least 22 hours stale, and, therefore, at the rate at which things are developing here, will be worthless. However, allow me to clarify for you exactly where things stand at this exact moment, since it helps explain this week’s post.

Overnight, well over 100,000 took to the streets across the country in unplanned demonstrations to protest Netanyahu’s firing of Defence Minister Gallant. So far this morning, the Histadrut (Trade Unions Congress), in a press conference where they shared the podium with representatives of employers in the private sector, among others, called an immediate general strike, without explicitly stating what their demands were. Obviously, their primary demand is the halting of the judicial reforms. Whether that is all they are demanding is not 100% certain, although it would probably be enough to stop the general strike.

It has to be said that this unanimity of the workers and the bosses is unprecedented in Israeli history.

Following this announcement, which brings out the public sector, including the Health Service, which is now working on a severely reduced footing, the (Likud) head of the workers’ union at Ben Gurion announced the immediate halting of all departures from Ben Gurion. Halting of all landings is expected to take effect from tomorrow.

The closure of many of the country’s shopping malls has just been announced. Universities are also closing. (Schools break up for Pesach after today, and will therefore miss the immediate wave of action.)

Netanyahu is currently meeting with all coalition party leaders (a meeting that is lasting far longer than originally anticipated), and is expected to address the nation immediately afterwards.

Which leaves me two options.

I could, theoretically, ignore what is happening in Israel, and write about what I planned to write about before the sky fell in. That seems at best cloth-eared, at worst callous, at all events irrelevant.

I could, theoretically, offer an opinion. I’m not sure how far I want to stick my neck out, not least because I feel so far out of my depth. Let me just say this. First, Netanyahu has to stop the legislative process for the judicial reform, and to prepare for a considered process of national public debate leading to a reform that the majority in the country undoubtedly feel is needed.

Second, the opposition have to accept that the stopping of the legislative process and the establishment of a framework for public debate represent the achievement of the declared aims of the demonstrations, which should, accordingly, cease with immediate effect. The demonstrations must not continue as a call for the removal of the democratically elected Prime Minister.

Now that I have alienated all my former friends on the right and the left, here’s what I’m going to do.

I am, for this week, going to stop here, and hope to meet you, next week, on the far side of this, the greatest civil and arguably the greatest existential, crisis that Israel has faced since its foundation.

Two final reflections.

If you feel that to call the current upheaval an existential crisis is an exaggeration, I recommend, for an assessment of the external existential crisis, an article by a former deputy national security adviser in Israel.

As for the internal existential crisis, over the next few weeks, we are due to mark, together, the festival of our national foundation, the anniversary of our greatest national tragedy, and the terrible cost and remarkable reward of achieving national statehood. If it becomes clear that we are, for whatever reason, unable to stand alongside each other to mark these events, then I fear this will point to the truth that we are unable to stand alongside each other at all, and the Zionist experiment has failed.

Popular singers in Israel enjoy a place in everyone’s heart that is uniquely Israeli. One such iconic figure, Shlomo Artzi, announced yesterday that he feels unable to accept the Israel Prize: in this context of the existential crisis, I feel that is the saddest news I have heard this week.

I do not, I cannot, believe that the Zionist experiment has failed. Instead, we have to seize the landmarks of these coming weeks and embrace them as the unifying national experiences they undoubtedly are. Until then, I wish us all a peaceful week and a week in which all Israel begins the long, hard essential journey back to brotherhood and the recognition of our shared destiny.

I leave you with the innocence of youth, and two pictures that prove that all you need to be contented is your Nana, and that brothers can live together contentedly under the same roof…but maybe only in Wendy houses.

I like hard physical work! Not in the sense that Jerome K Jerome liked work. He famously said: ‘I like work; it fascinates me. I could watch it for hours.’ No, I actually enjoy working up a sweat and getting my hands dirty. The trouble is, that, over the years, various parts of me have started, with increasing frequency, begging to differ. This means that just as I am getting into the swing of sawing a thick branch, or emptying a cupboard to clean it for Pesach, or some such physical exertion, one of my knees, as it were, decides that, on the whole, it would rather be suspended between a rectum on a sofa and an ankle on a pouffe.

This can of course pose problems. When Bernice comes home two hours later and asks, not unreasonably, why both dinner services are stacked on the kitchen counter and the drawer they belong in is in four pieces on the floor, she doesn’t really want to hear that I just didn’t have the strength to put everything back, but I’ll get round to it in just a minute.

Which is one of the reasons I love going to Portugal. At some point during our month with the kids, Micha’el is bound to mention that he is just about to start some project or other, and I can eagerly volunteer to help. It feels very good to wave off his assurances that “You really don’t have to!” and “Are you sure that it won’t be too much?” It feels even better to know that when, as usually happens, my body tells me, with the end of the job still nowhere in sight, that it has put up with as much as it is prepared to for one day, Micha’el will be wildly appreciative of what I have done, and will be happy to finish off.

This last trip to Penamacor afforded two opportunities for this kind of workout. One involved the sandbox for Tao that Micha’el was setting up on their land, close to the tepee. One day towards the end of our visit, Micha’el drove with Tao to collect the sand: half a cubic metre, which more or less filled the back of the truck. Back at the house, Tslil and Tao took a couple of bucketfuls to replenish Tao’s sandtray in the backyard, then Michael, Lua and I drove down to the land to wheelbarrow the remaining sand from the path to the sandbox.

This was, to be honest, little more than a mild workout for me (and almost a stroll in the park for Micha’el), since the distance we needed to wheel the sand was only 50 metres, all of which was downhill, and I had the fully functioning wheelbarrow, while Micha’el wrestled with the one that has seen much better days. Old age carries some privileges, you know! We had estimated that the sand would fill more than ten and fewer than twenty barrows, and were delighted when it stretched to just over fourteen. I find it very heartening when I can kid myself that I have an instinct for these things, and am the kind of man who can judge the correct consistency of cement just by smelling it.

As you can see, it was a beautiful, even warm, winter day, and we returned to the house very satisfied with ourselves.

Let’s take a little rest before going on to the second bout of physical exertion, and talk about the title of this week’s post. It is, as many of you will not need telling, part of the lyric from Ol’ Man River, the song that offers a Greek-chorus-like commentary on the action in the Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein musical Show Boat. It is also, unusually for a Broadway musical, a bass solo, and is most closely associated with Paul Robeson, who was unable because of other commitments to appear in the original Broadway production, but did open the show in London, and appeared in the revival and second film of the musical.

The lyric is interesting for at least a couple of reasons. First, there is a section of the song (often omitted) whose lyrics have undergone numerous changes over the years. Kern originally wrote:
Niggers all work on de Mississippi,
Niggers all work while de white folks play…

This version survives in the 1929 film version, but, in the 1936 (Paul Robeson) film, ‘Niggers’ was changed to ‘Darkies’. Starting with the 1946 stage revival, and in most revivals since, ‘Darkies all work’ has become ‘Coloured folks work’. The Temptations, in their 1960s version, claimed that ‘We all work while the rich folks play’.

Taking liberties with the lyric in a completely other direction, Paul Robeson chose to reflect, in his adoption and adaptation of the song away from the musical it was born in, what he saw as the racial reality and aspirations of American blacks in his time. Here, side by side, is an extract from Kern’s original lyric, and Robeson’s eventual evolved lyric.

Original Lyrics	Robeson Changes
Dere’s an ol’ man called de Mississippi; Dat’s de ol’ man dat I’d like to be! What does he care if de world’s got troubles? What does he care if de land ain’t free? …Tote dat barge! Lif’ dat bale! Git a little drunk, An’ you land in jail… Ah gits weary An’ sick of tryin’; Ah’m tired of livin’ An skeered of dyin’, But Ol’ Man River, He jes’ keeps rollin’ along	There’s an ol’ man called de Mississippi; That’s the ol’ man I don’t like to be! What does he care if the world’s got troubles? What does he care if the land ain’t free? …Tote that barge Lif’ that bale! You show a little grit and you lands in jail… But I keeps laffin’ Instead of cryin’ I must keep fightin’; Until I’m dyin’ And Ol’ Man River, He just keeps rollin’ along

Which is all very well for ol’ man river, but some of us have to keep totin’ that barge. Shortly after we arrived in Portugal, Micha’el and Tslil took delivery of a load of firewood. Incidentally, when it looked as though their usual supplier was not going to return Tslil’s call, and she contacted another supplier, he asked her what quantity she wanted, in cubic metres. Since their usual supplier has never asked, but just delivers what he knows to be a reasonable quantity for one domestic stove in a small terraced house in the village, Tslil had no idea what to say, and asked my advice. This was where I was forced to admit that I can’t really judge the consistency of cement from its smell, and that ‘a quarter of a shedful’ is not an official EU measurement of volume.

In the end, the original supplier phoned back to announce that he would deliver that evening, and he indeed did. Unfortunately, his end-point service consists of dumping the wood (cut into more or less manageable firelog lengths) unceremoniously along one wall of the shed. If you have ever played Jenga, you will appreciate the problem that left us faced with. The wood had been stacked along the side wall of the shed, with the logs more or less parallel to that side wall, leaving a narrow path through the shed, This meant that every time a log was removed, there was a real danger of an avalanche into that narrow path. As Micha’el explained, what was needed was to completely restack the load, perpendicular to the side wall. Since Micha’el was busy with other, more demanding jobs, I volunteered myself for this, about three hours before Shabbat came in.

The first step was to remove a section of the logs, to create an empty space in which I could start stacking. The kid’s shed is accessed from the backyard by a door at one end and leads out to the street behind the kids’ house through a second door at the other end. So, I stacked a fair amount of firewood on the pavement immediately outside that door and started to stack wood into the space I had created. Eventually, I had stacked sufficient wood to have cleared another space against the wall, and so I was able to continue.

After about two hours, when I was little more than half finished, I had to stop because Shabbat was fast approaching. I stepped back to admire my work and then realised that I had been stacking parallel to, and not perpendicular to, the wall. This, of course, meant that on Sunday morning I had to virtually start again. However, I was at least restarting from a rather more ordered and stable pile.

This time, I managed to complete the whole job in about two hours, and the end result was, I must admit, very satisfying. You will have to take my word for it that the pile looked much bigger in the flesh – or, rather, the timber – than it does in the picture.

All of which may explain why, on my return to Israel, I found that I had lost two kilo in Portugal. Bernice, of course, achieved a similar result by a disciplined weights routine. What she will do when Ollie is too heavy to carry, I don’t know.

In other news, last Friday we celebrated Raphael’s first birthday in Zichron, with rather too much whipped cream, and a motorcycle ride with his big cousin on Maayan’s side, while Tao and his friends celebrated his fourth birthday in Penamacor, in true gan fashion, with them all being candles.

One year, so rumour has it, the two boys are going to celebrate their shared birthday together, in the same country. Easier said than done, I suspect.

…but the memories linger on. I still have notes for several anecdotes about our latest trip to Portugal, so, in the blog at least, we probably won’t be leaving until a week or so before Pesach.

Let’s start with what may become Bernice’s signature dish, Munchy salmon. Unusually, the selection of fresh kosher fish in the three supermarkets we visited on this trip was rather poor, and consequently we ate considerably less fish this time. This was much to the dog’s disgust, since Lua loves nothing more than fish bones and skin, and she only gets offered these when we visit. I kid myself that this is not the reason that she always remembers us from one trip to the next, and is always delighted to see us, but I suspect it is, indeed, less puppy love and more cupboard love.

Anyway, what was readily available in the super was salmon, which Bernice baked in the microwave, garnished with garlic, and served with wedges of as many lemons as you wanted from the tree. An illustration should explain why I call it Munchy salmon, and why I give it here what is not so much a shout-out as a scream-out:

Speaking of the dog, she and I bonded more closely than ever on one of our walks this time. We were out early in the morning, deep in the forest, when I realized I needed to relieve myself. When I had finished, Lua trotted over, appeared to nod approvingly, squatted down, and matched my contribution. I feel that we are now, if not blood brothers, then at least urine siblings.

A couple of days after we returned from our Lisbon break, Tao resumed gan, after a break of several months, when the kids were visiting Israel and were subsequently without their truck. His return was unfortunately timed, because he was just getting a dreadful cold, and wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to go to gan. In the end, Bernice went with Micha’el to take him to gan, and I went with Tslil to pick him up at the end of the morning. I didn’t realise what I was signing up for until Tslil asked me whether I had boots! Fortunately, I was able to borrow Micha’el’s wellingtons, and we set off in the truck.

After a fifteen-minute drive along very minor roads, we turned off onto an unpaved track across country. A couple of hundred metres along, we hit a traffic jam where a flock of sheep were crossing the track, then, five minutes later, Tslil pulled up in what looked to me suspiciously like the middle of nowhere. If Tslil were 40 kilo heavier, and 15 centimetres taller, I would have been a little worried that she had brought me out here to sleep with the rabbits.

As it was, we set off down a gentle slope and soon arrived at a stream, which we had to cross using stepping-stones that, at that time of year, even during a very dry winter, were 8 centimetres under water. Leaving a small herd of cows behind, we were greeted on the other side by a very friendly, large, aging, docile, black dog and then by Marta, the ganenet, and her assistant, and the children. Set above the stream was one refurbished building, and one derelict and roofless shell. This was the forest gan.

Tao showed me round the refurbished building, The one large room at ground level was furnished with an efficient wood stove, a cooker, a kitchen cabinet and work-surface and a mobile signal. Up a flight of ‘these would never get Health and Safety approval’ open stairs was a second large room with a large toy cupboard. I was under strict instructions from Bernice to ascertain whether the cupboard was securely attached to the wall, which it was.

Outside was a flat, grassed mini-meadow, where Marta told us the children had practised their yoga that morning, facing, and being watched by, the faintly bemused cows. On a warm and sunny winter’s day, with the sound of the flowing stream and the placid chewing of the cows as background, the scene was near-idyllic. I suspect it loses some of its charm in a howling gale and driving sleet, but then, which of us doesn’t?

Last week, I am pleased to report, Tao went back to gan very willingly, and thoroughly enjoyed himself. The move back seems to have gone as smoothly as everyone hoped, which, considering the length of the break beforehand, is very positive. Not only is it an opportunity for Tao to have extended exposure to Portuguese, but it is also a chance for him to play and mix regularly with his circle of friends. When your nearest friends are a 15-minute drive away, and others are 30 minutes away, play dates are not quite so straightforward, so the gan, on a regular basis, is a tremendous thing. This first year, Marta is running the gan for two days a week, but she may add another day at some point.

Another regular feature in Tao’s routine is his videos – English in the morning and Portuguese in the afternoon. Some of the English videos are puppet shows – some stop-motion animation, others where adult hands are clearly seen moving the figures. In addition, there are thinly veiled promotional videos, principally for Lego. Tao has not yet, I am delighted to say, realized that his role in this set-up is supposed to be to demand to be bought ever-more-elaborate Lego boxed sets. Rather, and much more healthily, he takes ideas from what he sees to build his own models from Lego or magnetiles and to fuel his own imaginative play.

Shabbat sees a curious phenomenon in the house. Micha’el and Tslil are respectful of our beliefs and feelings, but we have always insisted that, while the house may technically be in our name, it is their home, and we are their guests when we stay. So, on Shabbat, out of respect for us, the kids light no fire (we keep the heaters on all shabbat) and turn on and off no lights, in the ‘public’ rooms, but, in the privacy of their bedroom and their office, the kids are free to continue their normal lives. What this means is that, on Shabbat, Tao knows that he must watch his videos not in the salon but in the bedroom. It suddenly struck me one Shabbat that he is, in a sense, marking Shabbat as a special day in a ‘clandestine’ action that is a curious mirror-image of the behaviour of Portugal’s crypto-Jews.

Finally, for this week, here is Tao, enjoying his new sandbox on the land (rather grand, but not yet quite completed – more of that next week), Raphael, enjoying his reunion with Nana on Purim, and Ollie, relieved to have cut his first tooth not long after we returned home.

In the early hours of Monday morning, we arrived back home from Portugal, safe and sound, exhausted and rather sad, but looking forward to catching up with everyone (and especially, of course, everyone in Zichron (and extra especially, of course, a certain little someone)). However, blog time runs differently from earth time, and my posts for the next few weeks are going to be lingering in Portugal.

Last week, I gave you an account of our trip to Lisbon with the family. It sounded, I hope, like a lot of fun. Today, I thought I would, in the spirit of Rashomon, give you a rather different version.

This one begins online, with me booking the coach tickets. I happened to notice – it wasn’t, to be honest, easy to miss – a firm statement from the coach company that all children were required to sit, throughout the journey, on a child car seat or booster seat. This statement was accompanied by a dire warning that any child not equipped with such a seat would not be allowed to board the coach. When I mentioned this to Micha’el, he assured us he had never seen a child travelling on a child seat on any coach in Portugal, and suggested that we should just ignore the instruction.

Bernice and I pointed out that, since we were driving to Castelo Branco with Ollie’s sal kal (car seat with carrying handle), it would make sense to take that and Tao’s booster seat to the coach station. If Micha’el proved correct, we would be able to leave the seats in the car in Castelo. If the driver insisted on car seats, we would not be caught out.

Which is why we arrived at the coach station laden with two child seats, only to be told by the bus driver that we had to put them in the baggage compartment; we were not allowed, under any circumstances, to bring them on to the bus. Micha’el mustered his considerable reserves of patience when dealing with officious pomposity, and explained that the company’s website explicitly stated that…Our protestations were futile, and after a couple of minutes, I explained to the driver that I was taking the seats back to my car, three minutes away, and asked him to wait for my return before departing. To nobody’s surprise, the driver insisted that he had no intention of deviating from the coach’s scheduled departure time.

However, confident that Micha’el would lie down in front of the coach rather than allow it to leave without me, I took the seats to our car and returned a few minutes later, in plenty of time to board the coach before departure time, or, indeed, to sit for 13 minutes waiting for the coach to leave 11 minutes behind schedule, which it duly did.

The majority opinion was that having to shlep the seats to the hotel in Lisbon, and back to the coach station to catch the return coach to Castelo, would be a real pain, particularly since the return driver was also certain to refuse to allow us to bring the seats onto the coach. However, I must record that Bernice expressed a dissenting opinion, suggesting that, if the return coach driver insisted on the children using child seats, and we had left them in Castelo, we would be in a real mess.

Fast forward two days, to a real mess: our arrival at the coach station for our return journey. If the first driver had proved inflexible, this second one proved particularly unpleasant. I’m not sure what he would have liked to be doing on that evening, but, clearly, driving a coach to Castelo was nowhere near his first choice! He took one look at the boys and asked: ‘Where are their seats? You can’t bring those children on without child seats!’ Fortunately, Micha’el had had time over the previous two days of R and R in Lisbon to replenish his reserves of patience. He calmly explained the story so far, adding that I had written to the coach company suggesting that they coordinate their policy with their drivers. The driver heard him out, but insisted (and, I must say, not unreasonably, albeit rather unpleasantly) that company policy was company policy.

After several rounds of toing and froing, not all of which I was able to follow, the driver, tiring of the debate, said that the children could board without child seats, but that he took no responsibility for that. If the police stopped the coach and inspected it, we would have to pay the fine; the coach company would not be liable. We of course thanked him profusely, boarded quickly, and, to nobody’s great surprise, there was no police raid on the coach and we arrived at Castelo safe and sound after a smooth journey.

There is a very embarrassing postscript to this story. Tao’s booster seat is one that we bought for him in Israel. The kids took it back to Portugal after their trip a few months ago, and used it in the taxi they took home from the airport on that occasion. An hour after we left Penamacor this Sunday to drive to Madrid airport, Bernice suddenly spotted that the booster seat was still on the floor of our car. So now, it has made the return trip from Portugal, and will be in Israel when the kids come again. Fortunately, Tao is still really a bit young for it, and has, in Portugal, his proper, and very heavy and bulky, seat.

Time for another confession.

Blogger’s aside: I find it remarkable that I feel able to tell embarrassing stories about myself in my blog that I would be hesitant to mention in person. Something about the distance both in time and in place between my writing and your reading allows me to be less inhibited than I would otherwise be. There are people who assure me that this exercise in self-humiliation is healthy., but this jury is still out on that.

I mentioned last week that, on our first night in Lisbon, Bernice and I ate at a vegan Indian restaurant a mile or so’s walk from the hotel. I was wearing what serve in Portugal as my shabbat shoes: a pair of ‘formal’ black shoes that have seen better days, but that are fine for our month in Penamacor.

If I’m being perfectly honest, I must say that, over the last couple of visits, the soles of the shoes have started to feel rather thin. However, this did not seem particularly significant, since I only wear them on shabbat and we very rarely leave the house on shabbat, there being no eruv in Penamacor.

After our very enjoyable meal, we strolled back to the hotel. With four hundred yards to go, I suddenly felt my left shoe flop off my foot. Looking down, I saw that there was a hole in the sole, or, rather, that there was a little sole around a huge hole, and, as if that were not bad enough, the upper was so offended at this that it had refused to have anything more to do with the sole, and the two had parted company.

I somehow managed to flop back to the hotel, feeling like Coco the clown. Fortunately, the hotel lobby was empty, and we made it back to the safety of our room with my dignity suffering no further assault. In the morning, I explained what had happened to Micha’el. Since I had brought no other shoes to Lisbon, he kindly lent me his to walk to a nearby Decathlon sports and leisure clothing store after breakfast, where I was thankfully able to buy a pair of remaindered trainers for myself (and a second pair for Bernice, incidentally) for under half their original price.

So even this story had a happy ending, which is only appropriate for Purim. Wishing you all Chag Purim Sameach!

Here we are on our last morning in Penamacor, moments after Ollie gave us a going away present of pulling himself up from a sitting position, using the slats of Bernice’s chair.