Sartorial elegance: that’s just one of the many things for which I was not known among my circle of friends growing up. It’s fair to say that, in my teens, I had an under-developed dress sense. Bernice managed to drag me into the 1970s, when I sported a denim suit (from Burton’s, I believe, which rather undermines the image I’m going for here), and a velvet jacket (but not simultaneously). Beyond that, my wardrobe was markedly unnoteworthy. I did buy a brown corduroy cap – at Lake Bala in mid-Wales – which I flattered myself made me look like Tom Paxton. Mind you, since I thought around the same time that I played guitar and sang like Tom Paxton, my judgement was possibly not entirely to be trusted.
However, some fifteen years ago, having largely relied over the preceding 35 years on Bernice’s impeccable judgement in matters concerning my wardrobe, I started buying my own clothes, sometimes even unaccompanied by her. This more or less coincided with my discovery of Zip, a mid-market clothing chain where I could almost always find what I hadn’t realised I was looking for until I walked in and saw it.
Fortunately, Zip opened a store in our local mall, and over the next few years I basically replaced my rather tired wardrobe. The store recently closed, leaving me very relieved that I now have enough teeshirts, collared shirts, polos and sweaters, jeans and what my brother and I are probably the only two remaining men to call slacks, to see me out. However, not long after, it reopened, so if I ever do need to buy clothes again, I shall be alright.
All of which is a prelude to something that happened a couple of weeks ago. We were in Zichron when Bernice received a WhatsApp from a very close friend of ours that her mother-in-law had just passed away. This was a not unexpected event: since her 100th birthday a few months previously, she had grown steadily weaker. The funeral was to be that evening, at 9PM, in Jerusalem.
We decided immediately that we would attend the funeral. However, with the temperature in the high 30s, I had travelled to Zichron in shorts, and I told Bernice that I wasn’t comfortable attending a funeral in shorts. We therefore considered driving home, where I could change into long trousers before we left to go to the funeral. The expected flaw in this plan was confirmed when we checked on Waze: we discovered that, in order to arrive home in time to change and leave home again in time to get to the cemetery at 8:50, we would have to leave Zichron at 5PM.
We also knew that even that might not be early enough. For any journey home around the evening rush hour, Waze tends to start off with an optimistic estimate, which it then adjusts upwards as the journey continues, so that, at some point, you begin to feel like Achilles in Zeno’s paradox: you don’t think you will ever get home.
At this point we decided that, rather than risking being late, we would cut our travel time by over two hours, and drive straight to the cemetery. This meant that we did not need to leave Zichron until 7:20. Esther then brilliantly suggested a solution to my sartorial problem. Esther frequents a wonderful second-hand charity shop in Zichron that offers clothes (and other goods) of excellent quality at ridiculously low prices: adult clothes are 5 shekels an item and children’s clothes are 1 shekel an item. I felt sure I would be able to find something suitable there.
So we all set off for the second-hand store. This proved to be a big tactical mistake on my part, as will become clear. Once there, I discovered that the selection of menswear was severely limited. Of the trousers on offer, only one pair fitted me around the waist. Unfortunately, these were a pair of drainpipe (skintight) jeans. Fortunately, they were in a stretch cotton which made them easy to put on and comfortable to wear, but I was concerned that they might be – how shall I put this – a little young for me. Or even – which sounds even worse – that I was a little old for them.
Esther was kind enough to say – although she confessed that this was not a sentence that she had ever imagined saying to her father – that I had the legs to carry it off. When Bernice also gave her guarded approval, I decided that, given the straits I was in, I was prepared to be in the straights, particularly since, for 5 shekels, I would not feel bad about donating them back to the second-hand shop immediately after they had done their funereal duties.
I was also comforted by the fact that I would be perhaps the most peripheral participant in the funeral, and being concerned about the impression I would make on other people was unhealthily self-centred. Finally, I reminded myself that a 9PM funeral in the main Jerusalem cemetery is conducted in pitch blackness, so nobody would actually be able to see what I was wearing.
Of course, in the time it had taken me to find and try on the jeans, Esther and Bernice had both found multiple items, and we then sorted out some plastic fruits and vegetables for Raphael’s play kitchen. So, in the end, my 5-shekel trousers cost me 40 shekels. In fairness, even that was a bargain.
Our journey to the cemetery was very smooth, and we arrived at exactly the right time. I felt a little self-conscious in my jeans, but, of course, even though some lighting was provided by everyone’s smartphone torch, nobody gave me a second glance. The jeans were very comfortable to wear, and, as I peeled them off at the end of the evening, I even contemplated, for a fleeting moment, holding on to them, and adding them to my permanent wardrobe. On reflection, perhaps not. I certainly ought to get rid of them before any of my grandsons are old enough to laugh at me for wearing them.
I leave you today with a rare treat: a single picture featuring all 5 of our direct descendants. We were in two different countries at the time, but Tao and Micha’el thought it would be nice to call us while we were with Esther and Raphael. As Micha’el pointed out, you need to use your imagination a little, since not one face is full, but I hope you feel it’s worth the effort. Anyway, it is a kind of prelude to the autumn, when, bli neder, Tslil and Micha’el, Tao and Ollie will be coming to Israel for a month, and we will all be physically, and not just virtually, together. Something to look forward to!
Bloggers Note:I wanted to give you all a heads-up. I’ve decided that, for at least the next few weeks, and possibly permanently, I’m going to switch to publishing a post every two weeks, rather than every week. I don’t kid myself that this will mean I have the post ready to publish days before publication date, but at least my Mondays will be stressful only every other week. I realise this probably will make no difference to your life, but I wanted to avoid Bernice having to field a lot of questions next Tuesday about rumours of my demise.
For the benefit of the two or three people who may not know about it, I offer this week the ultimate in binge watching.
When the TV series I am about to recommend to you first came out, viewers were not able to binge watch; they had to wait patiently for the next episode. Normal practice, in these situations, was for the episodes to be screened a week apart. Whether it was Quatermass and the Pit in 1958, The Forsyte Saga in 1967 or Dallas in 1978, that week-long wait was an undeniable part of the enjoyment of the series.
However, in the series I am suggesting to you, you originally had to wait 365 times as long as seven days – a full seven years.
I am referring (as some of you may have guessed) to the Up series. This was originally conceived as a one-off programme – Seven Up! – looking at the individual lives of a number of seven-year-old English children in 1964 and interviewing each of them about their interests, ambitions, hopes and fears. The original director intended a programme about the beauty of childhood, but a researcher and interviewer on the programme, Michael Apted, had a much more aggressive social agenda: he ‘hijacked’ the project to demonstrate how entrenched the class system still was in English society. To quote from the original programme: “Why did we bring these children together? Because we wanted a glimpse of England in the year 2000. The union leader and the business executive of the year 2000 are now seven years old.”
At some point, someone had the brilliant idea of revisiting these children seven years later. Michael Apted was appointed the director… and the rest is history – a history that now spans 56 years and may not yet be finished (although Apted’s death in 2021 may actually mark the demise of the series). We will have to wait until 2026 to see.
If, by some chance, you do not know the series, then you have the ultimate 9-hour binge watch waiting for you. Three warnings. First, the original programme is a product of its time, and features ten boys and only four girls. Once they had started with that mix, the makers had it baked in, and this is a great pity. Having said that, the four girls/women punch way above their weight, in each episode.
Second: each episode, quite reasonably, reprises a lot of archive material from earlier episodes. I say ‘quite reasonably’, because without ‘the story so far’ you would have had to retain a detailed memory of the last episode for a period of seven years. So, if you are binge watching, you may find yourself fast-forwarding quite a bit.
The third warning is that I don’t advise you to follow this link to the Wikipaedia entry on the series. You will find there lots of spoilers which will significantly impact your enjoyment of a story which, in many cases, has all the unpredictability of real life (literally).
All of the above is actually just an aside. I was musing this week on our different experience of our grandsons in Portugal and our grandson in Israel. A month at a time three times a year – the binge watch – as opposed to one episode a week. One effect of the weekly visit to Zichron, in the last couple of months, has been the chance to see, on each visit, Raphael’s progress in language acquisition: both his comprehension and his speaking. Esther speaks to him exclusively in English, and Maayan exclusively in Hebrew, but it is noticeable that his choice of language (in what are still, at the moment, one-word utterances) is marked. In almost all cases, although he understands the word in both languages, he only uses one language for any given concept.
So, for example, ‘bath’ is always in English. Of course, I am tempted to say, ‘bath’ is much easier to pronounce than ‘ambatya’, However, he favours ‘kadur’ over the English equivalent ‘ball’. It doesn’t seem reasonable to claim that ‘kadur’ is easier to pronounce than ‘ball’, so I don’t think that explains his choice. It is possible that Maayan plays more ball with him than Esther. However, it is usually Maayan who baths Raphael, so I suspect it is best to avoid simplistic explanations.
Then, of course, there are the occasions when Raphael gives us a glimpse of his, and almost every other child’s, formidable intelligence, in fashioning his own use of language. So, for example, ‘doovdoov’, which is his word for cherry (properly ‘doovdoovan’), is also his generic word for fruit, despite his knowing very well the words for about a dozen fruits. (This is a child who, left to his own devices, could easily exist exclusively on a diet of fruit, despite thoroughly enjoying all of the wonderful meals his mother and nana cook for him, and also enjoying grandpa’s chopped herring and rye bread.)
An even more striking ‘coining’ is in the world of food preparation, which Raphael is really into. He loves helping Esther make bread, or muffins, and is particularly good at mixing dough or batter. (Tao, by now, is virtually a competent independent cook, since he has been eagerly helping his parents in the kitchen for all of the last three years.) As well as wanting to help in the grown-up kitchen, Raphael also enjoys toy kitchen play. He has his own whisk and is always asking for a ‘bowl’, and also pressing any vaguely concave object into service as a ‘bowl’. A box, a cup from his stacking tower, a plastic mug with a handle, a saucer: all can be a ‘bowl’. If, as they say, all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all you have is a whisk…
Also remarkable, to me, is the way children near the beginning of their language journey discover how to use language not just to comment on, or categorise, the world, but also to make requests. Raphael now understands that he does not have to push away a spoon, or scatter food from his tray onto the floor. ‘Down’ is a more effective way of explaining that he has had enough to eat and would like to carry on playing. It is wonderful to see the civilising effects of language in action.
I find it impossible to remember when Tao was at this stage, despite it being such a relatively short time ago. The differences we hear in his language every time we fly to Portugal are, of course, still very striking. At this stage, this expresses itself in an ever-expanding vocabulary and an increasing complexity of sentence structure. Even though we speak every week, our calls tend to be more of a storytime and puppet show; chatting on a WhatsApp video call does not come all that easily to Tao, or, indeed, to me.
Tao and Olly are exposed to much more English than Hebrew, and Tslil knows that she has her work cut out to ensure that their Hebrew keeps up with their English. Raphael is in the opposite situation (and will be even more so when he starts going to gan every day next year – a situation I suspect he will adapt to more painlessly than his mother). Esther knows that she will have to work equally hard to maintain his English, and I suppose we will just have to resign ourselves to continuing selflessly dragging ourselves up to Zichron every week, just to point out the difference between a cup, a mug, a saucer and a bowl. It’s a miserable job, but someone has to do it.
Meanwhile, everybody is still enjoying the summer!
Blogger’s Note: I apologise to those of my readers who also follow another blog of a mutual friend who has, in recent weeks, been giving a blow-by-blow account of his middle-heavyweight bout with the Israel real estate market. I am not setting up in competition, but this week’s topic reflects how certain issues seem to be dominating my waking life at the moment.
It is now over two months since I casually dropped into the conversation that Bernice and I had taken the decision to move to Zichron Yaakov to be close to Esther and family, and one or two of you have been tentatively inquiring how our plans are going. So I thought this week I would bring you up to date.
There are two ways of doing this. The first is a one-sentence summary, which is, as it happens, fairly easy.
No progress has been made.
The second is rather more fraught, and complex, and, I hope, interesting, and will bring me closer to my magic 1500-word target, so why don’t I throw that in as a freebie?
Moving is, like everything in life, a process. It involves two distinct sub-processes: selling and buying. Or should that be buying and selling? Or perhaps we should be aiming for buyselling as a complex process that occupies a single moment in time.
We moved to our current home in Maale Adumim in the autumn of 1996, which the calendar tells me will imminently be 28 years ago. The fact that, for Bernice and myself, it seems like the day before yesterday apparently counts for nothing. However, the fact that it is so long ago means that I can no longer actually remember the emotions I assume I experienced throughout what is commonly described as a domestic experience more traumatic than any other except divorce. What I find myself asking every day is: Supposing we find the home we are looking for? How can we commit to buying before we have signed a contract to sell our home? At the same time, how can we accept an offer for our home before we have found our next home? It all seems very daunting.
As the spoiler a couple of paragraphs back already hinted, we are managing to live with this conundrum by, as of yet, failing to find either a prospective buyer or a prospective new home. Bernice and I have a couple of theories as to why this is.
Regarding our own home, the price we are asking reflects to some extent, and quite legitimately, the money we have invested in our three renovations over the years. As far as we are concerned, we have now brought the house to the point where we feel we have done everything that we need and want to do. However, Bernice’s theory, which seems to be backed up by what we see whenever a new family moves into a house in the area, is that Israelis don’t care what state a home is in, when they buy it they want, they need, to stamp their personality on it immediately: in other words, to gut it.
So, we have had viewers come in and discuss moving the front door a metre and half to one side (thereby gaining nothing, as far as I can see). Our estate agent (realtor) points out to prospective buyers that they can easily turn our snug (the extension back room that leads into the backyard) into a master bedroom and the adjacent utility room into an ensuite bathroom. So far, Bernice and I have resisted the temptation to scream: “But then, access to the backyard will be through the master bedroom! Unless you plan to knock an exit through the kitchen wall, and lose all of the impact of the design of the kitchen!”
In addition, Bernice is convinced that most viewers want a completely open-plan kitchen, dining and living area, whereas there is, chez nous, a load-bearing wall that partly divides the area in two.
Whatever the reason, we haven’t yet been made an offer that we can accept. However, as I (the Polyanna in this particular married situation) keep pointing out, selling a house is not a gradual process, where you make incremental gains that eventually reach a critical mass and topple into a sale. It is, rather, a light-switch situation: 19 people see the house and nobody makes an offer, then one day a couple walk in and half an hour later you have a buyer.
Which brings us to the other end of this tango for two. Until two months ago, Bernice and I had a home-buying record of which we were fiercely proud. When we got engaged, in 1971, we originally planned to live in London, where I was at college and Bernice was working. A few weeks’ research revealed that we could just about afford half a derelict house in the rundown area where my college was situated. We couldn’t actually bring ourselves to view any of these slum houses.
During this period, we spent a weekend visiting a friend in South Wales, where Bernice had spent her childhood. Out of curiosity, we looked in estate agents’ windows, and discovered that in the market town she had grown up in, we could afford to buy a semi-detached bungalow on a brand-new estate. The following weekend we travelled down again, saw three properties, and bought one.
I don’t want to ruin anyone’s day, especially anyone who is just starting out and trying to get on the property ladder, but that two-bedroom bungalow cost us ₤5800, which was the equivalent of just under ₤96,000 (NLS 470,000) today. Just to twist the knife in the wound: we were able to secure a mortgage for over 90% of the value, and were required to pay a deposit of only ₤500, about ₤8,260 or NLS 40,300 today.
Seven years later, on a whim, we saw two large houses in villages up the valley from our home, and bought one of them. This was not a sound economic move, but we spent seven happy years there before deciding to come on aliya.
After 15 months on an absorption centre in Gilo, we felt ready to buy a flat in Jerusalem., Friends from the absorption centre had recently bought in East Talpiot, and when the flat across the hall from them went on the market, they told us about it. We viewed it the same day, and bought it.
Nine years later, when we felt Esther and Micha’el really deserved separate bedrooms, and 55 square metres wasn’t enough for four people and a dog, even a small one, we started looking around Jerusalem. We didn’t actually view any properties, because we could tell from the advertisements that, within our price-range, no reasonable-sized flat was in an area we would consider living in, and no flat in an area that we would consider living in was significantly larger than our existing home.
At this time, Bernice went to a house-warming for friends who had just moved from East Talpiot to Maale Adumim. I didn’t accompany her, because I was in mourning for my late father. She came home and could not stop enthusing about the house our friends had bought…and the price they had bought for. Shortly afterwards, we viewed two houses, and bought one of them.
So, our record, until a couple of months ago, was: Viewed: 8. Bought: 4.
The last two months have, sadly, destroyed that outstanding record. We have to date viewed 9 properties, and we are not going to buy any of them. It was only yesterday that I realised why this is so. Until now, every move we have made has been to a bigger, better property. That has made us much easier to please. In addition, we have never, previously, had any pre-conditions, other than wanting to upgrade. We were not really tied in terms of location or specific requirements.
This time, we are being considerably more fussy. We want to be in Zichron Yaakov, and, ideally, within walking distance of Esther and Maayan’s new flat, which they are due to move into on 1 September. We also want to be within walking distance of an Ashkenazi shul that we will be looking to to provide us with a ready-made community (as happened so handsomely both in East Talpiot and Maale Adumim).
We also require to be no more than two floors above (or indeed, below) street level, or, alternatively, to be in a building with a shabbat lift. Zichron, we have discovered, is not packed with buildings with shabbat lifts.
We also require either a garden apartment or an apartment with a sukkah balcony. (I have been astonished to discover that there are estate agents in Israel who are not sufficiently versed in the laws of sukkah to understand what actually constitutes a sukkah balcony.)
We spent a week flirting with a 14th-floor mini-penthouse in Pardes Hanna. The 1-metre strip of the long balcony nearest the railing was not under the balcony of the penthouse on the floor above, and so we would have been able to set a long table and seat all the guests on one side, with everyone being in a kosher sukkah. However, the effect would have been less Sukkot, and more Seder night (as in da Vinci’s The Last Supper), which we eventually decided against. This was, I must say, to the great relief of almost everyone we spoke to – including family, and friends who lived for decades in Pardes Hanna – who were all convinced that we would not be able to make friends there. Indeed, just about the only person who thought the location and flat were ideal for us was the Pardes Hanna estate agent.
We are by no means certain that our family and friends are right, and we also have no unrealistic expectations of being able, at this stage in our life, to make friends anywhere as close as the friends we have in Maale Adumim. (This, of course, applies primarily to Bernice, who is the partner in this marriage principally responsible for HR. I handle things like working out whether Micha’el’s wardrobes will fit in the third bedroom, and largely leave people to her. This arrangement works for us.)
I don’t want you to think that viewing these nine properties has been a waste of time. We have a number of valuable takeaways. First is a much better understanding of the internal geography and neighbourhood variations within Zichron. This is particularly true since, these days, with Israel’s security agencies jamming GPS, Waze is liable to tell us at any moment that we are in downtown Beirut.
In addition, every place that we see that is not right makes it clearer to us what our requirements, and our priorities within those requirements, are.
Finally, if we hadn’t viewed properties this week, I wouldn’t have spotted, in one of the flats, the following box, packed ready for moving. Just one month exactly after the 30th anniversary of the release of Forrest Gump, I couldn’t not include it here.
Somewhere out there, I am sure, is an almond praline of an apartment with our name on it. Perhaps we will, at some point, bite into it, and spend happy years in Zichron with the family, liberally sprinkled with month-long excursions to the other family in Portugal. Perhaps we won’t, and we’ll continue to enjoy the home and the friends that have, by now, had all the rough edges rubbed off them, and we will make do with a weekly trip to Zichron and still have Penamacor. We happen to believe this qualifies as a win-win situation, and we really do know just how lucky we are.
In my first year at teacher training college, in a piece of cutting-edge technology, one of our literature lecturers arranged the filming of a panel discussion of a poem, the panel consisting of three students. When we viewed and analysed the discussion afterwards, several of my fellow-students told me that I was a natural in front of the camera and should consider a career in television. I knew then that I lacked the particular kind of fluency, of quickness of response, that the camera loves, and so I begged to differ.
When, several years later, the GPO (General Post Office) was searching for a new voice for its speaking clock, the headmistress of the school where Bernice worked was convinced that I would be perfect for the job. While this certainly avoided the problem of constant spontaneity, I found the thought of spending twenty-four hours a day standing in front of a microphone, saying: ‘At the third stroke, it will be eight, forty-two, and thirty seconds’, and so on, less than appealing. (Yes, I know that’s not how they really do it!) So, in the end, it was Brian Cobby who took over in 1985. Incidentally, for those of you from Britain, and of a certain age (ten years younger than me), Brian Cobby had, in a previous life, been the voice that announced: ‘5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1… Thunderbirds are go!’
Incidentally, if you have spent the last minute or two wondering why the Post Office, of all institutions, should want a speaking clock, let me enlighten you. Before the beginning of the railway age in Britain, many towns still operated on local time. A village would set its clocks and watches by, usually, the church clock. Because of the limited accuracy of most mechanical clocks, over the years all of these local times started drifting apart. When it was midday in London it might have been only 11:49 a.m. in Bristol.
The introduction of rail travel, and of timetables, made it essential for everywhere to be operated on a standardised Greenwich Mean Time. To ensure this standardisation, when the mail train arrived and the villagers gathered around the postman to get the news from London, he would announce what the time was according to his timepiece, which had been set in London. This custom is thought to be where the phrase ‘passing the time of day’ originated.
(If you want to have a look at the various generations of technology used for the speaking clock in Britain (‘Just dial T-I-M!’), check it out here.)
Probably because I lack the inventive spontaneity needed for the job, I have great admiration for those who can carry off the job of TV presenter successfully…and even more, I think, the job of radio presenter, where no body language or facial expressions can fill the gaps; radio presenters have only their voices to rely on. I often listen to interview and discussion programmes on Israel’s Reshet Bet, and have found myself, in recent months, reflecting on the contrasting styles and talents of the various presenters.
For me, one of the pleasures of the best of these programmes is that they demonstrate that, even in an Israel that is very conflicted and divided internally, it is still possible for two people to argue and disagree in a civilised way, and to remain respectful of each other. I first heard this in action on a weekly program of the early 2000s, called ‘על ימין ועל שמאל‘, ‘On the Right and the Left’, in which two national figures sat down to discuss current affairs. The figures were: on my right (on almost everyone’s right) Geula Cohen and on my left (on many people’s left) Eli Amir.
Geula Cohen had been a member of Etzel (a mainly revisionist breakaway from the mainstream pre-State underground defence force Hagana, Etzel followed a stronger line of response to Arab terror) and Lechi (which acted principally against the British Mandate forces). Cohen was Lechi’s underground radio broadcaster. After the establishment of the State, she became a politician, eventually cofounding the right-wing political party Techiya in 1979, in opposition to Camp David. She supported Jewish settlement of all parts of Eretz Yisrael, and herself briefly moved to Kiryat Arba, which is about as deep in cowboy country as you can get. She was in later life a recipient of the Israel Prize.
Eli Amir is an author and social activist. Having served as Advisor on Arab Affairs to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, he was later appointed Director General of the Youth and Aliya Department of the Jewish Agency. He repeatedly met with literary and other figures in the Arab world and advocated for co-existence, campaigning for more Israeli books to be published in the Arab world, and asking: ‘How can there be peace without us knowing each other?’
Each week, these two, whose world views and the arcs of whose lives were so different, sat in a radio studio and discussed the events of the preceding week. They never, to the best of my memory, found any significant island of agreement between them, but they always listened to each other respectfully, responded to each other’s points seriously, and parted, every week, as adversaries who recognized the right of each to disagree with the other, and who also each recognised that the other cared deeply about the country they both loved.
Something of the same spirit lives on, with, it must be said, a little less gravitas (but then we live in a very different age from the early 2000s, and certainly from the 1930s and 40s, Geula Cohen’s formative years, and even the 1950s and 60s, Eli Amir’s formative years). Currently on Reshet Bet, on Friday mornings, Emily Amrousi and Professor Yuval Elbashan jointly present a programme (‘Emily and the Professor’), in which they both discuss the week’s events and interview people in the news.
‘Emily’, a children’s author, journalist, and ex-spokesperson of the Yehuda and Shomron Council, lived for many years in Talmon, a yishuv close to Ramallah, and now lives in Jerusalem. In her childhood, her family became religious, and she grew up in a modern-orthodox, Bnei Akiva atmosphere. ‘The Professor’ is indeed a professor, of Law, and has been closely involved for 25 years with a non-profit organization advocating community and social rights for the weaker sectors in Israeli society.
Again, as with Geula Cohen and Eli Amir, Amrousi and Elbashan are (almost always) respectful of each other’s arguments, although it has to be said that the events of this year so far have put that tolerance to the test on more than one occasion. They are clearly friends, not only in the studio, and they welcome the opportunity to debate real issues in a civilized manner.
When I listen to programmes such as these, I find myself able to sustain some hope that Israeli society may be able to heal the fractures that threaten us.
This hope is nurtured in other ways as well. On Friday mornings, Omer Ben-Rubi presents a programme looking at the cultural news of the week. Ben-Rubi is not only a presenter; he is also an experienced administrator. He served as the founding manager of Reshet Bet, having previously run Galei Tzahal, the army radio station.
His culture programme is, I suspect, a uniquely Israeli phenomenon. In his introduction every week, he always gives the Hebrew calendar date, and mentions the Bible portion of the week. Last week, an unusual item could be found nestling between the segment where he invites three other observers of culture to give their recommendations for events of the forthcoming week (among them Barbie) and his playing of a recent pop release. On the day before the Shabbat when we begin reading the Book of Devarim (Deutoronomy), with Moses’ farewell speech to the nation, Ben-Rubi interviewed Micah Goodman, Israeli philosopher and a leading voice on Judaism, Zionism, the Bible, and the challenges and opportunities facing Israel and world Jewry. The subject of the interview was the message of that speech for our time, and what it teaches us about Moses as a political leader.
What is remarkable is not only that Ben-Rubi chose to include this item, but also that he gave no indication that he regarded it as anything other than a perfectly normal choice for a popular culture programme on a general public radio station in Israel.
Unfortunately, not every presenter on Reshet Bet has the same sensitivity, understanding, or knowledge. There is one particular presenter whose programme I am going to have to stop listening to, because she always makes my blood boil, and I end up shouting at the radio.
Rina Matzliach is, so I understand, a serious Israeli journalist, and presented ‘Meet the Press’ for 10 years. She has lived in Israel for over 65 years, since she was a year old. She has a BA in Israeli Literature and a Masters in Communications. She has been a broadcast journalist for 40 years. And yet…and yet.
In the last century, John Cleese made a series of management training videos which worked by demonstrating how not to do it. They are still very funny to watch, not least because they star John Cleese as the incompetent manager (in the days before he started taking himself too seriously). Every time I listen to Rina Matzliach, I find myself hoping that schools of radio journalism are recording her, so that lecturers can demonstrate to their students how not to do it.
Let me give a brief list of some of her most flagrant errors. When interviewing a guest, she constantly interrupts the guest’s answer to her last question, and frequently interrupts her co-presenter’s question with another question of her own. When interviewing a guest she knows personally, she always makes more than one personal reference, always of no relevance to the topic on which the interviewee has been invited to be interviewed. She appears never to filter her thoughts before expressing them out loud.
A couple of weeks ago, for example, she interviewed an Israeli who, with his wife, had been trapped by floods in a remote part of Nepal. They had walked a considerable distance to an area from where they were able to arrange transport back to civilization. This was so that they could return to their young children in Israel. They had, however, been forced to leave all but their essential possessions behind. He was on air to assure the listening public that the dozens of (mostly post-army) Israelis who were also trapped in the same area were well, had food and drink, and were in no danger. This must have been a tremendous comfort for parents who had lost contact with their children trapped in an area without mobile reception. Matzliach wasted a minute or two of this important interview ‘joking’ that, in their place, she would have stayed out of contact and enjoyed a longer holiday away from her children.
Matzliach frequently appears to forget that there is a radio audience of at least tens of thousands listening, and behaves as if she is at home alone. So, for example, she always sings along with the record chosen to break up the programme, despite her having, at best, a mediocre singing voice. To give another example, in a recent interview with someone she knew personally, she urged her co-presenter, on air, to ask the interviewee to send him a complimentary copy of the interviewee’s recent book (a book on a topic irrelevant to the interview).
However, what amazed me two weeks ago, was that, when her co-presenter, who is religious, mentioned that he would not be in the studio last Thursday because it was Tisha b’Av, she said: ‘Oh! Isn’t Tisha b’Av always in August?’ Maybe it is me that is being unreasonable, but it seems to me that an educated woman, with a BA in Israeli Literature, who has lived in Israel for over 60 years, should know that the Jewish religious calendar is not the same as the Gregorian solar calendar, that it includes leap-years in which an entire month is added, and that, in consequence, the timing of festivals and fast-days can vary from year to year by as much as 30 days, according to the Gregorian calendar. How can she not have noticed that Rosh Hashana is sometimes in early September and other times in early October?
It is difficult for me to escape the feeling that it is not that she does not know so much as that she has gone out of her way not to know, because she has convinced herself that there is nothing in the entirety of the Jewish religion that is worthy of her attention. She certainly makes a point of displaying her contempt for religion at every opportunity.
On the other hand, I find it very moving that this year a number of people who have never observed Tisha b’Av, and who, indeed, do not identify as religious, feel the threat of the country splitting apart is so strong that they decided to fast last Thursday.
Well, thank you for letting me get that off my chest.
All the kids and grandkids are back from their hols, but I can squeeze another week’s worth of pictures out of it. For Raphael, Storm the octopus seems to have overtaken Tiger as his constant companion, Ollie clearly loves his dad, and Tao has just been not-very-white-water rafting, taking all due precautions.
