This week marked a first for Bernice and myself. We ran a mini Kaytanat Savta. Just how mini I will explain shortly, but first some of you not steeped in Israeli culture may need a word of explanation about Kaytanat Savta. This translates basically as Grandma’s (or, in our case, Nana’s) summer school. To help working parents cope with the two-month summer break from school and kindergarten, a range of summer activities is organised for, mostly younger, children. These range from summer schooling activities held on school premises, through usually day (in other words, not sleepover) summer camps organised by local authorities, youth movements, enterprising teenagers and others, to rotating day activities organised by a group of parents for their children and hosted every day by a different parent.

For some reason, these organised activities all take place in July, and the month of August looms horrifyingly large for many parents. Even if the family have a week’s summer holiday somewhere, and each of the parents takes a second week of leave to stay at home with the children, this still leaves a week or more of loose end.

Enter the grandparents, who will often volunteer, or sometimes be volunteered, to take the grandchild(ren) for half a week or a week. It is into this group that we have just been initiated.

A brief note. Not for nothing, at least in our case, is this called Kaytanat Savta, rather than Kaytanat Savta v’Saba. I fully acknowledge that the partner with the training, qualification and experience in early childhood and nursery education is the one carrying the load here. The rest of us am along for the ride, to a large extent.

Esther, Maayan and Raphael are due to move within Zichron, from their current three-room house into a four-room flat on Thursday this week. Esther is due to start a new job on the same date, and had managed to finish off all of her other work commitments by Monday lunchtime this week. This means that there is just a chance they have enough time to pack up their house, move, and unpack essentials, before the new job/new year at gan/back to work of next Sunday. Our repeated offers to help in any way they wanted were negotiated down to taking Raphael back home with us on Sunday and keeping him overnight.

Raphael is, of course, coming up to two-and-a-half. He has never spent a night away from his parents, although he is used to staying in other people’s houses, and is very familiar with his ‘bed’ at our house (a mattress at the foot of his parents’ bed). When Esther and Maayan first broached the subject of him staying overnight at our house without them, he was very keen. Indeed, every time we see him or speak to him over the last couple of weeks he has wanted to “go to stay at Nana and Grandpa’s house today”.

When we drove up to Zichron on Sunday morning, as soon as we arrived he wanted us to leave with him. Even so, none of us was sure how he would react when we actually abducted him. I don’t know what we were worried about. After an early lunch, and several carefully repeated explanations of exactly which of us were and which of us weren’t going to be going back to Ma’ale Adumim, Raphael was totally undaunted. Even after he had hugged Mummy and Ima goodbye, and, accompanied only by Storm (his octopus) and Tiger (his tiger), been strapped into his seat in our car, he was unperturbed.

On the 100-minute journey back to Ma’ale Adumim, he slept for most of the way. When he woke up, he was his usual animated self, commenting on every lorry, bus, motorbike, emergency vehicle and piece of construction equipment we passed on the way. For the next 28 hours, he was disturbingly undisturbed, not once asking for his parents. As Bernice explained to Esther afterwards, this is a demonstration of the confidence that he has, that they have given him, in them. It is, of course, also a mark of the bond that he has forged with us (but especially with Bernice) over his short life.

We had a fairly flexible brief from Ground Control in Houston/Zichron. We were not required to make any complicated efforts in terms of activities; Raphael is a child who takes delight in life’s simple pleasures. We already knew full well that we needed to make sure the pantry, and especially the fruit bowl, were well-stocked. ‘Children’s coffee’ (which is actually almond milk, but please don’t tell Raphael) had to be strictly limited to two very small glasses at breakfast. And so forth.

On Sunday, we stayed close to home, going to our closest park for some climbing, sliding, swinging and seesawing. Later, we filled the paddling pool and Raphael cooled off and splashed around. The rest of the day was filled with eating, listening to stories, and playing games. Bernice took an exhausted little boy up to bed fairly early, and he slept, undisturbed, from 7:45 until 6:45 the following morning (which meant that I got to say hello/goodbye to him before I went to shul).

After breakfast, we drove to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, where we spent a very hot but very enjoyable two-and-a-half hours. It struck me that if an alien were sent to earth to seek out the most intelligent local species, and if that alien happened to land at the zoo on an August morning, he would never select humans. As we made our way round, it was clear that the animals were far smarter. The monkeys lay back along the boughs of trees, listlessly grooming each other. An elderly chimp sat on a ledge, carefully peeling a mango. The lions broke their langorous reclining only to yawn extravagantly. The bears refused to emerge from their dark house at all. Only the humans raced from enclosure to enclosure, in the ever-hotter August sun,

However, Raphael took everything in, and thoroughly enjoyed himself. He particularly liked the penguins (who, naturally, were fairly animated in their air-conditioned enclosure), but also was taken with the browsing giraffes. In a masterstroke of accidental timing, we arrived at Noah’s Ark (at the very end of the zoo), just as the children’s train arrived, and so we were able to ride back to the entrance in style.

The 25-minute sleep Raphael enjoyed on the drive back to our house meant that he couldn’t manage to drop off for his midday nap at home. So, the afternoon passed with more games and stories, and then it was time for us to take the bus to the Jerusalem railway station, where Esther took over. I hope she wasn’t too offended by the fact that Raphael seemed much more excited at the prospect of going home by train than he was at seeing Esther. When she explained that they would, in fact, be taking two trains, I thought he would burst with anticipatory excitement.

He was slightly disappointed that we wouldn’t be travelling back to Zichron with them, but I reminded him that, when we next came, we would be visiting them in their new home.

I suspect that the first edition of Kaytanat Savta may prove not to be the last. Providing that we always manage to get sufficient time to recover between sessions, that will be absolutely fine with us.

In the introduction to his last book, Morality, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks explains the difference between history and memory.

History is an answer to the question, ‘What happened?’ Memory is an answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’ History is about facts, memory is about identity. History is about something that happened to someone else, not me. Memory is my story, the past that made me who I am, of whose legacy I am the guardian for the sake of generations yet to come. Without memory, there is no identity, and without identity, we are mere dust on the surface of infinity.”

As Rabbi Sacks stresses throughout his writings, Judaism is a religion, and the Jews are a people, whose identity is profoundly shaped by a shared memory. We need only look at the nuts and bolts of the Jewish calendar cycle to see how true this is. The classic example is Pesach, when, at the Seder night at the very start of the festival, we do not simply recall but rather strive to relive the subjective experience of achieving freedom from slavery in Egypt. We are enjoined to see ourselves as if we came out of Egypt on that very evening.

Of course, it is not only Pesach. We erect a temporary dwelling on Sukkot to ‘relive’ the experience of dependence on God’s protection that the Children of Israel enjoyed in the desert. Moses reminds the second generation, about to enter the Promised Land, that God is making his covenant that day not only with them, but with all the as-yet-unborn generations of their descendants. We have a tradition that we were all ‘at Sinai’, as well as a profound sense, reflected in both the liturgy and the philosophy, that each day we receive the Torah anew.

And, to differentiate, as the Hebrew phrase has it, with a thousand differences, every year, on Tisha b’Av, we adopt the customs of mourning, dim the lights in shul, sit on the floor or on low stools, and weep for the destruction of the first and second temples and the twice-visited exile from the Land. Perhaps the most painful part of the day is the recitation of kinot, laments, in shul at the end of the morning service. Over the centuries, laments have been added to mark particularly tragic events in Jewish history, be it the slaughter of rabbis, the path of death and destruction that the Crusaders cut through Jewish Europe on their way to the Holy Land, or the Holocaust.

I must confess that, while I always take part in the recitation of these laments, and am usually one of the ten or so members of the congregation asked to each introduce two or three of the laments, and give a brief background, there are years when my performance of this ritual is just that: the performance of a ritual.

One of the legacies of October 7 is that it stripped away, in a single day, 75 years, since the foundation of the State of Israel (or, if not that, then certainly 56 years, since the Six-Day War of 1967): more than half a century of believing that the helplessness of Jews in the face of antisemitic attacks was a thing of the past. I sat in shul on Tisha b’Av this year and read the graphic descriptions of the unspeakable acts of savagery visited on men, women and children after the city fell. For the first time, I did not have to imagine these scenes. I had seen the video shot by the Hamas savages themselves. The images that came unsummoned were not the jerky black-and-white news footage of the 1940s, but the full colour phone videos of 318 days ago.

For the first time I did not have to imagine those scenes in a past that, even if its most recent manifestation was the Shoah, is still from before my lifetime. Rather, it was my recent memory and, much more powerfully and significantly even than that, it was a still-extant existential threat. October 7 has taken us back to the default position of Jews ever since the fall of the Second Temple, the sense that our life is as precarious as…well, Tevye says it better than I can. I now feel viscerally something of what must have been the day-to-day emotional experience of Jews throughout the two thousand years of exile.

There were, of course, some better periods and some worse periods over those two thousand years. But any Jew who left Spain after 1492 should have known that any Golden Age comes with an expiry date, and, however well things worked out for him in Italy, Holland or England, he was living on borrowed time.

This is the hard lesson that, I fear, Jews in New York and London need to internalise today. As for Jews in Jerusalem, we have, at the very least, to acknowledge that Israel does not, at the time of writing, have all the answers. The filmed horrors of October 7 are deeply harrowing. In a very different way, the uncertainties that Israelis are feeling are equally harrowing.

I am speaking not only of the physical uncertainty of whether, and when, Iran will attack. I am not even speaking only of the tortuous uncertainties of whether any more hostages will be released, alive or dead, and at what terrible price in the release of bloodstained terrorists, and at what terrible price in more future victims of terrorism. I am, rather, speaking of whether it is possible to build an Israel that is physically secure enough to survive the unending enmity that the world directs at us, and that at the same time is morally secure enough to remain worthy of surviving, and to be recognised as such by its amazing population.

Let me be clear. I am not describing Israel as she is today. By any objective measure, the IDF is a moral army fighting a moral war in Gaza. Don’t take my word for it. Read what the High Level Military Group (an association of military leaders and officials from NATO and other democratic countries) says.

However, it is undeniable that one of the prices Israel pays for standing up to Palestinian terrorism is that it becomes increasingly challenging to act morally. At an individual level, and, potentially, at an institutional level, it becomes ever more difficult to resist being dragged down to the level of the enemy you face. If, as may well happen over the next year or two, significant numbers of idealistic young nation builders feel that Israel offers no way forward to a future that can be both secure and moral, and seek their personal future somewhere else (Where, for Heaven’s sake?), then the balance of the fabric of the nation may start to tip.

At the same time, we may be about to see a massive influx to Israel of idealistic and moral Jews who no longer see a future for themselves in the Diaspora. If that happens, then the future may look very different indeed.

As a Danish parliamentarian apparently said in the late 1930s: “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” And yet, our Jewish perspective should perhaps encourage me to be rather more optimistic. It is difficult to see our current position, depressing as it is, as the darkest moment in Jewish history…or even in Jewish history of the last 100 years. From 1944 to 1948, from the heart of the Shoah to the establishment of the State, was, incredibly, only four years. As Ben-Gurion said, “In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.”

I’m still keeping my fate tied with Israel’s. If you knows of a better ‘ole, go to it. And, Iran willing, I’ll see you back here next week.

As I built up to starting to write this week’s post, I felt that I really had to write about the situation. However, I don’t feel I have anything particularly insightful to say that you couldn’t glean from the few media outlets I regularly mention. Nor, indeed, did I feel like adding to a mood of despondency in a week that is already coloured grey by the looming imminence of Tisha b’Av, the fast commemorating the destruction of both Temples and the exile from the Land.

At the same time, when the elephant in the room plants its rump on your lap and sticks its trunk in your morning coffee, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. So, I thought I would explore a mildly interesting and less ponderous aspect of living in Israel in August 2024, and couple that exploration with one or two utterly trivial diversions.

Diversion 1. Bernice and I celebrated our wedding anniversary last week by going into Jerusalem for a meal and ice-cream. First the light rail, then the extremely popular downtown restaurant, then the heart-of-downtown ice-cream parlour were all so much emptier than they should be in early August that we were able to get seats on the light rail, a table at the restaurant, and served at the parlour without having to wait at any point. The almost total absence of foreign tourists was matched by the equal scarcity of out-of-town Israelis; those not wary of leaving the safety(?) of Tel Aviv for the danger(?) of Jerusalem were probably trapped abroad, regretting that they had chosen to fly AbandonAir, rather than reliable El Al. Just saying. I’m not saying I welcome the Iranian threat for enhancing our anniversary experience, but I am saying I’ll take any silver lining I can find.

Living in Israel: Much of the talk around these parts in the last ten days has been about the reaction of the Israeli in the street to the threat of Iranian retaliation for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Ever since Israel did or didn’t eliminate Haniyeh by planting a bomb in his hotel room or firing a rocket from across the street using either a human launcher on a nearby roof or a remote launcher, or by firing a missile either from beyond Iran’s border or from an aircraft flying over Teheran…whatever. Ever since then, Israelis have been watching out for Iran’s promised retaliation, while at the same time observing fellow Israelis’ reactions to the threat of retaliation.

I have to report that the public’s reaction has been more low-key than last time round, in April. The Home Front has advised that we stock up on water and canned goods, ensure that we have a torch, a rechargeable radio and a first-aid kit, and keep a radio on over Shabbat, tuned to a ‘silent station’ that will only broadcast in an emergency. However, on our visit to the supermarket last week, we saw no panic buying of anything. This may be partly because many people keep a permanent emergency supply, which they use and replenish on an ongoing basis. It is certainly true that everyone seems to be taking impending Armageddon in their stride.

We haven’t actually been into our pharmacy to seek advice about a first-aid kit suitable for dealing with the after-effects of a direct hit by a Shahab-3, with its fetching pastel yellow décor and its 750kg payload, but we suspect that our Mister Men elastoplasts and small tube of Polydine might not quite do the job.

However, we have bought a radio: a curious blend of old and new that I find very satisfying. Its colour scheme is evocative of the Swiss Army Knife, and it also has some of the same compact heft and gee-whizz versatility that makes said knife so seductive. Let me take you on a short virtual tour.

The front panel sports a satisfyingly 1960s transistor radio analog tuning dial and display. The top panel offers solar charging panels and the button to activate the side-panel LED light, which has two different strengths: emergency “I’m down here!” and subtle atmospheric background saferoom. Holding down the button also activates a piercing siren and automatic flashing of the lights to produce SOS in morse code. The back panel houses the FM aerial and the handcrank as an alternative method of generating power. The other side panel features a socket for charging the radio from the mains, and a USB outlet for recharging mobile phones.

In short, all it lacks is that most coveted tool on the Swiss Army Knife: a thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves! Personally, I can’t wait for Iran to attack and knock out our power supply.

Diversion 2: Spoiler alert: prepare to have a long-held illusion shattered.

It’s not actually a thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves. The item in question is the right-hand tool of the three that unfold from the right-hand side of the knife: apparently a blade that comes to a point and has a hole in the centre a third of the way down.

Online research reveals that it is not a hoof pick, both because hoof picks are hooked to enable getting under the stone to prise it out, and also because a hoof pick has a rounded, rather than pointed, end, to avoid puncturing the horse’s hoof. Here are two examples.

Some online commentators believe the tool is actually a marlin spike – used for separating rope strands and for other rope-related tasks. However, I am persuaded that it is in fact an awl or punch, a tool for making a hole in leather or canvas. The hole in the awl is for passing thread through if it is being used to carry out a repair on a tent.

You might also call it a punch/reamer. Making a hole where there wasn’t one before is punching it, done with an inserting motion. Opening it up wider, with a twisting motion, is reaming it.

It appears that the only person who actually had a knife with “a little thing for getting stones our of horses’ hooves” was Dorothy L Sayers’ amateur sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey. Everyone else has an awl. (By the way, the radio serialisations of Sayers’ Wimsey novels, starring Ian Carmichael, are highly recommended if you need an escape from today’s insane world. They are doubly evocative of earlier eras: both the era in which the stories are set (upper-class England of the 1930s) and the era in which the radio adaptations were produced (the 1970s and 1980s). You can find an example here – Have His Carcase.

I think that has carried us satisfactorily away to a place of comfort and safety, where the worst thing that happens is a single gruesome murder, so I’ll leave you there for another week.