Blogger’s Note: It may well be that, some weeks, when you start reading my post, you find yourself wondering just where it’s leading. It may or may not surprise you to know that the experience of writing it is often the same. What could easily be mistaken for a lazy lack of planning is, in fact, an attempt to achieve an easy flow of spontaneity.

The downside of this is that sometimes, when I discover where the post has led me, I’m not that enamoured of the final destination, and then I have to retrace my steps and choose the road more taken instead. This week, I was quite surprised to see where I ended up, and really couldn’t decide whether to stick with it, or start again. While I know at least several of my readers will find little, if anything, here to interest them, with apologies to them, and after reflection, I feel I want to stand behind where this week’s musings led me.

In the Jewish calendar, in a normal year, these few days are very unusual. If we are fortunate, the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, have led us on a spiritual journey up to the peak of reaffirming acceptance of Hashem as both King and God at the very end of Yom Kippur, in what we truly believe may be and hope is indeed as close to a state of being unencumbered by our sins as we can ever aspire to. Immediately, a whole slew of mitzvot crowd in on us. While the sound of the shofar’s final long single note, the Tekia Gdola, still reverberates, we recite arvit, the evening prayer, then hear Havdala, the ceremony marking the transition from Shabbat to weekday, then move outside shul to recite Kiddush Levana, the blessing on the New Moon. The next days are filled with erecting and decorating the sukkah, acquiring the arba minim, the lulav and etrog and cooking and learning for chag.

All of this is true this year, and yet, in this most unusual year, these few days seem even more unusual than normal. It began, for me, with the prayers of the Yamim Noraim, which seemed to have an additional resonance, reflecting the particular sensibility that I brought to them this year. To give just one example: how can I have failed to notice, until this year, that the first block of specific appeals to ‘Our Father, Our King’ in Avinu Malkeinu, after the general introductory group, are appeals to remove all of the external threats to our wellbeing, including the nefarious plans of our enemies. This is a timely reminder that only someone who has been removed from immediate physical danger has the clarity of mind to reflect on their sins. The war creates its own priorities. When the siren sounds, you first find shelter and only then continue your prayer.

More immediately striking is the fact that the looming sense of Sukkot approaching has an additional and antithetical layer to it this year. October 7 fell, this year, on the fifth of the ten Days of Penitence, at the very heart of the Days of Awe. Even more significantly, as we look forward to Sukkot, we see, immediately following it, Simchat Torah, and the first yahrzeit of the victims of the pogrom.

Nobody can say what Simchat Torah will feel like in our shuls this year. Being asked to rejoice in the Torah on this most bitter of yahrzeits, one for which none of us can feel ready, is both the least imaginable and the most Jewish of asks. How will we, how can we possibly, be overwhelmed with joy at the gift of Torah Hashem bestowed on us, when all we see, every day, is the horrifying price tag attached to that gift? How can we rejoice in our privileged position as those who accept the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven at the same time as we are asking God every day how long He will continue to hide His face from us, and how He can bear to allow to be visited on us what has been visited on us as a nation over this last year?

And yet…and yet. What choice do we really have? October 7 was the worst day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Usually, when we hear that sentence, the speaker’s intention is that we should feel how exceptional October 7 was. However, let us keep a sense of perspective. The Holocaust ended less than 80 years ago. If we measure Jewish history from the Brit ben Habetarim – the Covenant of the Pieces – that God made with Abraham, and if we imagine Jewish history from then until now as a single 24-hour day, then the Holocaust ended at about 23:30, just half-an-hour ago.

What this tells us is that October 7 was not all that exceptional. Our liturgy reminds us, in so many places, that throughout our history we have suffered atrocious pogroms and unspeakable acts of hate-filled violence, sometimes carried out in uncontrollable anger, sometimes in fiendish glee, and sometimes in cold-blooded calm. As we read on Seder night, “in every generation they rise up against us to destroy us”.

Today (Monday, as I write this) is an especially difficult day. We learnt last night and this morning the details of the direct hit on an army training base dining room during the evening meal, killing four 19-year-old soldiers – whose given names were Yosef, Yoav, Omri and Amichai – and injuring 58 others. In addition to the pain of those losses and that suffering, this attack has raised a slew of worrying questions. Did the drone release a missile immediately before it crashed? How is it that the drone was, apparently, originally identified and tracked, and then lost to radar? Were the timing and the precise location of the hit cruel misfortune or precise design and GPS navigation? Is this a one-off event, or does it mark an escalation of Hizbollah weaponry for which we have no definitive answer?

Any euphoria we allowed ourselves to feel over our multiple intelligence and tactical victories over the last weeks in Lebanon now begins to look as though it may melt into hubris.

It increasingly seems that any talk of achieving an absolute victory, in the North or the South, is unrealistic. The ‘Never Again’ that we lived with for most of the last 80 years seems to have proved to be an illusion. This was always a slogan that faced both ways. The world would never allow another genocidal attempt, and the Jews would never submit to another genocidal attempt. The last year has arguably made it clear that in neither of those two ways is the slogan necessarily true. Looking outwards, we see a world in which antisemitism continues to flourish. Looking inwards, we see that our survival is fragile, and that it does not lie within our power to change reality sufficiently to create a climate of peace.

At the end of the day, everything is in God’s hands. The very fragility of our survival emphasizes our dependence on God. Our acknowledgement of that dependence is our acceptance of His dominion, and our rejoicing on Simchat Torah will reflect that acceptance. When you buy a season ticket for the rollercoaster, you know that you are going to be facing ups and downs. On the rollercoaster there can be no ups without the downs. The very fact of your buying the ticket affirms that you accept the downs as well as the ups.

No. On reflection, not ‘accept’, but ‘embrace’. You embrace the downs as well as the ups. If you believe that everything is in God’s hands, then you have to strive to find the meaning, the potential, that is in everything, however hard it may be to see. Victor Frankl striving to help his fellow prisoners find a sense of purpose in Auschwitz; Golda Meir emerging from the cellar in which her father hid the family as the Cossacks raped and pillaged; emerging determined not to be that frightened little girl any longer. The thousands liberated from the camps who then married and built themselves new lives, new families, that could never replace those they had lost, but that gave them a life infused with a previously unimaginable richness and sweetness. The thousands of individual acts of bravery, self-sacrifice and public service that flashed brilliant on October 7 and every day since.

Human life, Jewish life, is made up of dark and light. Without shadow, there is no brilliant sunshine. We strive to keep the shadow away as much as possible, but when it sweeps over us, we must face it, and inhabit it, and strive to grow from it.

Wishing you all a Chag Sameach, despite, and in defiance of, our existential crisis.

I am writing this post on October 7, 2024, the first anniversary of Hamas’ pogrom. In the world as a whole, and, within that, in the Jewish world, and, within that, in the State of Israel, we are all very familiar and very comfortable with the marking of anniversaries and commemorative days. This anniversary, however, is like no other I have ever experienced.

First, it started on Saturday. Shabbat marked Day 365 of October 7, and everywhere this was being spoken of as “marking the year”. Of course, 2024 is a leap year, and so, technically, the first year was completed yesterday, on Sunday, and not on Saturday. However, we normally mark anniversaries on the same date as the event, and so it is today that is being marked nationally, in official and unofficial ceremonies, in the streets and the cultural centres and in the media, as the first anniversary.

This marking of Day 365 that completes a simple year, and of Day 366 that completes the leap year, and of Day 367 as the anniversary of the date, is not something that we do in other circumstances. It has happened here, this week, I believe, because every single day since October 7 2023 is another day that 97 children, women and men abductees have been surviving in sub-human conditions in Gaza; another day that their wives, husbands, children, parents, siblings, grandparents, grandchildren, wider family and friends have suffered the constant pain of not knowing where they are, what state of physical health and state of mind they are in. It also marks another day for the four hostages who have been held in Gaza far longer. Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul, two soldiers who crossed into Gaza in 2014; Hisham al-Sayed and Avera Mengistu, who crossed into Gaza separately in 2015: all are still held captive in Gaza, bringing the number of hostages to 101.

The hostages, their loved ones, and, to a lesser but not negligible extent, the nation, are all marking not a year, as a single block, but a year of days, on each of which we wake to the renewed realisation that our captives are not yet redeemed. Every single day brings its unique burden. Every day, every single day, the mainstream media bring us interviews with more bereaved families and families of hostages.

This is another feature of this year. We are not marking the anniversary of an event whose magnitude, whose nature, whose multi-facetedness we understood in real time. We are marking the 367^th day of an event whose details are still being uncovered.

This morning, the Hostages and Missing Families Forum announced that Idan Shtivi, 28, had died at the Nova festival and his body had been abducted to Gaza, where he is still held. “On October 7, Idan arrived at the Nova Festival in the early morning to document his friends’ performances and workshops,” the forum said. The IDF spokesman later referred to the announcement, and stated that the decision to determine his death was based on intelligence information and was approved by an expert committee of the Ministry of Health in cooperation with the Ministry of Religious Affairs and the Israel Police. This is the reality of a year ago that is still being painstakingly, and paingivingly, unearthed.

And of course, Idan, like every single one of the 101 hostages, alive and dead, is an entire world. Some worlds are more dramatic than others, some more prosaic; but each of them is an entire authentic world to those who inhabit it with the hostage. Here is the Instagram entry of Idan:

“Idan Shtivi is a loved child, a family man, a loving partner to Stav, and a loved son to Dalit and Eli. Idan is a true gentleman, a genuine and generous soul, always putting others before himself and caring for everybody’s best interests. Idan was about to start an exciting new chapter in his life: moving in with Stav. The couple even adopted a dog together. “We talked about how our home would look, and in the end, I entered the apartment alone and hoped every day that he would return to me.”

Here is the poetry and nobility of what we call an ordinary life, lived with integrity.

In addition, of course, we are not marking the anniversary of an event that was completed in the past. The war of which the pogrom was the opening salvo continues today, on multiple fronts, and every day of the 367 has brought its own stories both of bravery and of suffering and loss.

This morning, the death was announced, in battle in southern Lebanon, of IDF Staff Sergeant Major Etay Azulay, aged 25. This raises the total number of Israeli soldiers killed on or since October 7 of last year to 727. If, on average, two of your nation’s fighters are falling every day, then you count the passage of time in days, and not in years.

As I write, I know no details of Etay’s life, other than the fact that he was 25 when he fell, and that, judging from his picture in uniform, he had a warm, infectious, and slightly mischievous smile. May his memory, may all their memories, be for a blessing.

One of the many women widowed by this war, speaking on the radio this morning, drew attention to another sense in which this anniversary does not mark something completed in the past. Ordinarily, she explained, when a person suffers bereavement, 90% of their life continues as normal.

In her case, a year ago, on October 7, when she lost her husband, she also lost so much more. She lost her home on the kibbutz, destroyed by Hamas. She lost the kibbutz as a place to live, since it was uninhabitable, and she and her children were compelled to move from a pastoral, small-community life to an anonymous apartment in a big city, a way of life unlike anything she had ever known. Her children all had to switch from attending a small school with the children who had been their neighbours and closest friends all their lives, to attending a large school where they knew nobody. She lost her job and was unable to find work. When she suffered bereavement, her entire life was completely uprooted in a moment. A year later, a year of 367 days later, she still has no roots.

The survivors of October 7 live every day with their trauma. Every day that the war continues, the emotional burden on our fighters grows heavier. Every day that the hostages are not returned, each one of them grows inexorably weaker and closer to death, and so, in a different way, do their loved ones. Every day that the nation does not grow together, it grows further apart. Each one of these 367 days has made the path back to a normal life that much longer and more choked with weeds.

My prayer, today, is that we may be able to commemorate the second anniversary of October 7 in a single ceremony, united as a nation, looking back on a cataclysmic past event. Until then, we are compelled to continue to observe that today is Day 367 of October 7, and tomorrow will be Day 368.

There must be something about this time of year that affects me strangely. Looking back, I see that at the end of October, almost three years ago, I offered you a pot-pourri post entitled A Healthy Portion of Salmagundi. 51 weeks later, I proferred A Modest Helping of Gallimaufry. 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 an olla podrida.

In the 16th century, while Middle-French speaking cooks were cooking up a gallimaufry, which is a meat stew, a hash of various kinds of meat, Bartolomeo Scappi, the cook of Pope Pius V, was preparing a Spanish stew, usually made with chickpeas or beans, assorted meats like pork, beef, bacon, partridge, chicken, ham, and sausage, and vegetables such as carrots, leeks, cabbage, potatoes, and onions. The recipe can be found in Scappi’s Opera dell’arte del cucinare (A Work on the Art of Cooking), published in 1570. This week’s dish is called olla podrida. The literal translation of this is apparently “rotten pot”, but podrida is probably a version of the original word poderida, so it could be translated as “powerful pot”. What this post threatens to be is a similar collection of a number of stray thoughts that, after a strange last couple of days, 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. I leave it to you to decide whether the result is rotten, or powerful. I know that I can expect from at least some readers rather less obsequiousness than the curate displayed, and a good job too, on balance.

Well, there we are. Over 300 words already (of which about 100 are copy-pasted from the post two years ago) and I still haven’t said anything. So, let’s get to it.

I’m planning to avoid talking about current affairs as far as possible, but I hope you will allow me two observations. The first is that many of the Hassan Nasrallah obituaries offered in the mainstream media beggar belief. For the Washington Post, Nasrallah was “a moral compass” (always pointing due South, presumably) and “father figure”. (Not everybody, clearly, had an idyllic childhood). The New York Times noted that he “created a state within a state that provided social services”, without drawing attention to the extent to which he was personally responsible for creating the conditions within Lebanon that made such provision necessary.

My second observation concerns another terrorist, killed in another airstrike in Lebanon on Monday. This was Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, the co-ordinator of Hamas activities in Lebanon. He was also, according to Arab media reports, the principal of the UNRWA-run Deir Yassin Secondary School in El-Buss, and, additionally, head of the UNRWA teachers’ union in Lebanon, overseeing 39,000 students in 65 schools.

You may think that UNRWA could be accused of turning a blind eye to a potential conflict of interests here. However, UN Watch highlighted early in the year his involvement with UNRWA. According to UNRWA, Abu el-Amin was suspended without pay in March for three months for violating regulations and was investigated over his political activities. I infer from this that in June he was reinstated. For my money, UNRWA ignoring the facts that UN Watch highlighted early in the year would have been less outrageous than them suspending and then reinstating him.

On Sunday morning, Bernice had to abandon the first two assaults of her planned military campaign to conquer the preparations for the Rosh Hashana-Shabbat three-day festival of eating that awaits us starting Wednesday night, in order to, first, drive me to the doctor’s surgery, then pick me up and go to the pharmacy to pick up the prescribed meds. The doctor suspected gout (as my friend and gout-sufferer had diagnosed on Shabbat), but was also not prepared to rule out an infection. After consultation with the Health Fund’s chief pharmacologist over potential contra-indications, the doctor contacted me later in the day with a different pain-killer prescription, and Bernice had to make yet another expedition to the pharmacy. In addition, of course, I was completely helpless when it came to setting up or clearing away from meals, and so everything fell on Bernice. She always says she has no patience with patients, but you probably believe her no more than I do.

By this morning, the excruciating pain had diminished to a very dull ache, so I was able to drive myself to the surgery for a bank of blood tests. By this afternoon, the results were in, and, in a brief WhatsApp exchange, the doctor was able to confirm our analysis that it is, apparently, gout and an infection. (As I wrote to him: “That’s how we read it, but it’s very good to have it confirmed by someone who knows what they’re talking about.”) All of the prescribed medication is working its magic, and I am, once again, full of praise for our excellent health system, our efficient health fund, and, best of all, our tireless family doctor, who, having asked me, yesterday, to WhatsApp him today (Monday) to let him know how I felt, ended up beating me to it and WhatsApping me as soon as he saw the results..

All of this means that I will be on antibiotics on first day Rosh Hashana, and therefore possibly prohibited from drinking wine. I still have to pluck up the courage to ask my doctor. Or perhaps, having just asked Dr Google about “antibiotics and alcohol”, I won’t ask any kitbag questions, as they are referred to in Hebrew.

Which brings us to beer. As you may know, I brew my own, buying my supplies from an establishment in downtown Jerusalem that has an excellent range of craft beers and has always provided a very good service in providing supplies for home brewing. A couple of years ago, they stopped offering a drop-in service, and instead required customers to email their order a day before they came to pick it up. This worked fine, until it didn’t. A month or so ago, I decided to brew a batch so that it would be ready to drink for the chagim. I emailed in my order, and, although I was mildly surprised not to receive an acknowledgement, I wasn’t worried. The next day, we were in central Jerusalem, and swung by the supplier to pick up the order.

When we arrived, the bar looked to be in the middle of renovations, and a rather surprised manager casually told me that they no longer supply raw materials for home-brewing. I pointed out that their website made no mention of this, and still offered the email address. He was completely unmoved by this. He told me they had stopped several months ago, and asked when I last placed an order. I told him it had been several months, and he said: “Well, there you are. That’s why we stopped the business. What did you expect?” I felt it was a little unfair to lay the failure of the business at my feet; I can’t believe that a man in his seventies drinking largely alone ever represented their core business. However, I wasn’t in the mood for what would anyway be a pointless argument, so I just left.

A couple of hours scanning the internet revealed no suppliers closer than Tel Aviv or Rishon Lezion, and, annoyingly, nowhere on the way to, or fairly close to, Zichron Yaakov. However, there were online suppliers, and it was very easy to place an order online, which duly arrived two days later. When I unpacked the order, I found all the ingredients I had ordered, plus a bag of dry malt grain which was not part of the recipe…but no yeast. Although this is a small bag with only 10 grams of yeast, it’s the yeast that works a lot of the magic. Without it, my 19 gallons of wort would basically be grain and malt cordial.

I emailed the supplier, explaining my problem, and, the following day, I received, by courier, a 10-gram bag of yeast, wrapped lovingly in a cushioned bag. I duly made my wort, sealed it in the vat, with the water-vent inserted for the air released by the yeast (which is basically the yeast breaking wind after it has consumed the sugars in the malt extract). Then comes the waiting, sometimes for just 12 hours, more often for 24-36 hours, until the bubbling starts. It then increases in frequency, from one burp every four minutes to virtually continuously, until, after a week or two, a hydrometer reading shows that the specific gravity of the wort has reduced from around 1.048 to 1.012, (1.0 is the specific gravity of water.) This means that three quarters of the sugar has been converted to alcohol, yielding a beer of about 4.5% strength, which is plenty for me.

Only this time it didn’t. I caught an occasional break of wind, but it never increased in frequency; it was always 4 or 5 minutes between each incident. I waited a week, two weeks, three weeks. Eventually today I decided to take a hydrometer reading, and discovered that the specific gravity had dropped from 1.047 to 1.013, which represents about 4% alcohol. All I can imagine is that an imperfection has developed in the hermetic seal of the plastic vat, and air has been escaping under the lid. So, I somehow have to find time to bottle the beer (a 3-hour process).

I would ideally like to do this tonight, so that the beer will be ready for me to enjoy and offer guests on Sukkot. However, it is already almost 9pm and I still haven’t finished this blog. Tomorrow we are in Zichron all day, and by the time we get home we will not really be ready for a full-scale bottling exercise. Wednesday is Erev Rosh Hashana, so I’m not even going to consider suggesting to Bernice that we bottle then.

It begins to look as though next Sunday will be B-Day. If the beer matures in the bottle fairly quickly, it will probably be drinkable by Shabbat Hol Hamoed. Nine days after that, we fly to Portugal, where I will spend a month praying that none of the bottles explodes in our absence. (As part of the bottling process, I add a mild sugar syrup to the wort, to encourage a little more conversion to alcohol in the bottle, so as to create effervescence when pouring. If the sugar syrup is not distributed evenly between the bottles, it can cause one to explode. If you have 57 bottles of beer stacked close together on a shelf, and one explodes (the technical term is a bottle bomb)…I leave the rest to your imagination. I have never had it happen, but I have had a bottle fall on the floor as I was stacking them after bottling, and even that is not a pretty sight.

On which note, I will wish you Shana Tova uMetuka – a sweet and happy new year: tova mikodmata – happier than the last one.