News from Israel continues to be overwhelming. However, truth to tell, we don’t have the time here in Penamacor to immerse ourselves in it as we tend to do, if we’re not careful, when we are at home. By the time I walk Lua in the mornings, it is past 10 AM in Israel, and the morning program I usually listen to has finished. I often listen to, or at least dip into, the archived previous day’s broadcast. I also use this time to listen to Daniel Gordis’s podcast Israel from the Inside, on the days when a new edition is available.

Beyond that, we read our thrice-daily WhatsApp feed of the news round-up, and one or other of us will sometimes read a story in more detail in other arms of the mainstream media. This is arguably a healthier news diet than our routine when in Israel; it leaves me feeling rather out of things, but there are times when that certainly feels like an improvement.

All of which is a long-winded build-up to the statement that this week’s post is unashamedly and exclusively devoted to what I’ve been up to this last couple of weeks: when I haven’t been with the boys, that is.

Two weeks ago, I ended my post with the following words: “We are confident that by the end of the second week we will have hit our stride, and be ready to go the distance. Tune in next week, to follow me eating my words.” This observation proved prophetic when I put myself to bed last Sunday afternoon and slept soundly for 90 minutes. Bernice, remarkably, just keeps going, despite firing on far more cylinders than I do throughout the day. But then, she is considerably younger than I am.

There is very little to report from here, other than that spending time with the family continues to be wonderful. Ollie’s appetite for listening to songs is as gargantuan as Tao’s for imaginative play. After Ollie mislaid Tao’s new Black Panther during a walk with Tslil one Shabbat, I found the superhero model in the grass while walking Lua on Sunday morning, and became, fleetingly, something of a superhero myself.

The following day was the 10th of the month, which, conscientious readers whose lives offer them little excitement may remember from our last visit, is the one day of the month when our supermarket senior citizens’ loyalty card entitles us to a 10% discount. So, of course, we went on an outing, and, much to Bernice’s surprise, 10% was indeed deducted from our total bill. These little victories loom larger, somehow, in a foreign language.

Even more remarkably, because totally unexpected, was what happened today (Monday) at the same supermarket. When we reached the checkout, I presented my loyalty card, which was duly swiped, as always. I know that certain items are offered at discount to card-holders, but I have never seen any sign indicating which items these are, and we have never enjoyed such a discount.

However, today, after telling us the final total for the bill, the cashier pointed out that we had accumulated credit of over 14 euros on our loyalty card, and asked whether I wanted to deduct this from the bill. I assume that we have been steadily earning discounts, but that these are added as credit to the card rather than being deducted from the original bill.

To save 14 euros on your bill is, naturally, a very pleasant experience. To do it unwittingly is doubly pleasurable. We left the supermarket (or the ‘super-dooper-market’ as Ollie has taken to calling it) with a spring in our step.

This last week has represented for me something of a mad social whirl, within the constraints of life in Penamacor, obviously. Friends of Tslil and Micha’el, also from Israel, own land about 20 minutes away. The wife’s parents are currently on a week-long visit, for the first time. The parents are religious, and, clearly, careful arrangements had been made for their visit, with the young couple koshering their vegetarian kitchen and buying new tableware and cookware.

On Wednesday, Tslil’s friend called to ask whether we could possibly spare them a bottle of wine, since her parents had not thought to bring any from Israel. (Needless to say, they are not seasoned travellers.)

As luck would have it, on this trip we brought six bottles with us from duty free. Each Shabbat we open a bottle, and, depending on how much anaesthesia we feel we need, the bottle lasts us until after lunch on Shabbat, or dinner on Sunday or Monday. So, we knew that we could easily spare a bottle.

On Thursday, they dropped in to collect the bottle, and the father (originally from South Africa) and I had a very pleasant chat about this and that (cricket, mostly, unsurprisingly). Bernice had been rather concerned that they might not welcome a bottle of dry white wine for kiddush, but, in fact, he seemed very relieved that I wasn’t offering him Palwin No 5 (or Manishewitz, if that’s your side of the pond).

Then, on Sunday, on our regular morning walk, Lua met up with what was clearly a friend, albeit an unlikely one: a little terrier who barely came up to Lua’s ankles. As the two of them raced around together, the terrier’s owner, a woman of Micha’el’s age, and I struck up a conversation. She, unsurprisingly, recognised Lua, and knows Tslil and Micha’el. From her accent, I would say that she had a middle-to-upper-middle-class Home Counties English upbringing.

She told me that she had been living in Berlin, but had grown tired of city life. After Covid, she was holidaying in Lisbon when a friend invited her to visit him on a piece of land he had just bought in the middle of nowhere. After camping on his land for six weeks, she decided to stay. Having recently come into some money, she was in a position to buy a house in nearby Penamacor, where she has now lived for three years.

At this point, my companion took the left fork in the path, to loop around back home, while Lua and I were going to carry on into the forest. Lua took a little persuading to leave her companion, but eventually she agreed. Once back home, when I wondered aloud whether my new friend worked or was of independent means, Tslil and Micha’el were able to tell me that she is an artist (so, presumably, she both works for a living and is of independent means), and makes her new home available for various art events.

It is certainly true that chance encounters in Penamacor can lead to very interesting back-stories. Not for the first time, I found myself wondering at the footlooseness and fancy-free-ery of today’s young – and no-longer-so-young – adults. I then reminded myself that, in our mid-thirties, Bernice and I, with our almost three-year-old Esther, moved from Wales to Israel.

I then “Yes, but”ted myself with details such as the financial and infrastructure assistance of the Jewish Agency, our previous history of 25 years of Zionism and the presence in Israel of Bernice’s sister and her and my various cousins and more distant relatives. It’s not quite the same as fetching up in Penamacor, or indeed Berlin, with no prior.

When my social engagements have allowed, I have found the time to do a couple of odd jobs around the house. This is undoubtedly the ideal way to curry favour with your daughter-in-law. Micha’el has a good set of tools, and is a keen and talented handyman, but he tends to be seduced by more major projects, is currently investing most of his time in teaching English online to help the bank balance, and has a less developed sense of the aesthetics of interior design.

Tslil complained one day about the state of the salon walls. The previous owner of the house had a large collection of art reproductions hanging around the house. Many of these were dark and dusty; several were devotional, depicting crucifixion and the performance of miracles. Tslil and Micha’el removed all of the religious ones long before our first visit to Portugal, and, over the years, they have removed more and more of the secular and sombre ones. Silent witnesses remained strewn across the walls, in the form of nails hammered in. These were beginning to really annoy Tslil. In addition, around the internal electricity box, which is a wooden cube sunk into the entrance hall wall, where damp has crept in over the years the plaster has started to crumble.

Enter the father-in-law. Having established that Micha’el did not have the necessary equipment, I set off for the China shop. I needed Polyfilla, and an implement to apply it with. I did not know what either of these things was called in Portuguese. (Indeed, in English, I’m not quite sure whether what I sometimes call a spatula is really a putty knife or a palette knife.) Fortunately, a suitably small (and very cheap) filler knife was on display in the shop, but I could not find any filler powder.

Undeterred, I made my way to the ‘proper’ hardware and builders’ supplies store, where, after a thorough search of the shelves, I still failed to find the powder I was looking for. I had done a little language homework, and was steeling myself to ask about “po, mistura água, preencher buraca na parede”, while knowing full well that my saying this gibberish would elicit, from the affable but non-English-speaking shopkeeper, a burst of response that would leave me infinitely further from my goal. Just then, wonder of wonders, I heard a lady my age conversing in British English with a younger man (her son), who, moments later, engaged the shopkeeper in fluent Portuguese conversation.

I explained my predicament to him. He spoke a sentence to the shopkeeper that contained none of the words I had assiduously gathered up in preparation, and, moments later, I was leaving the shop with a kilo of estuque de acabamento (finishing stucco, since you ask). Two days of occasional work with pliers (levering out the nails) and filler knife (filling in the holes) and Tslil was over the moon with the results.

I have to admit that the job was made considerably easier both by Tao’s assistance with the one or two holes and crumbling pieces of plasterwork that were at his eye level and by the fact that the original wall was finished by someone who clearly had all of Micha’el’s sensibility. We were able to go for a ‘natural’ finish that blended perfectly with the rest of the wall.

So, what with one thing and another, it’s a wonder I’ve managed to find the time this week to write a post. Join me next week for what promises to be more of the same, in my last post from Portugal. (Even though, by the time you read next week’s, we should be back in Israel…and asking ourselves where those four weeks went.)

There are weeks when I struggle to find a topic to write about, and others when I feel spoilt for choice. However, never can I remember a week when I felt there were at least three topics that I simply had to write about. Never, that is, until this week. In the end, I have decided to write about something else entirely, but before I do, let me give you the blogging equivalent of speed dating, with a couple of one-paragraph summaries of the last seven days’ ‘in other news’. Our personal ‘news’ from Portugal, such as it is, will be held over until next week.

US election. Here’s my takeaway. If you lie for months to the American people about the mental capacity of the sitting President, then, with no open selection process, replace him with someone whose major qualifications are her sex and race, rather than her personal suitability, then attempt to appeal to the key black undecided voters and the undecided wives of Republican voters by patronising both groups, all the time mocking the rival candidate rather than presenting coherent policies, and peddling woke attitudes which you tell the nation to accept without offering a rational explanation as to why, you’ll lose the election. It will be interesting to see whether this is a lesson too hard for the Democratic party to internalise.

On the same day as the Democrats reaped what they had sown, another, for me bigger, story broke: Netanyahu’s firing of Gallant, and his replacing of him with Yisrael Katz. I can’t address this story in one paragraph. For the moment, let me say that, horrifying and saddening as it is, I cannot find an explanation for the timing of this act that is not connected to Netanayahu’s struggle for political survival. Given the military background and experience of Gallant, his relationship with his American counterparts, and Yisrael Katz’s almost total lack of experience in this field and singular unsuitability for the position of Defence Minister, I can only see this as an act of betrayal of the nation by Netanayahu. A dark day indeed.

But what I really want to write about is this week’s Torah portion, and, in particular, the story of the Akeda, Abraham’s binding of Isaac. The apparent significance of this story is that it is a test of Abraham. Is his faith is Hashem sufficient for him to be prepared to sacrifice his son to Him? This is, of course, a test that Abraham passes, and, at the last moment, he is told by an angel not to sacrifice Isaac.

I have long struggled to understand this story. Our sages teach us that Abraham grew up in a traditionally polytheistic and idolatrous home, in a society that favoured child sacrifice. Independently, by observing the world and its blessings, he came to deduce the existence of an omnipotent and loving God. God then made himself known to Abraham. How is it conceivable that Abraham could for a moment believe that God wanted him to sacrifice Isaac? If he did not believe that, then the test was an empty test.

A further problem I have with this story is in understanding why it occupies the place it does in our liturgy and the way it is presented there. The Biblical account of the Akeda, in its entirety, is recited every day as part of the preliminary morning service: all 19 verses. Clearly, the sages believed that the story has an important message for us. The account in the liturgy is then followed by a prayer that begins: Master of the Universe, in the same way as Abraham overcame his mercy in order to do Your will wholeheartedly, so may your mercy overcome your anger towards us. This suggests that the key message is not that we should behave mercifully, but that we should not act impulsively and emotionally, but rather should master our passions.

I heard this week another explanation of the significance of the Akeda story: an explanation that curiously brought to mind Wilfred Owen’s First World War poem The Parable of the Old Man and the Young:

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

In stark contrast to Owen’s description of parents sending children to war in defiance of God, Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, one of the most influential Orthodox Jewish figures of the late 20^th Century, in conversation with Daniel Gordis, discussed the significance of the Akeda in the reality of Israel in 2024. “Emil Fackenheim said one of the great lines of modern Jewish theology. He once said… every parent, after the Shoah, every Jewish parent who has a child and… chooses to be a Jew after the Shoah is as great, as heroic as Abraham, because the peak of Abraham’s life was that he was willing, out of faithfulness to his mission, to his covenant, to his God, to take his child and bind him to the altar. Well, every person who has a Jewish child knows that they are binding not just their children, but their grandchildren. Grandchildren of Jewish grandparents were persecuted and killed by the Nazis.”

Rabbi Greenberg went on to explain that he was always upset by the idea of the Akeda as a test of Abraham and that he now views it as something totally different, as God’s full disclosure, God’s admission that to join this covenant is to take on risk, to take on danger. The fear of losing one’s child is surely the greatest risk a parent can take. And yet, he pointed out, the Jewish people, far from backing away, has taken it on. He acknowledged that he did not know how the Jewish people would get through the next year or two, given the inevitable great danger and heavy losses. But he declared his belief that that the past record gives us good reason to believe that the Jewish people will come through again.

“If the Holocaust didn’t break them, October 7 is not going to break them. If the past tragedies were overcome by life and by love and by all these things, we have every reason to believe this is, too. Given the past record of the Jewish people, I think this should be a moment of sadness and of pain, but also of hope and of real expectation. I say, again, I can’t wait. I look forward to it… After the Exodus, the greatest revolution of our history, out of that experience came the Bible. After the destruction of the Temple, the greatest destruction of our period, came the Talmud, the second greatest creation of Jewish people.

Now I say to myself, in our time, we have an exodus, the state of Israel, greater than the biblical, and we have a destruction, the Holocaust greater than [previous persecutions]… What’s going to come now? I hope it’ll be greater and more transformative for the whole world than ever before.”

My final update last week referenced “a journey that could hardly have been smoother”. Before I get on to this week’s real topic, let me explain the significance of that ‘hardly’.

When we first began our thrice-yearly migrations to Portugal, we hired a car from the airport. In Lisbon airport, this is very convenient. The car hire reception counters are a one-minute walk from the arrivals hall, and the car pick-up points are a further three-minute walk.

However, when car hire prices rose steeply a couple of years ago, we discovered that the premium we would have to pay for this convenience was very substantial. There is very little parking space available for car hire at the airport. The few companies that take that space pay a hefty rent for it, and pass that cost on to their customers. There are, in addition, a host of other companies that offer a shuttle service from the airport to their offices and car parks, a five- or ten-minute drive from the airport.

So we began using an off-site company, Klass Wagen, whose service is, I must say, excellent, in all respects (other, of course, than the fact that you may have to wait 20 or 30 minutes for the shuttle, and off-site pickup therefore adds the best part of an hour to your journey).

I was therefore very excited, when I was booking a car for this trip, to discover a company, Flizzr, that offered airport pickup at an off-site price. I should have been suspicious: as Bernice pointed out after the fact, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I should have known better than to trust a company called Flizzr, which sounds like a TV dolphin with a speech impediment. I should have wondered about the company describing itself as a ‘Car Rental Provider’. Just what did ‘provider’ mean in that sentence?. I should have wondered about the pickup being from the Sixt desk in the airport. Why don’t Flizzr have their own desk?

In the event, after we took our short stroll to the Sixt airport desk, the clerk told us to go outside the airport while he phoned for a white Sixt minibus to take us to pick up the car. Needless to say, I pointed out that the website had clearly stated that pickup was from the airport, but, of course, the Sixt clerk, who had no interest or investment in Flizzr, wasn’t in the mood for conversation.

After we had waited fifteen minutes outside the airport, I tried calling the phone number on the voucher. However, this was the phone number of Sixt, not Flizzr, and after listening to the available menu items all the way through, I realized none of the options would lead to a resolution, and so I hung up. A couple of minutes later, the minibus arrived, and within seven minutes we were at the Sixt office, where a very pleasant and efficient clerk, who spoke excellent English, swiftly handled our paperwork. He agreed with me that Flizzr’s misrepresentation on their website was outrageous, and assured ne that Sixt were forever telling them they had to change it, but, of course, it was nothing to do with Sixt.

We were soon on the road, in a Peugeot 308 that is a pleasure to drive, with Android Auto working, so that the map display was very easy to read. In addition, the car offers cruise control, headlights that dip automatically whenever they sense traffic ahead or oncoming, and then automatically return to beam, and windscreen wipers that automatically adjust to the presence and ferocity of rain. Every time I hire a car these days, I feel more and more like an optional extra.

All of this meant that we arrived in Penamacor at 10:30 rather than 9:40, as we had hoped, but it could certainly have been worse. We were able to get a good night’s sleep before Tslil was no longer able to hold the boys back from coming into our room, at around 6:15 the following morning.

In the week since then, we have had time to discover all of the ways in which the boys have developed since we left here in July. We of course expected to see big changes in Ollie. The difference between being just two and being two and three-and-a-half months can be expected to be significant. But Tao, as well, has surprised us in how he has matured. We were in the supermarket (of course) with the boys yesterday. When we reached the checkout, I started unloaded our trolley. Meanwhile, Tao said ‘Hello’ to the cashier. In the summer, he would have not felt confident enough in his Portuguese or in himself to strike up a conversation with a stranger, but this has now changed. He is noticeably more outgoing, and, by all accounts, his third language is developing as well.

Of course, in this respect his parents set him an excellent example. For several months, Tslil has been teaching a yoga class in English to a group of local women. She also found a useful arrangement where she gave a weekly private lesson to a Portuguese woman who, in return, coversed with Tslil in Portuguese. She also practices online every day. Last week she started teaching a new class, in Portuguese, and she was very happy with the way it went. Meanwhile, Micha’el recently spent a half-an-hour in conversation with an elderly local man, who asked him at one point whether he came from Brazil.

One day a week, Micha’el and Tslil practise their language skills by speaking to each other only in Portuguese. They certainly sound convincing to me, although it has to be said that I’m not exactly an expert. Also one day a week, Micha’el speaks to the boys in Hebrew. Now that even Ollie is very clear about the difference between the two languages, it seems to me that exposing the boys regularly to a second native Hebrew speaker is a very worthwhile initiative.

However, the prize for language development since our last visit has to go to Ollie. In July, he spoke a few words, always in isolation. He had no difficulty making himself understood with eloquent body language, but he was barely speaking. Nobody was at all worried about this. He clearly understood everything anybody said to him, and his father did not speak until he was well into his third year (and hasn’t stopped since).

When we arrived this time, we were amazed to find Ollie stringing words together like a pro, with ‘sentences’ like “Mummy outside laundry dryer” (“Mummy has gone outside to put the laundry in the dryer”, obviously). Now that his outgoing nature is augmented by sparkling conversation, and given the fact that he has a healthy appetite and is not at all a finicky eater, he is the perfect guest to invite to a dinner party.

Both Micha’el and Tslil are keeping themselves in very good physical shape and eating very healthily. They seem to be in a routine that is working well for them. Lua grows more placid as she continues to mature. Micha’el has trained her very well and I am thoroughly enjoying my daily morning walk with her. Even the weather has been largely kind, with, so far, only a little rain, and plenty of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

Shabbat was even warm enough to sit in the sun in the backyard.

In short, everyone here is in very good shape. Even if Bernice and I are on our knees by the end of the day, we get a good night’s sleep, because Ollie is sleeping through the night much better, and we have only shared our bed with him once so far. We are confident that by the end of the second week we will have hit our stride, and be ready to go the distance.

Tune in next week, to follow me eating my words.