A week ago, I stated, in response to a comment from a friend who was having difficulty making the words of the sedra names match the tune of America, that I had actually made a recording, but that my voice was so ropey that I wasn’t prepared to share it. (I think I have air conditioning throat.)
Now here we are, a week later, knee-deep in medical appointments (just routine check-ups; all is well), magazine editing, and preparing for when we kidnap Raphael and bring him back here on Tuesday for some nana and grandpa time. All of which means that, even though I had a topic in mind for this week, I’m going to take the embarrassing but easy way out and share with you my croaky voice.
Suffice it say that Tom Lehrer remains unchallenged. I’m not giving up the day job just yet.
Normal service will, I hope, be resumed next week, but meanwhile, you can suffer the rendition here. If you feel cheated this week, just drop me a line and I’ll send you a complete refund of your subscription fee.
My big brother is getting more assertive as he gets older. Last week he set me two tasks. Normally, I don’t take kindly to being told what to do, but the first was so enticing, and his logic for suggesting the second was so persuasive, that I find myself compelled to act like a submissive younger sibling.
First, he came up with a cool idea (he didn’t actually use the word ‘cool’. He spent over 40 years as an actuary in the world of insurance, so ‘cool’ isn’t in his vocabulary.) Inspired by my rekindling of memories of Tom Lehrer last week, he suggested that, for Simchat Torah, it would be fun to set to music the names of the 54 weekly Torah portions.
So, on Sunday, instead of working on the shul magazine, I spent the day doing just that. It was an interesting challenge. First, I grouped the names of the portions into their rhyming families. I used what I hope is the standard Israeli Ashkenzi pronunciation; the last group in the following list contains all the unique final sounds that have no rhyming partner.
Having done this spadework, two things were obvious. First, this was unlikely to be as daunting a task as I had first feared, because there were six groups with at least four rhyming names, which would allow for four-line verses with an AAAA rhyming scheme, and, with luck, an internal rhyme as well.
Second, thirty of the names were three-syllable words, only four were four-syllable words, fifteen were two-syllable words and one was a monosyllable. Only two of the others were six syllables long. All of this suggested that it would not be complicated to fit the names into the pattern of a song with a triple rhythm. My first thought was the theme from The Lone Ranger, or the William Tell overture by Rossini, to give it its highbrow name. I eventually rejected that because of the complicated and long finale. Then it struck me: there was a perfect triplet patter song that could tolerate the throwing in of an extra syllable here and there, pacy and racy.
If you start by singing the first two lines below to the end of the intro to America from West Side Story, starting at the line “I like the isle of Manhattan”, and then sing the four lines of the main tune (starting “I like to be in America”, followed by the first variation “I think I go back to San Juan”, followed by the main tune twice, you will find that the following arrangement works.
I have taken the same liberty Lehrer allowed himself, by throwing in a ‘ve’ or an ‘u’ (and) at the beginning of the occasional name, to aid the scansion (cf ‘and anthramum and osmium’):
בלק, ויחי, אחרי מות, שלח, משפטים, ראה, וזאת הברכה, שמיני, ובא, בהעלותך, כי תבוא.
There. That’s a little gift to you, my loyal readership. There’s plenty of time for you to memorise that and polish your performance before you amaze your friends in shul on Simchat Torah.
Unfortunately, the second task does not, in prospect, seem quite so much fun. However, Martin pointed out that I have, from time to time, ventured into the realm of geopolitics, and since, last week, Maale Adumim became the centre of the Middle East conflict for a day, he felt that I really couldn’t not write about the Israeli government approval for the planned development of the area that has been known for years as E1, that is now renamed T1 (in recognition of Trump’s support for Israel), and that will, in the future, be known, apparently, as Mevasseret Adumim, which we can translate as the Herald or Harbinger of Adumim. (Mevasseret Yerushalayim is a town on the main road to Jerusalem, the first point on the road from which you can see Jerusalem as you approach on the road.)
The development of T1 will add 3,400 housing units to the city of Maale Adumim. A new suburb within Maale Adumim is expected to add an additional over 3,500 units. Together, these two suburbs should see the city’s population grow from about 40,000 to around 75,000. Provided that this development is achieved with commensurate infrastructure development, this should be good news for the city. It certainly will bring to an end a long period when young citizens could not find affordable homes within the city.
However, none of this is the reason why the world is focused on E1. On a scale that is out of all proportion to its size, the area represents a huge battleground over territorial contiguity. The development of E1 will effectively turn Maale Adumim into what will be potentially a suburb of Jerusalem.
Incidentally, this will probably lead to a significant increase in our arnona (property tax), because the per capita sum raised by Jerusalem municipality from among its citizens is significantly less than the corresponding figure in Maale Adumim, a city with a prop-ortionately large working-age and working population. At the same time, we may find that the market value, and the saleability, of our house both increase.
Of course, contiguity of Israeli housing will result in discontiguity of Palestinian housing. For the last decades, Palestinians have maintained illegal facts on the ground, in the form of housing, to ensure that the southern part of a putative Palestinian state (including Bethlehem) is not cut off from the northern part (including Ramallah) It’s worth bearing in mind that, despite the dramatic sound of the phrase’cut off’, we are talking about a very small parcel of land.
In the map below, the Jerusalem municipality is in beige, Israeli population centres are shown in blue, Palestinian population centres are shown in brown and E1 is shown in red. The map clearly shows that, if pigs were to be seen flying tomorrow, and an agreement were reached over a Palestinian state, it would be very easy to build a tunnel under E1 providing contiguity to the two parts of Palestine. It would scarcely need to be longer than the new tunnel underpassing French Hill, which has shortened our journey to Jerusalem and beyond by at least ten minutes.
So, what is the real significance of this announcement? Here, for what it’s worth, is my take. First and foremost, this is not a maverick act by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Even though he was the government representative at the official ceremony announcing the approval of the development project, and even though he is undoubtedly personally delighted by the decision, and more than ready to take credit for pushing it through, let no one be in doubt. It is Netanyahu who has blocked the development for a couple of decades, and it is Netanyahu who has now decided that it will go through.
I believe that this change in tactics is part of Netanyahu’s concerted attempt to increase pressure on Hamas. If Hamas intransigence results in loss of Palestinian land, that represents a far greater humiliation for Hamas than the mass losses among its forces, the hardship suffered by the Gaza population (obviously) and even the elimination of multiple layers of Hamas leadership. Martyrdom is a badge of honour for Hamas: not only, I suspect, for the foot soldiers, but also for the senior leadership. They genuinely see their cause as greater than themselves and they regard it as a religious duty to be prepared and proud to die for the cause. They will embrace death.
Loss of Palestinian land, on the other hand, hits Hamas where it hurts, at the very heart of their cause. In addition, if Palestinians in the West Bank join the dots between the failure of negotiations in Gaza and the development of E1, this is potentially very bad news for Hamas.
That represents about the extent (to be honest, considerably more than the extent) of my willingness to comment on the situation. At the end of the day, I’m much more comfortable playing at making patterns with words.
I wrote last week that my reflections on the death of Tom Lehrer would “have to wait for another time”. I feel as though I want to make this week that time, not because my mind is now cleared of all that was occupying it last week; it isn’t. Nor because things on the national and international front look much rosier this week; they don’t. If anything, things are even worse. However, there’s only so much doom and gloom I can wallow in, and I really feel as though I want to escape to somewhere more….innocent? Not the first word that springs to mind when considering Lehrer. Somewhere more civilised, certainly; more urbane; less intense. More ironic.
I’m not quite sure how to approach the subject of Tom Lehrer. I doubt if there are more than a handful of my readers who are not familiar with Tom Lehrer and his modest (in size), but wide-ranging (in subject-matter) oeuvre. If the name means little to you, then perhaps the best thing you can do is go to YouTube, search for him and spend an hour or four, letting him, in his own words: “… take you now on wings of song as it were and try and help you forget, perhaps, for a while, your drab, wretched lives.”
Which leads me neatly into two initial observations. First, four hours is all you will need, more or less, to listen to Lehrer’s entire musical oeuvre, even including all of the pirated videos from live appearances. A few of Lehrer’s songs were not initially issued on record – either because of issues of good taste (of which more later) or arcaneness. At a shockingly young age, Lehrer grew tired of performing, and stopped writing songs. As he later remarked: “Satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
Secondly, once you start listening to Lehrer, you find that almost everything he wrote in his songs and his equally polished introductions to them is eminently quotable and, after a few repetitions, unforgettable. The comments below his obituary in The Times were full of people doing little more than sharing their favourite quotes from the songs.
Okay. Assuming the few of you who needed to do a pre-term make-up class in Lehreriana have done so, and are now back with us, I can now attempt to explain why I am convinced that his contribution to the comic song repertoire was unique and magnificent.
Let’s get the least memorable, but still essential, element of the Lehrer cocktail out of the way first. Tom, as I cannot imagine anyone referring to him (Tom is for ordinary folk like Hanks, not elite near-geniuses who skip a year of high-school for three consecutive years and win a place at Harvard at age 15, on the strength – if we believe the internet – of an application letter in the form of a poem) was born into a nominally American Jewish home, in which the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan were often on the gramophone. Here, one assumes, Lehrer developed his ear for a good tune and his recognition that in comic song the music has as key a role as the words.
Fortunately, Lehrer was also a sufficiently accomplished pianist to be able to execute what he had written, and to do so with such effortlessness that his whole attention appeared to be focussed on his verbal interaction with the audience. Which brings me to another point. Lehrer began his career performing his songs for fellow-students at parties, and he exudes the same relaxed and comfortable aura of being among friends even when he is performing for an audience in a large theatre (and even when the audience are not native English speakers and miss some of the cultural references). In one of his in-house performances at Harvard, he reprised a song by Noel Coward, and he shares with Coward an apparent social ease.
Enough, I think, of skipping round the edge of the lake, admiring the grassy verges and the ornamental bridge. The time has come to plunge in, and talk about the lyrics. The first point to be made is perhaps the breadth of the range of subject-matter. While Lehrer wrote for a season of That Was the Week that Was and dealt, there, with social, political and geopolitical satire, he felt free to range very much further afield. Indeed, since he had no sense of propriety (a word he rhymed with ‘impiety’ and ‘variety’ in one of his memorable triplets), the world was his oyster. Few writers of comic songs cover such topics as necromancy, drug peddling, sado-masochism and what we used to call venereal disease but is now apparently known as STD (which, when I was a boy, was a feature of the telephone system and stood for subscriber trunk dialling).
Consider these lines from I Got it from Agnes (the STD song):
Max got it from Edith Who gets it every spring She got it from her Daddy Who just gives her everything
She then gave it to Daniel Whose spaniel has it now
In many ways, this is an uncharacteristic lyric from Lehrer, in that it is not self-consciously clever. However, when he wants to, Lehrer can be cleverer than anybody else in the room. Consider this quick-fire rhyming pattern from a Gilbert and Sullivan parody recounting the story of the last verse of the story of Oh, my darling Clementine!
Though I missed her, I kissed her Young sister named Esther This mister to pester she tried. Now her pestering sister’s a festering blister You’d best to resist her, say I!
Two rhyme sounds there: one used in six different words (plus one repetition), and the other in four different words (plus one repetition), all in the space of thirty one words. If you think that sounds easy, please try it at home.
But of course he made it sound easy. He made it all sound easy. I knew that Daniel Radcliffe (possibly better known to you as Harry Potter) was a bear of little brain when he woked all over JK Rowling, the woman who gave him fame and fortune, on the occasion of her pointing out that ‘woman’ is a word with a biological meaning. However, you can also get a measure of Radcliffe’s maturity from the fact that, like many of us, he has learnt the lyrics of Tom Lehrer’s Elements song, but, unlike the rest of us, he considers it suitable for trundling out not only at parties but also on prime-time television. Having admired Lehrer’s faultless, unruffled and clearly enunciated performance (while playing the piano), contrast it with Radcliffe’s fumbling, mumbling, bumbling, gauche ineptitude here. One wonders what party pieces he rejected because they weren’t quite polished enough!
Of course, The Elements is an atypical Lehrer song, for several reasons. He composed neither the music nor the words. All of our delight is in the delightful and delighted execution, and the effortless way he has rearranged the elements into an order that may have no chemical elegance, but has a literary elegance.
It is also atypical in that it is not, to some degree of gentleness or sharpness, poking fun at attitudes, institutions or personalities. All were grist to Lehrer’s mill. To illustrate this, I am going to offer links in this section rather than quoting lyrics, because Lehrer’s relish in his skewering of targets is so tangible.
If the tunes were Lehrer’s piano, then the words were his forte.
The inevitability of the nuclear apocalypse might not seem an obvious topic for a comic song, but if you ensure the rhymes are tortuously brilliant, you can pull it off.
If you attend a funeral, It is sad to think that sooner o’ l- ater those you love will do the same for you And you may have thought it tragic, Not to mention other adjec- tives to think of all the weeping they will do
Pe4haps the best marriage of form and content in his body of work is in the setting of a song that purports to give an example of what the Catholic church should have been aiming for in its (then) desire to modernise the liturgy is Vatican Rag. The ragtime tune rings absolutely authentic, and Lehrer sets himself increasingly stiff rhyming hurdles, all of which he effortlessly sails over.
We come next to Lehrer’s other career, as a mathematics professor. Although he eventually abandoned his PhD studies, he was no slouch, and he wrote several amusing songs about mathematics. They were mostly written for consumption within the Harvard math department, but he eventually found one topic that non-mathematicians could relate to, since a whole nation of parents were being exposed to and befuddled by it in their children’s homework: new math. Now, obviously, you cannot write a comic song about new math that actually demonstrates and explains the underlying mathematical concepts of new math and is at the same time hilarious. Except that Lehrer did, of course. (I think I recommend listening to this without watching the annoying animation whose primary effect is to ruin the timing of Lehrer’s delivery.)
And now here we are exactly where I knew we would be: very nearly 1500 words in and there are at least another 15 songs that I absolutely have to talk about. You know what? Go back to YouTube and listen to the master himself: Poisoning Pigeons (with its rhymes for both ‘strychnine’ and ‘cyanide’, Alma (every word of which has historical authenticity), My Home Town, Wernher von Braun, Smut (the perfect mismatch of tune and lyric, and the best collection of rhymes on the first syllable of a word that breaks across a line). Anything, really. There are no duds here.
Lehrer’s greatest line? I’ll offer two contenders, one from an introduction to a song, the other from a lyric to a mock Harvard anthem.
I’ll just leave you with Lehrer’s purported admission poem to Harvard, written, remember, at the age of 15. This sounds like an urban myth, but it appears that it was definitely written by Lehrer, even if he did not use it ashis application letter, but simply an amuse-bouche for his fellow high-school students. Either way, it is the earliest record of his precocious and formidable talent. It is interesting to note, by the way, that long before Lehrer rhymed ‘Harvard’ with ‘discovered’, he rhymed it with ‘larva’ed’, which is less humorous but almost as impressive.
Dissertation on Education Education is a splendid institution, A most important social contribution, Which has brought about my mental destitution By its own peculiar type of persecution. For I try to absorb In the midst of an orb Of frantic instructors’ injunctions The name of the Fates And the forty-eight states And the trigonometrical functions, The figures of speech (With the uses of each) And the chemical symbol for lead, The depth of the ocean, Molecular motion, The names of the bones in the head, The plot of Macbeth And Romeo’s death And the history of the Greek drama, Construction of graphs And the musical staffs And the routes of Cortez and da Gama, The name of the Pope, The inventor of soap, And the oldest American college– The use of conceits, The poems of Keats, And other poetical knowledge. I’m beginning to feel I don’t care a great deal For the reign of the Emperor Nero, The poems of Burns, What the President earns, And the value of absolute zero, The length of a meter, The size of a liter, The cause of inflation and failure, The veins and the nerves, Geometrical curves, And the distance from here to Australia, Reproduction of germs, Biological terms, And when a pronoun is disjunctive, The making of cheese, The cause of disease, And the use of the present subjunctive. I wish that there weren’t Electrical current, Such places as Rome and Cathay, And such people as Watt And Sir Walter Scott And Edna St. Vincent Millay. I don’t like very much To learn customs and such Of people like Tibetan lamas, And I’d like to put curbs On irregular verbs And the various uses for commas, International pacts All historical facts, Like the dates of Columbus and Croesus, Bunker Hill, Saratoga, And Ticonderoga, The War of the Peloponnesus. But although I detest Learning poems and the rest Of the things one must know to have “culture,” While each of my teachers Makes speeches like preachers And preys on my faults like a vulture, I will leave movie thrillers And watch caterpillars Get born and pupated and larva’ed, And I’ll work like a slave And always behave And maybe I’ll get into Harvard…
As I was going down the stair I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish that man would go away!
In another week, in another universe, I hope that I will be in a mental place where I can share with you the origin story of the surreal poem from which that is a stanza. This week, however, my mind is elsewhere.
One of the places my mind is, or was until a few days ago, is the death of Tom Lehrer. My reflections on that will also have to wait for another time, other than to say that, towards the end of last week, I found myself wishing passionately that Lehrer were sixty years younger, and alive, so that he could capture, in his inimitable fashion, the full irony of the surreal geopolitical reality we are living through.
Last week, as you will doubtless be aware, France announced that it plans to recognise the state of Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly this autumn. Then Britain made a similar announcement, making its declaration contingent on Israel failing to carry out a number of measures before then. Then Canada and Malta followed suit.
I have a little skin in the UK game, and I wouldn’t have expected anything else from Macron, Malta has no muscle at all, and Canada…is Canada. So my attention is directed at Sir Keir Starmer. A cynic would argue that the timing of his announcement reflects his desperation as he struggles to fend off challenges from within and beyond the Labour Party he leads. I would like to believe that his announcement is driven purely by political expediency and cynicism. The idea that he might actually believe that such recognition of a Palestinian state is a good thing for the world, for Britain, or even for the Palestinians, is too worrying to contemplate.
Anyway, Tom Lehrer I am not, but a verse came into my head as I attempted to digest this news.
As he was going down, Sir Keir Recognised a state that wasn’t there. IT WASN’T THERE! He knew full well. I wish Sir Keir would go to hell.
A couple of other observations. First, let’s look at Starmer’s statement that this recognition will take place unless the Israeli government “take[s] substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza” (no clear statement about what precise situation Starmer is referring to, because that might involve considering at whose feet the responsibility for the “appalling situation” can be laid), “agree[s] to a ceasefire and commit[s] to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution. And this includes allowing the UN to restart the supply of aid” (which hasn’t stopped) “and making clear there will be no annexations in the West Bank”.
Here he virtually makes explicit the fact that he is motivated not by any sense that recognising the state of Palestine is the morally correct thing to do at this point in time. He presents it as merely a tactic to persuade Israel to act according to his will. Either he believes Britain has a moral duty to recognise the state of Palestine, in which case he should recognise it, unconditionally, or he does not believe that, and has no justification for recognising the state. To use recognition of Palestine purely as a stick to beat Israel with is indefensible.
At the same time, he has demanded that Hamas “must immediately release all the hostages, sign up to a ceasefire, disarm and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza”. However, he has not made his government’s recognition of the state of Palestine contingent on Hamas meeting those demands. Only the goose gets the sauce, not the gander.
So, with your permission, let us step back for a moment from Starmer’s delusional universe into the real world. Imagine, for a moment, that you are one of the Hamas executive enjoying the hospitality, protection and financial support of that upstanding nation, Qatar. Sitting in your seven-star hotel room, you read Starmer’s demands. “So”, you reflect, “unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire, Britain will recognise Palestine, regardless of how we act. Well, then, all we need to do to guarantee that outcome is withdraw from the ceasefire talks.”
My second observation is this. What, in the name of all that is logical, does “recognising the state of Palestine” mean? A purely hypothetical entity with no borders, no system of government or administration, no diplomatic service, is not a state, and cannot be recognised as a state. (“I met a man who wasn’t there.”) That’s not just my opinion, by the way. Under international law, the Montevideo Convention of 1933 gives the following minimum requirements for a recognised state: a defined territory, a permanent population, an effective government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. (One out of four apparently doesn’t qualify you.)
The good news is that 40 peers from the House of Lords have written to the UK Attorney General pointing this out, and concluding that, therefore, for Britain to recognise Palestine “would be contrary to the principles governing recognition of states, according to international law”. The bad news is that it is far from certain that the Attorney General will so advise the government, and even further from certain that the government will take his advice.
A tiny part of me, of which I am not excessively proud, would like to see France, UK, Canada, Malta, and everyone else, “recognise” “Palestine”, and then for Israel to “recognise” “Palestine”. When, a couple of hours, or days, or weeks later, a terrorist attack (correction, an enemy invasion) takes place in Israel, or a rocket is launched from Gaza (correction, Palestine commits an act of aggression against Israel), as it inevitably will, Israel can declare this an act of war from a foreign state and conduct a war against that foreign state, thereby sidestepping all of the arguments about supplying humanitarian aid to the enemy and about innocent civilians. Even this very small part of me is, I wearily acknowledge, too big for some of my readers to stomach, and I apologise to them.
There was a brief period when I thought the above was going to be the story of the week. However, another story has loomed into view that towers over it, especially in the week that marks our annual commemoration of the disasters visited upon the Jewish people throughout history. The last couple of days have marked a new low in the moral depravity of the once-civilised world.
Hamas, taking their lead from the Nazi death camps, are systematically starving at least some of the “hostages” (surely we can find a word that better captures their desperate situation). This should, perhaps, surprise nobody. However, Hamas has judged that its cause will be best served by publicly flaunting this starvation. It has published videos in which the victims of that gradual starvation speak about their plight (one of them, Evyatar David, speaks while, barely able to stand, he is digging what he has been told will be his own grave). The benefit to Hamas of releasing these videos should be clear: their effect on the morale of the man in the street in Israel. The last couple of days have seen entirely understandable calls, from hostage family members and many others, for Israel to recognise that it cannot win the war, to lay down its arms, to bring the hostages home through an agreement, and then and only then, if it wishes, to resume the war, unfettered by responsibility for the hostages.
What is chilling about the release of the videos is not the cynical way Hamas seeks to manipulate Israeli public opinion, but its judgement that, at this stage, the decades-in-the-making worldwide propaganda campaign that the jihadi regimes have financed and orchestrated has been so successful that releasing video of its inhuman, obscene, calculated, cold-blooded murder of Israelis by slow starvation, and its (I assume deliberate) inclusion in the video of a muscular, well-toned Hamas bicep handing the emaciated Evyatar a tin, will not lose Hamas any significant amount of sympathy around the world.
At the time of writing, this calculation by Hamas seems chillingly, horrifyingly, accurate. If that does not keep you awake at night, if that did not inform your reading of every kina (every liturgical poem of lament) in shul yesterday, if that does not make you contact the Jewish Agency representatives in your home country to inquire about Aliyah, then I don’t know what will. Our safe Jewish future here is not yet certain, but our unsafe Jewish future anywhere else is increasingly certain.
May we all hear better news this week, and may I feel able to write about happier topics this time next week.
