You may not be at all surprised to learn that I’ve been giving a fair amount of thought recently to the question of prayer. Or perhaps that should be ‘the questions of prayer’. What with selichot before the regular shacharit morning service every day for the last week and a half, and two long days of morning services of Rosh Hashana, I’ve been occupied in prayer a fair bit recently, and I thought I might bounce some of those thoughts off you this week.

But first: I have never lived close to the shul I daven in. Growing up, we were an eighteen-minute walk, mostly uphill, from our shul. For the first fourteen years of our married life, Bernice and I lived 20 miles from shul. In East Talpiot, we had a challenging twelve-minute uphill climb to shul, and here in Maale Adumim shul is what used to be a twelve-minute walk, and is now, inexplicably, a sixteen-minute walk away, including a climb of 82 steps at the end of our street. The disadvantage of living so far from where you daven is obvious; the advantages perhaps less so. Let me, then, describe the two key advantages.

First, nobody WhatsApps me early in the morning to tell me that the shul is one short of a minyan.

Second, I usually have time, either walking to shul or walking home from shul, for contemplation. Some of my better blog posts have been shaped on the potter’s wheel of my walk home.

So, when a chance conversation with a fellow-congregant after the evening service last Friday night set me thinking, I had sixteen minutes to mull over what he had said as I walked home.

Let me give you a quick background to the topic of our conversation. In the wake of October 7 and the abduction of the hostages, and in common with most mainstream congregations in Israel (though not as quickly as some), our community adopted the practice of reciting a couple of psalms at the end of each of the three daily services, followed by the brief prayer Acheinu Kol Beit Yisrael, calling on God to have mercy on all Jewish captives, and to bring about their release. The psalms are read antiphonally, with the shaliach tzibbur (the person leading the prayers) reading the psalm a verse at a time, pausing for the congregation to repeat each verse. This traditional method draws each congregant’s attention to each verse.

We prepared copies of a sheet with a dozen appropriate psalms, traditionally recited in times of duress, and the shaliach tzibbur is free to choose which psalms to recite. In practice, most people choose to confine themselves to two very well-known psalms, which the congregation are familiar with and which more people are likely to respond to aloud. These are Psalm 121 (Essa Einai – I will lift up my eyes) – and Psalm 130 (Mimaamakim Kraticha – From the depths I called to You – or perhaps you know it better as De Profundis) As I say, we recite these three texts after completing the set liturgy of each service; their recital adds no more than two minutes to the service.

As I was leaving shul last Friday night, a fellow congregant said he felt that the time had come for us to cut out one of the psalms, and recite only one each time. He argued that reciting two psalms was a burdensome imposition on the congregation, and he pointed out that, judged objectively, our reciting the psalms and prayer ‘religiously’ after each service had, over the last months, yielded no tangible results. He admitted that he personally finds it difficult to think consciously of the hostages every time he recites the psalms; the very routine, he finds, makes genuine focus on the hostages’ plight more difficult to achieve each time afresh.

I told him that I didn’t feel the same way, and, as I walked home,  I gave more thought to what he had said and contemplated the essence of prayer.

Our sages tell us that prayer is a substitute for the animal sacrifice in the Temple. As such, it is an expression of worship and, primarily, of thanks to God. At the same time, our liturgy clearly acknowledges that there is also a place for supplication in prayer. Our services are structured to allow us to make local, even personal, requests of God. The question I found myself asking was: What is the purpose of that supplication? My friend in shul had clearly judged our prayers for the hostages to be ‘unsuccessful’. What, I asked myself, does success look like in relation to a prayer?

I think my answer is multi-layered. First and foremost, a prayer of request or supplication is, in common with all prayers, an acknowledgement of our position as the servants of God, and of His position as the Almighty. In turning to him to show mercy to the hostages, to help us in our hour of need, to heal our sickness, to ‘answer’ our prayers, we are primarily acknowledging Him as the proper address for our prayers. God alone is capable of bringing the hostages home. As many of our prayers explicitly state, such a prayer is an expression of the hope that God will want the outcome that we want. Yehi Ratzon Milfanecha – May it be Your will, O God. Our wish will be granted only if God’s will matches our will,

If talk of ‘granting a wish’ sounds more like Aladdin and the genie than the believing Jew and his or her God, let me attempt to justify my choice of words. I deliberately chose not to write, in the last paragraph, ‘Our prayers will be answered’ because I believe that our prayers are always answered. However, they may not be answered by what we want being granted. If your parents refused to allow you a second ice-cream as a child, they did not grant your wish, but they answered your prayer. ‘No’ is an answer, and, as in the case of the ice-cream, it is the right answer. Your parents knew what was good for you better than you did.

So, the first element of a prayer being successful is that it represents, for the supplicant, an acceptance and explicit acknowledgement of the true relationship between man and God.

The second element is, I feel, the effect that the prayer has on the consciousness of the person reciting the prayer. To set aside two minutes at the end of every service to pause and reflect on the plight of the hostages is to create a structure that guards against putting them out of our mind. The mainstream media achieve the same thing by providing a platform for the voices of the families of the hostages to be heard every day. My friend admitted that he found it difficult to engage with this reflection and to be moved by it on a regular basis. I admit that I don’t have the same experience. Without this daily reminder, I would, I fear, let whole days pass without thinking of the hostages. As it is, every time I recite the psalms I reflect on their suffering.

In this connection, I find it astonishing that, in our shul, more than a few congregants regularly walk out of shul during the recitation of these psalms. I know that these are not people who do not care about the hostages. Clearly, as my interlocutor suggested, the familiarity of the recitation has bred in them, at the very least, disregard. The way to combat this disregard is, naturally, to focus consciously on the words. Prayers are, of course, much more than words; at the same time, words are what prayers are wrapped up in, and words are the only route we have into prayers. An awareness of the words, and a focussing on them, is the pre-requisite for mindful, and therefore meaningful prayer, That, I am confident, is the way of Judaism. It is certainly the way of my Judaism.

By the time my reasoning had reached this point, I had reached home and was able to immediately put my abstract reflections into practice by mindfully reciting Kiddush.

Let my close by wishing you all Gmar Hatima Tova. However you mark Yom Kippur, may it be a meaningful day for you and, if it involves the recitation of any prayers, may you find the time and the state of mind to reflect on the meaning of those words.

Blogger’s Note: In an attempt to work around the Jewish calendar, and taking great care not to commit myself, I plan, bli neder, to post for the next two weeks on Monday morning rather than Tuesday morning.

It’s now 11PM on Monday evening. Having spent most of the last week finalising the layout and graphics for the shul magazine, I was able to proofread the galleys of the English half of the magazine today, which puts me, thankfully, ahead of schedule for our publication date.

However, when I came to sit down three hours ago to write this week’s blog post, I found that my brain had more or less turned to mush. Having spent the last two days trying, and failing miserably, to decide between another depressing post bemoaning how the world is going to hell in a handgun (yes, I know) and a short riff on the cultural significance, or otherwise, of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, when push came to shove I discovered that I couldn’t actually string two sentences together about anything. If I were a real writer, I’d say I had a case of block, but I don’t flatter myself..

Ando so, in what is disturbingly starting to look like a trend, I am actually going to admit defeat this week. Now that even we lie-abed Ashkenazim have started saying selichot, and I am having to get up twenty minutes earlier in the morning, I simply can’t stay up as late as I too often do.

If you’re looking for something to read this week, I recommend Gil Troy’s latest book, which goes by the least catchy title of the year so far: The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-Hatred. For those of you who don’t know him, Troy is an academic historian who has published several works about Zionism, and writes one of the two opinion columns in the Jerusalem Post that I feel is always essential reading. His latest book is short but typically authoritative and timely. This is a book that he wants to reach as many defenders of Israel and intelligent bystanders as possible, and so he has made it available to download for free. Here’s the link:

Click to access The-Jewish-Peoples-The-Essential-Guide-to-Zionism-WEB.pdf

There you go: a gateway to considerably more than my usual 1500 words, and written by someone who actually knows what he is talking about.

I’d like to reassure you that normal service will be resumed next week, but I see that Rosh Hashana starts on Monday night, so, being realistic, and barring miracles,I think that my next post will be published a day before Erev Yom Kippur.

Until then, may I wish you and us all a happy and healthy New Year, a year in which we find resolution and closure to at least some of the conflicts that are afflicting us all, and in which the world as a whole starts to emerge from the nightmares that threaten to engulf us.

“Some days”, as a wise man once said, “you’re the fly, and some days you’re the windscreen.” The secret of a contented life, I suspect, is to acknowledge and accept the truth of that observation. Of course, that probably works better if the ratio of days when you are the fly to days when you are the windscreen stays closer to 0.5 than 0.

Of course, most of the time, a day is a very crude measure for this ratio. Any given day will offer plenty of situations in which you could be the fly or the windscreen, and, in my experience, most of the time they are more or less evenly balanced. You’re held up in traffic and you miss the screening of the film you planned to catch. However, this gives you the opportunity to take a delightful late spring hour-long walk through the park. You waste half an hour looking for the glasses that are on your forehead, but then a friend you haven’t spoken to for ages gives you a call and you have a lovely chat. You get the idea.

And then there are days like today (Monday), when the light tone of those first two paragraphs is so completely inappropriate. I have just been listening to a random 60 minutes of the mainstream TV station’s evening news programme. The broadcaster’s radio news channel carries the audio of that programme every evening, usually from 7:00 to 8:30, but this evening it stayed with the feed until 9:30. Today was one of those days.

At 6:00 this morning, Hamas operatives in the outskirts of Gaza City approached an IDF shelter. They made their way, undetected, up to a tank that was parked outside the shelter, with a full crew inside the tank. Apparently, the crew were not sleeping, but were checking their surroundings and reporting to their HQ. The terrorists managed to lob a bomb into the tank, which exploded, killing the crew of four: Staff Sergeant Uri Lamed, aged 20, from Tel Mond; Sergeant Gadi Cotal, aged 20, from Kibbutz Afikim; Sergeant Amit Aryeh Regev, aged 19, from Modi’in-Maccabim-Re’ut; and a fourth soldier whose name has not been released.

The question begs to be asked: how is it possible that they didn’t spot the terrorists? Is it just the case that, on Day 703, our soldiers can no longer maintain the level of alertness that the situation demands? Whether or not, these are another four lives, ended before they had done little more than begin; four unique life adventures that will now never be followed. I see no reference online to any of the four being married. Is this a blessing? They leave no widows or orphans. Or is it a curse? They are the end of their line. Nothing of them is left here for their parents and siblings, other than an entire world of memories to be cherished and shared.

These four boys/men are the 901^st, 902^nd, 903^rd and 904^th members of the forces to have fallen since October 7^th began 23 months ago. Are all those lives paving the way to a better future? Today is not a day when I  feel strong enough to contemplate that question too deeply.

And then, just a few hours later, three terrorists armed with automatic weapons infiltrated from West Bank villages, crossing the barrier at one of the well-known crossing points used by Palestinians seeking to cross the barrier illegally and work in Israel. They made their way to one of Jerusalem’s major junctions, to a busy bus-stop that serves multiple bus lines and where, at that hour of the morning, many people crowd the pavement waiting for their buses. There they boarded a bus and opened fire, killing six civilians and wounding at least 21 more.

The six who died were: Dr Mordechai Steintzag, aged 79, who made aliya from the US in his mid-40s, and, discovering there was no ‘healthy’ bread available in Israel, started a home bakery that now supplies supermarkets throughout Israel; Sarah Mendelsohn, aged 60, who was a worker in Bnei Akiva’s head office, and was eulogized today as “sort of the movement’s mother figure”; Levi Yitzchak Pash, a 57-year-old who learnt and worked at Yeshivat Kol Torah, and was eulogized as someone who always gave to others (he apparently had accepted a lift this morning at the bus-stop from a passing motorist, but, when someone else mentioned that he needed to get to Shaarei Tzedek hospital, Pash gave up his seat and thus met his death); Yaakov Pinto, a 25-year-old who came on aliya alone from Spain as a teenager, learnt and taught at yeshiva, and married just three months ago; Rav Yosef David, aged 43, a Torah student who leaves a wife and four children; Yisrael Metzner, aged 28, a Torah student of particular intensity, seriousness and modesty.

This list reflects the fact that the bus stop is at Ramot junction, and Ramot is a religious (largely Haredi) neighbourhood of North Jerusalem. In every other respect, this list is a random list. These very special, very ordinary people were not singled out by their murderers; they were just as ordinary, and just as special, as any six Israelis, any six human beings, are.

And then, as if the day were not black enough, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu arrived at the scene of the attack, and, of all the things that they might have chosen to say, and ignoring all the ways in which this tragic event might have given Bibi an opportunity to unite this fractured nation, this is how he, and Ben-Gvir, saw fit to mark this occasion. A little background is needed.

On Sunday this week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Israel Prison Service is failing to carry out its legal obligation to provide adequate and nourishing food to security prisoners (most, though not all, of whom are, of course, Palestinians). The minister responsible for this issue is Ben-Gvir, who, at the scene of the terror attack, accused judges of encouraging terror to “raise its head”. Bibi then added to his prepared remarks by endorsing Ben-Gvir’s remarks. “With regard to the court,” he said, “you are also in this war, and we don’t make things easier for our enemies; we hit them as hard as we can, and that’s what you ought to be doing as well.” So outrageous and divisive is this that my online search shows that the mainstream media decided it would be better not to report these words.

It is worth pointing out that the law that the court found that the Prison Service and Ben-Gvir are ignoring is, of course, a law that Netanyahu’s government introduced.

Those of us with memories that go back earlier than last week will recall that, in opposition, Ben-Gvir, and Bibi, were always very quick to lay the blame for Palestinian terror attacks in Jerusalem on ineffective government. This, apparently, is no longer the case.

No, it’s been a very dark day here in Israel. The only things to raise the spirits were two statesmanlike pronouncements. The first was from Abu Mazen who was quick to condemn any attack on Israeli or Palestinian civilians. Does this include, I find myself wondering, the murderers of Israeli civilians that he pays terrorists lifetime stipends for perpetrating?

The second was from President Macron, a man of whom it might be said: ‘To lose one Prime Minister may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose three looks like carelessness.’ He looks at Palestinians murdering Israelis and sees this as an indication that now is the perfect time for a two-state solution. “What,” he has presumably asked himself, “could possibly go wrong?” There speaks a man whose country’s civil struggles were with populations conveniently separated from France by a body of water considerably wider than the Jordan river, or possibly a man who has studied no history.

Tomorrow, by the law of averages, I should be the windscreen. And so to bed.

It used to be that becoming the greatest in the world at your sport was something you pursued privately, individually, obsessively, and in a markedly low-tech manner. Don Bradman famously played no competitive cricket as a child. Instead, he spent hours throwing a golf ball at a curved irregular brick wall in his back garden and hitting it on the rebound with a cricket stump. Among other things, this gave him an extraordinary ability to react very quickly to uneven bounce, which probably accounts in part for the fact that any discussion of the greatest batsman ever is a pointless exercise.

If we judge batsmen by their average runs scored, then competition is very fierce through the ages. 45 batsmen in the history of test cricket have averaged 50 or more. 44 of them average between 50.06 and 62.66 runs, which is very respectable. And then there is Bradman, so far out on his own that he doesn’t really belong on the same chart, with a test average of 99.94. Here’s a thousand words-worth of graph to hammer the point home:

The real picture is actually even more dramatic than that. Can any of you cricket fans name the batsman with the second highest average? It’s actually PHKS Mendis of Sri Lanka, and, if you didn’t get that right, it will be partly because Mendis, in common with the next three names on the list, played fewer than 24 tests. You have to go down to No 7 Sutcliffe to find another batsman who played a statistically significant number of tests.

So that’s what used to be. Spend 12 years in your back garden with a golf ball and a stump, and, if you have the innate ability to build on, you may just end up existing in a league of your own.

Needless to say, those days are long gone. In the modern world, sports teams, and individual sports stars, hire managers and trainers and separate coaches for each set of skills, and dieticians and physiotherapists and psychotherapists and doctors and witch doctors and goodness knows what else.

In the world of motor sports, of course, we are well used to this obsessive attention being lavished not only on the players but also on the machines, and the F1 competition is arguably as much about technology as it is about driving talent and skill. The same is true, of course, of cycling, yachting, and, to a lesser degree, any sport that uses equipment.

The dramatic improvements in personal best times in swimming in the 2010s were all attributable to developments in swimsuits. First, variable elasticity of the material compressed the body, making it more streamlined and hydrodynamic. Then, newly developed water-resistant microfilament fabrics reduced drag by up to 8%. The use of bonded rather than sewn seams reduced drag by a further 6%. The impact that this had on the 2009 World Swimming Championship times was such that one particular full-body suit was banned by the sports’ authorities in 2010.

You may also remember the Nike Vaporfly controversy. In case you don’t, we are talking about a running shoe whose advanced technology, specifically carbon fiber plates and specialized foam (don’t ask me; I just google this stuff) gave runners a significant advantage in bounce off the track. The shoe, basically, was providing some of the energy that would otherwise be provided by the athlete’s muscles.

You can, of course, argue that all of these are examples of difference in degree and not kind, and that equipment developments have always enhanced and will always enhance performance. If the developments are open to all, they should be welcomed. Faster running track surfaces are an example of an even playing field. (Did you like what I did there?)

Certainly, the modern cricket bat has effectively brought the boundary rope ever closer to the batsman’s crease, as the number of 6’s scored in the average innings these days will testify. Mind you, Gary Sobers’ performance for Notts against Glamorgan at the beautiful, and now sadly no-longer, St Helens’ ground, hitting Malcolm Nash for six sixes in a single over in 1968, still stands supreme, considering the bat he was using. St Helen’s was, it is fair to say, a bijou ground, but nevertheless what an achievement!

Welcoming back my readers from beyond the reach of the old empire and the greatest game: If you’ve ever upgraded your tennis racquet or sports shoes, after an embarrassingly long time, you will doubtless have experienced first-hand the impact of advancing technology. For those of us who don’t change our car every three years, it is much the same experience, something akin to suddenly finding yourself in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You may, by now, be wondering what has set me off on this flight of fancy. Well, it is the news that I read today that science is currently engaged in pushing back the boundaries of sport in ways that I wasn’t previously aware of. Gabriel Vichera was a biotech doctoral student in 2010, when his attention was caught by a story about a cloned polo horse that had been sold for $800,000.

Polo is, of course, an elitist sport that attracts many wealthy players, not least in Argentina, and cloning, typically from highly valued polo ponies, had been developing since 2003 in Argentina. Vichera founded a company, Kheiron Biotech, with financial backing, and is now breeding and selling cloned horses, at an average of $40,000 dollars a horse. This year the company expects to produce 400 horses by cloning.

However, the interesting part of this story is that the company is also conducting research into gene editing. The company is using a technology known as CRISPR, which works like genetic scissors. (I told you not to ask me!) They are experimenting with reducing the body’s expression of the myostatin gene, a gene that limits muscle growth, with the aim of producing a polo pony that is unnaturally fast and strong.

The sports’ authorities have not yet authorised the introduction of genetically engineered ponies into the sport. What is clear is that many polo pony breeders are, understandably, very much against the development, which may produce stock that is both more improved than breeding techniques can ever hope to achieve, and that is ‘brought to market’ very much faster.

So here is a subtle philosophical question. Polo pony breeders use scientific knowledge gained over generations (and also their intuitive gut feelings) in an attempt to engineer, through selective breeding, polo ponies that are closer to the ideal. Is the use of cloning technology qualitatively different from that, or is it just a more modern iteration of it? And, today’s big question, is genetic engineering through CRISPR qualitatively or only quantitively different?

And, for those of you looking for a plotline for your next thriller, is a mad scientist somewhere, as we speak, applying CRISPR technology to produce the next heavyweight boxing champion of the world?

Let us end with a couple of reminders of times when the world of sports was more innocent, and certainly less driven. Angela Mortimer died last week. She won the Wimbledon Ladies Singles title in 1961, beating crowd favourite Christine Truman in the first all-British final since 1914 (and, to date, the last). As well as holding the trophy for a year, she also won a £20 voucher for Lillywhites, a West End sports shop, equivalent to just under £400 (1800 shekels, $535) today. This year, Iga Świątek won £3 million. Yes, but is she happy?

And finally, it is fair to say that the England cricket team of the 1980s lacked something of the dedication and discipline of more recent years (although the early 2000s had some characters as well). Allan Lamb, a magnificent batsman and a real character, recalled this week playing a tour match against Western Australia.

The Americas Cup was being held in nearby Fremantle, and one evening, after a day’s cricket, several team members met up with the English sailing team, who were sponsored by a whisky distiller. Ian Botham was involved in a whisky drinking contest, among other pranks, and was so hungover the following day that when he went out to bat he forgot to take his bat with him, and someone had to run out to the middle with it. However, being Botham, he still managed to top score with 48 off 38 balls. Golden days!

Join me next week for, possibly, another self-inulgent nostalgic wallow in another part of the gene pool. Or, just possibly, something completely different.