Blogger’s Apologies. This is the post I should have published last week, when it would have been immediately relevant to you, and when it would have reflected the news story of the day. I can only remind you that I’m still the 17-year-old who handed in his homework a day late every week for the last two years of his schooldays, and plead that I needed a week of thought, and the invaluable contribution of the National Library of Israel blog, to formulate this week’s reflections.

“Shocked, but not surprised.” Those four words, I would suggest, best sum up the reaction of the Jewish world to the pogrom on Bondi beach a week ago (as I write). How can we be anything but shocked at the unhurried and casual calm of the two terrorists, as they strolled along the bridge, picking off victims. At the same time, how can anyone be surprised that such a massacre occurred in Australia, whose iconic Sydney opera house was the scene of a mass pro-Palestinian demonstration on October 9, 2023, 18 days before Israel launched its ground offensive in Gaza, and whose prime minister has failed, since then, to unequivocally condemn and forcefully act against the inflammatory rhetoric and escalating violence of Palestinians and pro-Palestinians against Jewish Australians, choosing instead to ‘recognise’ the ‘state’ of ‘Palestine’.

Bondi feels like something of a watershed. Part of our shock may stem from the fact that we tend to think of Australians as more laid back, less polarised, than Europeans and Americans. Knowing that Sydney is over 14,000 km from Jerusalem, we may also have believed that Australia had no reason to be unduly interested in events in the Middle East. After Bondi, we know that the intifada has indeed been globalised. In addition, of course, fifteen innocent victims is thirteen complete worlds more than the two victims of the Heaton Park Synagogue  attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and those thirteen additional martyrs do represent a substantive difference, I feel.

If we want to digest, and to explore the deep significance of, the Bondi attack, we have had, over this past week, literally in our hands and minds, the perfect source text. (Jews, by definition, cannot explore the significance of anything without a source text.) In this case, the text is one written in the blood of Jews through the millennia. It is written in Hebrew, which means that many of the millions who sing it do not connect deeply with its meaning, because they do not understand Hebrew, but rather connect with it viscerally, as a part of their cultural-historical-familial heritage that has always been there. I invite you to explore it this week with me.

Most of us probably grew up with five verses of Maoz Tzur. The first is an appeal to God to rebuild the Temple. This restoration will occur when Israel’s enemies will be finally defeated. Then the dedication of the Temple will be completed.

Refuge, Rock of my salvation: to You it is a delight to give praise. Restore my House of prayer, so that there I may offer You thanksgiving. When You silence the loud-mouthed foe, then will I complete, with song and psalm, the altar’s dedication.

מעוז צור ישועתי, לך נאה לשבח, תיכון בית תפילתי, ושם תודה נזבח. לעת תכין מטבח מצר המנבח. אז אגמור בשיר מזמור חנוכת המזבח.

This is a very appropriate sentiment for Hannukah, since the vanquishing of our enemies and the rededication of the Temple so that we can offer thanks to God reflects precisely the story of Hannukah.

The following four verses walk us through Jewish history, which, in the memorable summary, is a repeated story of “They tried to kill us; we beat them; let’s eat.” Or is it? Let’s take a closer look.

Troubles sated my soul; my strength was spent with sorrow They embittered my life with hardship, when I was enslaved under Egyptian rule. But God with His great power brought out His treasured people, While Pharaoh’s host and followers sank like a stone into the deep.

רעות שבעה נפשי, ביגון כוחי כלה, חיי מררו בקשי, בשעבוד מלכות עגלה. ובידו הגדולה, הוציא את הסגולה, חיל פרעה וכל זרעו ירדו כאבן במצולה.

Initially, Pharaoh, fearing that “this people” would grow so numerous that they would side with Egypt’s enemies and overwhelm the Egyptians, enslaved the Children of Israel. It was only when Moses demanded the right to lead the people into the desert to worship God (something they had been less than dedicated to in Egypt), that matters escalated to the point where Pharaoh sought to slaughter the entire nation.

Here, at the period when the family of Abraham became the nation of Israel, the dual nature of that nation, its peoplehood and its religion, is immediately central to the story.

He brought me to His holy abode, but even there I found no rest. The oppressor came and exiled me, because I had served strange gods. I had drunk poisoned wine. I almost perished. Then Babylon fell, Zerubbabel came: within seventy years I was saved.

דביר קדשו הביאני, וגם שם לא שקטתי, ובא נוגש והגלני, כי זרים עבדתי. ויין רעל מסכתי, כמעט שעברתי, קץ בבל, זרבבל, לקץ שבעים נושעתי.

This verse describes the Babylonian exile, which was a result of Israel abandoning its religion. However, the people were exiled as a unit, and, when Babylon fell to the Persians, the people were granted permission, after only 70 years of exile, to return to their land, the Land of Israel.

[The one who] sought to cut down the tall fir tree [was] the Agagite, son of Hammedatha. But it became a trap to him, and his arrogance was brought to an end. You raised the head of the Benjaminite, and the enemy’s name You blotted out. His many sons and his household You hanged on the gallows.

כרות קומה ברוש בקש, אגגי בן המדתא, ונהיתה לו למוקש, וגאוותו נשבתה. ראש ימיני נשאת, ואויב שמו מחית – רוב בניו וקנייניו על העץ תלית.

Next is the Purim story, where the focus is not on Jewish religion. (The story begins with the Jews revelling in Ahasuerus’ feast, which was definitely not kosher-catered.) Haman is a classic antisemite who sees the Jews as a seditious people, who can never be a part of the Persian and Medean empire, because they will always insist on keeping themselves separate, however much they appear to assimiliate.

Then the Greeks gathered against me, in the days of the Hasmoneans. They broke down the walls of my towers, and defiled all the oils. But from the last remaining flask miracle was wrought for Your beloved. Therefore the Sages these eight days ordained for song and praise.

יוונים נקבצו עלי, אזי בימי חשמנים, ופרצו חומות מגדלי, וטמאו כל השמנים, ומנותר קנקנים, נעשה נס לשושנים, בני בינה ימי שמונה קבעו שיר ורננים.

The Greeks, on the other hand, had no issue with the Jews as people, but only as practising religious Jews. The Greeks’ defilement of the Temple was designed to speed up the Hellenization of the Jews and their successful absorption into the Greek empire. This is, of course, the story of Hannukah, and, in one sense, it seems a logical ending point for the song.

Speaking for myself, growing up with the above five verses, I never consciously thought about the fact that they do not tell the complete story. However, you can argue that there should be a sixth verse, retelling the story of a fourth inimical empire – Rome – the destruction of the Second Temple and the exile.

And, of course, there is.

Bare Your holy arm, and hasten the time of salvation. Take retribution on behalf of Your servants against the evil nation. For deliverance has been too long delayed; there seems no end to the evil days. Thrust Admon into the darkness of death, and establish for us the seven Shepherds.

חשוף זרוע קודשך, וקרב קץ הגאולה. נקום נקמת דם עבדיך, מאומה הרשעה. כי ארכה לנו הישועה ואין קץ לימי הרעה, דחה אדמון בצל צלמון הקם לנו רועים שבעה.

Admon – the red one – is associated with Edom (Yishmael) and, by extension, with Rome and, by extension, with the Holy Roman Empire and Christianity.

It is only since coming on aliya that I have become familiar with this verse. To examine why this is so, and why it appears in some siddurim and not others, we need to look at the history of Maoz Tzur. (It is here that I am indebted to the National Library’s blog, which is always a fascinating read.)

Maoz Tzur was written in the Middle Ages, and it is quite possible that the sixth verse was composed together with the first five and that the sixth verse was suppressed, either by the Christian authorities throughout Europe, or by the Jewish communities themselves in the interest of self-preservation.

However, some scholars argue that the last verse is not part of the original piyyut but a later addition. This makes sense; otherwise, why sing this poem specifically on Hanukkah? The words of Maoz Tzur refer, in each verse, to a different exile (Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome), and it could have been sung on many other occasions in our calendar. Only if the poem ends with the story of the miracle of the cruse of oil is there reason to associate it specifically with Hannukah.

There are a few references to Maoz Tzur in medieval Jewish literature, but the first time we see a reference to that last verse is in 1696 in a book printed in Germany, outlining the main laws and ideas of daily mitzvot and the festivals of the year. In the chapter discussing the laws of Hanukkah, the author writes:

“I found it written, and since the poem of Maoz Tzur deals only with the three kingdoms of Babylon, Media, and Greece, and the fourth kingdom of the exile of Edom, Yishmael, is not mentioned at all, therefore, we established some rhymes that speak of this redemption from exile, to be recited after the song Maoz Tzur in the tune of Maoz Tzur.”

I find myself wondering whether, in Germany in 1696, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, things looked promising enough for Jews to feel that they could anticipate God’s vanquishing of Edom. It is certainly easy to understand why the Jews of 19^th Century Eastern Europe and mid-20^th Century Europe would have felt that they had no strength to sing the sixth verse.

On the other hand, it is easy to understand how, after the establishment of the State of Israel, and after the Six-Day War, and after the recalibration of Catholic-Jewish relations in the wake of the Second Vatican Council in the mid-60s, Jews, in Israel and in the liberal democracies, felt that they could foresee a future where Israel’s last imperial enemy was finally vanquished.

And then came October 7. And then came the globalisation of the intifada. And I find myself wondering now whether we will feel able to sing, to that rousing, uplifting tune, the words of the sixth stanza of Maoz Tzur, or whether we are now in one of those periods in history when we can still pray to God to vanquish our enemies, but we cannot imagine the accomplishment of that vanquishing.

One final thought. Maoz Tzur makes it clear to us that, at different points in Jewish history, the focus of antisemitism is sometimes on Judaism as a religion, and sometimes on the Jews as a people. The target of antisemitism is sometimes the religious rituals, artefacts, practices and beliefs, and sometimes the people themselves. Our enemies sometimes restrict our freedoms, sometimes exile us, sometimes enslave us, sometimes murder us.

The enemy we face today claims, of course, that he is anti-Zionist, not antisemitic. His fight is with Israelis, not Jews. What this means, if I am reading it correctly, is that his objection is to the concept of a Jewish people, not to the concept of a Jewish religion. The flaw in his argument is his belief, or claim, that the two are separable. The fundamental truth, of course, is that the Jewish people is inexorably bound up with the Jewish religion, and both fuse together in the Land of Israel.

Our enemies actually understand this. They acknowledged it when they attacked us on Yom Kippur 50 years ago, Simchat Torah two years ago, Yom Kippur less than four months ago, Hannukah a week ago. (Do you detect a theme, there.) They acknowledge it every time they kill a Jew “for being a Zionist” even though they have no idea whether the individual Jew they kill identifies as a Zionist.

One of the tragedies in our current situation is that there are Jews who reject this truth, even though our enemies embrace it in their actions against us. But that is a subject for another time.

Bit of a hodge-podge today, mostly arising from last week’s blog post. Let’s dive right in.

Two of my originally American readers encountered what was, for them, a new word last week: anti-macassar. One googled it, and thanked me for teaching him a new word. “I didn’t even know those had a name,” he admitted. This, I suspect, is because, while Victorian men were applying macassar to their hair, American men were taming the Wild West. To each his own.

The other friend confronted me in shul, to ask about anti-macassars, because she strives, commendably, to minimise her digital footprint, and chose to ask me rather than Google. I must confess to finding that rather flattering. I must, however, admit, that I have subsequently confirmed and fleshed out the answer I gave her by plunging down a number of google rabbit-holes, all so that you don’t have to.

So, our story begins in Sulawesi (as so many do), although at the time that our story begins, it was known as Celebes. One of Indonesia’s major islands, Sulawesi boasts, on its Western coast, a major port by the name of Macassar. I won’t give you its entire history, but the first mention of Macassar is in the Nagarakretagama, which you hardly need me to tell you was a 14^th-Century eulogy to the king of the Mahajapit empire, which was, as if you needed reminding, a Javanese Hindu-Buddhist thalassocratic empire. (A thalassocracy, for those of you who slept through Ancient Greek at school, is a state or nation that acquires maritime supremacy over a large area of sea, rather than land. The Vikings are probably the example most of us are more familiar with (not first-hand, you understand), but Mahajapit (also known, confusingly, as Wilatikta) extended over almost the entirety of the Nusantara archipelago.) But I digress.

Skipping lightly over the Portuguese (1513), the Sultan of Gowa (1545), the Dutch (always a good idea to skip over them) (1605), Islamisation (1607), the English (1613), the Dutch again (1667), the Chinese (1730s), the Dutch yet again (1906), the Japanese (1942) and the Australians (1945), Macassar eventually became the capital of the newly declared State of East Indonesia in 1946 and was renamed Ujungpandang in 1971.

Incidentally, just to confuse matters, there is another Macassar in the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. When the Dutch East India Company expelled a local Muslim religious and civil leader, Sheik Yusuf, from Macassar to South Africa, he was such a prominent figure that the settlement he founded, which became a centre for spreading the message of Islam to the Capetown slave community, became known as Macassar in his honour. Rather as if a neighbourhood were renamed Nantymoel because that’s the town in Wales that Bernice and I came on aliya from. But I digress.

We take up our story again in late 18^th-Century London, where barbers would concoct hair preparations for which they claimed astonishing powers, and sell them to an eager public for considerably more than they cost to prepare. One such barber was Alexander Rowland, and, from the moment he began offering his customers Rowland’s Macassar oil, it was a resounding hit. Undoubtedly, this was partly because of the name. Probably, some customers believed the oil was an extrusion of the macassar ebony, a very handsome wood, deep brown or black with striking yellowish brown streaks, native to Indonesia. In fact, the oil was almost certainly originally an extrusion of the schleichera oleosa (rather a less catchy name for a tree), or gum lac tree (the name tells you all you need to know), also native to Indonesia and, indeed, the whole of Southeast Asia. Let us be generous to Alexander, and assume that the ships that carried the oil for import to Britain left from the port of Macassar.

Whether or not, a couple of decades of aggressive and very effective advertising that made extravagant claims about the product transforming a bald pate into a luscious head of hair established it as a firm national favourite; at some point, Rowland began preparing it from the cheaper and more readily available ingredients coconut oil and ylang ylang (a tropical tree still valued for the essential oils extracted from its flowers, which has a strong floral fragrance).

Impressively, having once been Prince Albert’s favoured hair preparation, Rowland’s macassar oil remained in continuous production until 1954 (in other words for 161 years), when the company went into liquidation. However, do not despair. An enterprising gent by the name of Shane O’Shaughnessy left the world of IT to return to his grandfather’s barbering business, and, in 2012, revived some of his grandfather’s preparations, including macassar oil. So, the anti-macassars on our new lounge suite (of which, incidentally, we took delivery this past Sunday) are not a mere whimsical touch on our part, but may well prove extremely useful if some hirsute English fop or dandy chooses to pay us a visit.

I can’t leave the world of tonsorial taming without mentioning that cricketing and football hero of my youth, Denis Compton. Compton played both football and cricket for England, but it was as a cricketing batsman that he is best remembered – one of the finest England produced (in an era where it produced a good few), he set several records that are still unbroken. In a very early example of sports sponsorship, Compton became the famous face – or, rather, hairline – of Brylcreem, the 1940s and 50s heir of macassar oil, a brilliantine cream that both controlled and gave a sheen to men’s hair.

Compton earned £1000 a year (the equivalent of just under £45000 today), which was a huge amount by the standards of the time. To put this in context, I haven’t been able to find stats for cricketer’s salaries in 1950, but a footballer earned £14 a week, or £728 a year, so Compton did pretty well from his sponsorship.

At this point, you may well be wondering why this obsession with matters tonsorial. I must admit I was wondering that myself, until the penny dropped a few minutes ago. The truth is, I’m feeling a little vulnerable, so I hope I can rely on you to lend a sympathetic ear (or, more accurately, eye, unless you’re using one of those AI text readers).

Ever since I first noticed, some decades ago, that I have what I always preferred to refer to as an aggressive forehead, I have been coming to terms with the fact that the thick mop of hair I enjoyed in my twenties and thirties seemed destined to have a shorter shelf life than most of the rest of me. (On reading that last sentence, Bernice suggested that I never had a thick mop of hair. Recollections, as Her Majesty observed, may differ.) I gave up going to the barber about fifteen years ago, when he insisted on charging me full price, even though I was in the chair barely long enough to warm the seat. Since then, Bernice has been trimming my locks, and a very fine job she has done of it, too.

However, in recent years, it has been an increasing challenge for my shaver’s trimmer attachment to grab hold of my hair to cut it, there being less and less of my hair to grab hold of. Last week, it took Bernice repeated passes over the back and sides to trim them (there having been nothing on top for some considerable time). When she had finished, I came to the conclusion that the game was no longer worth the candle. It had been taking Bernice longer and longer to cut my thinner and thinner hair, and, I felt, we were now so close to the point where it would take her an infinite amount of time to cut an infinitesimally small amount of hair that, in short, we had reached the end of the barbering road.

So, from the trimming chair, I went straight to the bathroom, and shaved off all of the remaining hair at the side of my head. (‘All’ is rather a grand term for the quantity involved, but the principle holds.) This included shaving off my sideburns, which were considerably fuller. I left the sparse undergrowth at the back, where I could not see it. The result was that, when I looked in the mirror, I appeared completely bald.

In the week since then, I have learnt a number of important lessons. One: if you plan to shave your head, try to avoid choosing the very week where a previously interminable summer dips suddenly and dramatically into winter. Two: a short, stubbly, head-covering of hair, in combination with a fairly coarse-crocheted kippa, creates a Velcro-like effect that secures the kippa to your head surprisingly better than you might have expected. (I had, in anticipation of serious challenges in this department, ordered a healthy length of wig tape, which, as I write, has cleared Israeli customs, and should be arriving in the next few days. I have no idea whether it will be effective, but I look forward to finding out.)

Three (and this is the painful part of this whole story): I wondered how people would react to this new tonsorial look, and it has been a very bitter pill to swallow to discover that scarcely anyone has noticed. This forces me to the painful conclusion that, over the last couple of years, I have been labouring under the misapprehension that I have been living under a head of hair at all. Clearly, I was, to all intents and purposes, bald long before I shaved my head.

Don’t get me wrong. Having taken the plunge, I am very happy with the result, not least because I have made four other very positive discoveries. One: I will never need to buy another packet of kippa clips. Two: all those much too small kippot that I had been saving for no reason are now a perfect size. Three: the bottle of shampoo that I suspected might see me out I can now sell, because shampoo is something that lives for me only in the past. Four: I have shaved not only my head but also a couple of minutes off my showering time. One sponge with one squirt of shower gel now does me top to toe, I am already planning what to do with my extra half-an-hour a week.

Now that I’ve got all that off my chest, next week, I promise, will be a hair-free post.

And so, while you’re looking the other way, another 19 years slip by, and before you know it
that new lounge suite is starting to look embarrassingly shabby. That’s more or less the point
we reached a few months ago, and so we started exploring possible replacements.
A few days stumbling around online led us to the conclusion that anything that we were
likely to find as comfortable as what we were replacing was going to cost us more than we
really wanted to spend. Enter Plan B.
While it’s true that our old suite (a three-seater plus two-seater) is getting a little misshapen
around the arms and the headrests, since it is a bulgy style of furniture anyway, this is not
something we couldn’t contemplate living with. The real problem is that the fabric has
become stained, both from the occasional spillage of coffee (or, in Bernice’s case, tea) and
from the long-term effects of perspiration (or, in Bernice’s case, glow).
So, we started to explore recovering the suite. Another round of research soon led us to the
conclusion that a proper recovering job would set us back not sufficiently significantly short
of buying a new suite. Although the recliner mechanism is fine on all four reclining seats, the
extent to which the stuffing has been knocked out of the sofas means that we didn’t feel
paying a hefty sum to recover it made sense. Time for Plan C.
A further internet research revealed loose, one-size fits all, fabric covers, that (online, at least)
tie effortlessly underneath the sofa, are held tightly in place (online, at least) by long, thin,
foam sausages that tuck down between the seat and the back and seat and sides, and come
with glowing recommendations from hundreds of satisfied customers. For an outlay of only a
couple of hundred shekels, we could effectively renovate our suite.
Except, of course, the material is rather less durable than we had hoped, securing the covers
to recliner seats proved more of a logistics challenge than foreseen, and the foam sausages,
no matter how firmly tucked down, soon spring up again, startling unsuspecting guests and
driving us mad. After a couple of months of living with the idiosyncrasy of this papering over
the cracks, we faced the fact that we really had to bite the bullet and buy a new suite.
An initial, and fairly thorough, internet trawl revealed that, in the sweet spot of reclining
sofas that do not require remortgaging the house, Dr Gav has little, if any, competition.
Blogger’s Note: If you have had a bad experience with Dr Gav furniture, please don’t feel
obliged to share your story with me. We have already gone ahead and ordered, so I’d rather
not know what’s liable to be waiting for us a depressingly short distance down the road.
As luck would have it, we reached this point exactly on Black Friday. For the benefit of my
readers outside Israel, I need to explain that this is less of a statistical improbability than you
might think, because, in Israel, Black Friday lasts for the entire month of November.
Sometimes, it is called Black November, but sometimes it is still called Black Friday (and
sometimes even Bleck Friday, but that’s another story), even though it lasts 30 days.
Having found Dr Gav’s website, Bernice and I saw that there was even a choice of suites, at
more or less the same price as we paid 19 years ago, when we certainly couldn’t afford it. So,
last week, we set off for Talpiot in South Jerusalem, to see what we would make of the suites
in the flesh. Having done our homework, we were able to announce to the saleswoman that
we wanted a 3+2 with a manual reclining mechanism, and, in addition, a reclining TV chair.
(In our back room, which we call the snug, where our 32-inch screen lives, we have an
electric reclining sofa, and it feels decadently luxurious, but for the salon we need a seating
arrangement that we can recline in on Shabbat, so it has to be manual.)

The only unresolved question was: leather or fabric. After viewing, and sitting on, all that Dr
Gav had to offer, we quickly made up our minds. We really felt we couldn’t justify spending
another 35% for leather. As it happens, the TV chair was not in exactly the same style, and
not available in the same shade of grey, as the sofas. Bernice thinks this variation is very
sophisticated, and, by this stage of our shared life, I know the areas in which she outpunches
me, so I immediately bowed to her refined taste.
The best news of all was that, as luck would have it, the day we walked into the shop was the
last day of Black Friday, and the 3+2 were, for that one day only, available at a 33%
discount, and the chair at a 6% discount. This was a little confusing, since the day was
actually December 1, which seems an odd day to end Black November. However, we didn’t
argue. (I have, subsequently, revisited the website, where I see that the furniture is now being
offered at full price, so it appears we were indeed lucky to get in just in time.)
Feeling very pleased with ourselves, we sat down at the showroom desk to finalise the
purchase. (The nice thing about buying furniture, incidentally, is that you get to sit in a really
comfortable chair when you finalise the purchase.) We confirmed the choice of fabric from
the swatch book (Note to self: research the etymology of ‘swatch’ – such a wonderful-
sounding word), and had the price confirmed…and then the fun started.
First, the saleswoman added the delivery charge. I’m pleased to say that there was no extra
charge for delivering over what a few people who didn’t get the memo still call the green
line. (A surcharge for delivery to ‘the territories’ used to be standard, but seems to have more
or less died out.) Then, when she confirmed that the delivery team would undoubtedly be
ready to take our old suite to the municipal bins at the end of the street, for a modest
remuneration, I made a mental note to add another 100 shekels to the bill.
As Bernice and I rode the (free for seniors) bus home, we agreed that we could tie the three
pieces together, thereby counter-balancing the different shade of grey and slightly different
design of the TV chair, by buying another cushion at IKEA to match the two we already have
on our current sofas. This, of course, is predicated on the assumption that IKEA still stock
that cushion design. I am sure we will find they don’t, and will have to buy two new cushion
covers, in addition to the one new cushion.
While we are at IKEA, we will also probably be looking for six placemats in a distinctive
contrasting colour, to use as anti-macassars. We would buy anti-macassars, if we could only
find them in the shops, but they seem, strangely, to have gone out of fashion in the last 120
years.
As you can see, our list of hidden extra costs is mounting up. However, at least everything I
have mentioned so far is in the realm of the expected. Once we returned home, Bernice came
up with one that I wasn’t expecting. She pointed out that probably the shabbiest part of our
current sofas is the footrests, which are discoloured and rubbed and dirty. “We’re going to
have to start taking our shoes off when we come in, and changing into slippers,” she informed
me. I couldn’t argue with the logic, even though I am not a fan of changing into slippers.
Once I have invested in the, at my age not inconsiderable, effort of getting a pair of shoes on
in the morning, I like to extract the maximum from that effort, and to keep them on until I go
to bed.
However, as I said, I couldn’t fault Bernice’s reasoning. The only problem is that my one
decent pair of slippers live in Portugal, where I need them for the winter, especially when my
shoes are soaking wet, and the only pair I have in Israel are a ridiculously wide pair of
backless slippers, bought on impulse several years ago. In order to keep them on, I have to

avoid lifting my feet off the floor, with the result that they make me look and sound a good
fifteen years older than I am.
So, a couple of days later, off I went to our local mall, to buy slippers. All the cheap ones
were backless and therefore no use at all, but I eventually found a pair of Kippy slippers that I
will be perfectly happy with. (Again for the benefit of non-Israeli readers, Kippy was a
hedgehog character in Israel children TV’s version of Sesame Street, who wore slippers that
zipped up the centre, which have, subsequently, always been known, and loved, or mocked,
in Israel as Kippy slippers. To see what I mean, or to relive your children’s childhood, take a
look here.) Slippers! Yet another hidden extra!
But that’s not all. If, as we are told, time is money, then there is one more hidden extra I need
to tell you about. As we left for our last trip to Portugal, we had time to kill at the airport, and
somehow talked ourselves into buying a bottom-of-the-range robot cleaner (which,
incidentally, we are happy with, so far). I hadn’t realised, when we bought it, the investment
of time in setting up that this would involve, but I soon learnt that I needed to let the robot
map each floor of the house. I then needed to divide each map into its separate rooms, in
order to be able to give specific cleaning instructions. Naturally, the robot maps such
impassable barriers as sofas, thereby learning that it must pass around them. A couple of days
ago, I realised that, after our new furniture is delivered, and we have decided on final
placement, I will have to redraw the downstairs map, to accommodate the new suite.
Next time someone says: “We really ought to think about replacing the…”, I’m going to
insist we carry out a brainstorming exercise to properly understand just what ‘replacing
the…’ is going to involve, hidden extras and all. I think we’ll start to find that it’s remarkable
what we can actually carry on living with.

T S Eliot assured us that the world ends not with a bang but with a whimper, but in the last few months I have started to feel that my cultural world (or, at least, the cultural world that I inhabited and loved before making aliya in 1986, which is the cultural world that I will always regard as home) is ending not with a bang, nor with a single whimper, but, rather, with an inexorable series of whimpers, as, one by one, the cultural icons of my youth and my first decade or so of adulthood turn up on the obituary pages.

This week, it was the turn of Tom Stoppard, whose unique gifts I want to celebrate today. Before I dive deeper into his work, a couple of observations, if I may.

Many of the comments below Stoppard’s obituary on Sunday spoke about what a tremendous loss his death was. While I am sure that it is felt as a profound loss by his family and friends, this seems to me a strange description for the world as a whole. Stoppard was 88 years old at his death. He completed what he declared would be his last play – Leopoldstadt – in 2019. Over a period of 56 years, he wrote 26 plays for the theatre, and adapted or translated 10 others. He also wrote the libretto for an opera, 10 plays for radio, 5 original plays and 2 loose adaptations for television, in addition to 17 film and television screenplays adapted from books and his own and others’ plays. As well as covering a range of genres, these 70 works span a wide range of subject matter. I must confess that I feel no profound sense of loss. I am, indeed, so overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of work that Stoppard has left us that I do not feel anything is lacking.

My second observation concerns the distinction that Stoppard shares with Shaw, Pinter, Chekhov, Brecht, Shakespeare (obviously) and a few other playwrights. He has been adjectivized. This coining of a term to describe the style of plays written by X strikes me as paradoxical. Such an adjective is useful only when describing another playwright’s work – ‘I feel X’s recent work is increasingly Pinteresque’. However, such an adjective is only coined for a playwright whose style is so idiosyncratic that any work by another playwright that puts one in mind of it feels like pastiche, and not really warranting serious discussion. So, the adjectives are, in practical terms, of very limited use.

Which is a neat way into addressing the question of what makes a play ‘Stoppardian’. One obituary suggested that Stoppardian is ‘shorthand for wit, linguistic cleverness and dazzling eloquence’.

This seems to me a very incomplete definition, that fails to recognise the extreme seriousness of Stoppard’s concerns in almost all of his work. He himself once wrote: “I want to demonstrate that I can make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours.” This, I feel, is an interesting comment for two reasons. The first is that, in dismissing his ‘wit, linguistic cleverness and dazzling eloquence’ as ‘flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours’, either Stoppard was being rather archly self-deprecating, or he was so naturally and effortlessly brilliant a master of words and realiser of absurd situations that he failed to see just how dazzling his wit was.

The second thing I want to note about Stoppard’s self-assessment is that he did not write: “I can make serious points while flinging a custard pie around the stage”, but, rather, “I can make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage”. The clever, eloquent wit is not an incidental entertainment that makes the serious content palatable to a theatre audience; it is, at its best (and a frighteningly high percentage of it is at its very best), the medium through which the message is conveyed. 

And that message is sometimes very serious indeed. If all you know of Stoppard is that he wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-winning film Shakespeare in Love, then you may be surprised that university professors of social and political theory write essays with titles like Freedom and Morality in the Plays of Tom Stoppard and doctoral candidates submit theses on such subjects as Epistemology and Ethics in Tom Stoppard’s ‘Professional Foul’

This may surprise you, even if you are familiar with the work with which Stoppard strode into the public eye in 1966, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The conceit of this play is so brilliant and so rich that I have to spell it out, even though most if not all of you will already be aware of it. What, Stoppard wonders, do minor characters in a play do, between the time they exit the stage in one scene and enter it again some time later. From this one question, Stoppard weaves a play parallel to Hamlet, following the offstage exploits of Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and exploring the logic of a world that exists suspended in limbo between their brief appearances onstage in Hamlet. When a probably befuddled theatregoer asked Stoppard “What is it all about?” he replied, with characteristic lack of pomposity, “It is about to make me a lot of money.”

Before I write about a particular television play I am very fond of, I want to give a taste of Stoppard’s intellectual range. He left the school he hated at 16, and, like many other auto-didacts, his interests were wide-ranging. The themes of his play Arcadia, for example, include the philosophical implications of the second law of thermodynamics, Romantic literature, and the English picturesque style of garden design. I cannot pretend to be educated enough to know whether he was right when he said: “The thing you have to understand is that, as a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas.” Even if that is true, he certainly succeeded in making the arguments around a huge range of political, ethical and aesthetic questions appear accessible to a general audience.

Which brings me to Professional Foul, an 80-minute television play from 1977 (when mainstream British TV still commissioned and broadcast every week serious plays by leading playwrights). The play is set in Prague and follows a Cambridge ethics don, Professor Anderson, as he attends a weekend philosophical colloquium in Prague, as a guest of the Communist Czech government. What should be a fairly uneventful trip, allowing him to attend the Czechoslovakia v England football game that is the real reason for him accepting the invitation, is complicated by a visit from an ex-student who asks the professor to smuggle out his banned doctoral thesis for publication in the West. The intervention of the Communist government leads to an ethical dilemma for Anderson, a situation explored by Stoppard through the opinions of several characters.

The play was written to coincide with Amnesty International’s Prisoners of Conscience Year and is dedicated to Czech playwright Václav Havel, then periodically imprisoned by the Czech Communist authorities, and later president of a free Czechoslovakia. In the year of publication and broadcast, the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia presented the government with a formal protest against its violations of the Helsinki Accords.

Happily, this play is available on YouTube here. I really hope that you will watch it, especially if you didn’t catch it in 1977. I recommend it for many reasons, but I will mention here only two. First, it is an opportunity to watch Peter Barkworth’s flawless performance as the urbane, cultured, decent, professor, whose lifetime of hypothetical academic musings about ethical problems proves, in the end, to have equipped him to deal magnificently, and for the first time in his life, with a genuine moral dilemma. Nobody portrayed the ultimately decent, upper-middle-class Englishman more perfectly or with more natural poise than Barkworth, and here, as always, he shines.

The second joy of the play is the language. One of the play’s major themes is the uses and abuses, the possibilities and limitations, of language, and, everywhere the play turns, it finds new ways to shed light on this theme. It is incomprehension that enables us to share Anderson’s mounting unease as he finds himself apparently trapped in the home of his dissident ex-student while it is being searched by the secret police. It is some time before we and he realise exactly the situation, and one complete scene, with its multiple bit players intervening from neighbouring apartments, and arguments breaking out, is played out entirely in a language, Czech, that neither the professor, nor the audience, understand. The effect moves from confusion to menace very effectively.

In another scene, Anderson, having failed to make it to the stadium for the football match, and having listened, and understood very little of, a partial Czech live commentary on the game, finds, later that day, that the two rooms adjacent to his in the hotel are occupied by two English newspaper sports correspondents, each of whom is phoning in his copy for the next morning’s edition of his paper. Anderson wanders into each room in turn, desperate to hear the key details of the game, but is repeatedly frustrated by the correspondents’ hyperbole, which favours ornate figures of speech over the dry facts of the game. One of the correspondents, for example, describing a defender who was repeatedly swerved around by the same attacking opponent using the same move, says that he displayed “all the qualities of an elephant except memory.” This is, of course, a wonderfully witty line (although nothing drains the wit from a line that sparkles when dropped unexpectedly into the middle of a scene from a play more completely than extracting it with a pair of tweezers and pinning it, scientifically, to the display case of a written argument). However, more significantly, it offers another example of the limitations and obfuscations of language.

Which I really should take as a less than subtle hint to stop here, since I’ve probably been walking alone through this tangled undergrowth for at least a couple of paragraphs.

But, before I do, let me urge those of you still with me to join me not in mourning the loss of Tom Stoppard, but in celebrating the extraordinary wealth of entertaining food for thought, and thought-provoking entertainment, that, over six decades, he laid out for the delight of the world. If you stumble across any of his perhaps less well-known radio plays – The Dog It Was that Died, Albert’s Bridge – treat yourself to 40 minutes of sense disguised as nonsense…and I haven’t even mentioned The Real Inspector Hound…or the screenplay for Brazil…or Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, another play about dissidents, in this case commissioned by Andre Previn and featuring the London Symphony Orchestra, onstage.

I’ll shut up now, and leave that very crowded stage to a master: the late, great, Tom Stoppard. Please enjoy! The performance is only just over an hour long, and is a unique, hilarious, chilling jewel.