844 days and no longer counting. And, as if that were not enough of a fact to wrap your head around, 4209 days and no longer counting. Yesterday, the last of the 250 hostages snatched by Hamas on October 7 was returned to the bosom of his family. Today is the first day since July 20, 2014 that there has not been an Israeli hostage in Gaza.

On July 20, 2014, during the Battle of Shuja’iyya, Hamas fired an anti-tank missile at an armoured personnel carrier, killing all seven Israeli soldiers inside. Hamas then abducted the body of one of them, Staff Sergeant Oron Shaul z”l. He was returned to Israel on 19 January last year.

On January 25, 2026, Israeli forces located, identified and brought home the body of Staff Sergeant Ran Gvili z”l of the Special Patrol Unit Yasam.

For the 4208 days between those two dates, and especially for the 843 days between October 7, 2023 and yesterday, Israel has held its breath. A fundamental tenet in the morality of the IDF is that it leaves nobody behind. It sees itself as having a sacred obligation (secular, but no less sacred for that) to return to their parents every single child entrusted to it by those parents.

That the country sees this as a sacred obligation regarding any living child (or spouse, or parent, or sibling) probably seems natural to any civilized person. That this is equally true regarding a soldier who has been killed is, perhaps, less obviously natural. It seems to me a reflection of what is perceived as a compelling need to offer the bereaved family their best opportunity of achieving closure.

The Jewish way, which has become the Israeli way, is to embrace life and reject death. The period of mourning for a first-degree relative is carefully calibrated: the period of limbo before the funeral; the funeral; the first week after the burial; the remainder of the first year after the burial; the rest of the bereaved’s life. Each period has its rules, its traditions, its strictures; its requirements to mourn or to turn from mourning. The effect (and, I suspect, the purpose) of this calibration is to ease the mourner back into the world of the living.

Many, many families commemorate their departed loved one not by mourning but by acting: often by setting up a charity in the name, the memory and the spirit of their loved one. This act has undoubtedly played a major part in restoring meaning to the lives of thousands of bereaved Israelis. However, for such a process to start, letting go of the all-consuming grief is a pre-requisite. Few people can achieve this if they have no body to bury, no ceremony of parting, no gradation of moving on. The IDF’s sacred obligation pledges to afford them that opportunity.

I also think the IDF, and the country as a whole, feels an equal obligation to the one who has been killed. To be forever separated from the country for which they gave their life is a terrible injustice. The nation feels the need to do everything in its power to repay the debt of gratitude it owes to its citizens who sacrifice their lives for the nation.

One of the most remarkable features of the weekly Torah portion is that every year, every week, the portion resonates with current events. This week is no exception.

In the very first verses of Beshalach, this week’s portion, we are told that Moshe took the bones of Yosef with him as he left Egypt, because Yosef had made his brothers swear that, when God remembers them and brings them up out of Egypt, they will take his bones with them. This, we understand, is a vow that his brothers passed to their children and, ultimately, Levi’s great-grandson Moshe fulfilled his ancestor’s vow. Rashi infers from the phrasing of the Hebrew that the remains of all of the brothers were brought up from Egypt in the Exodus. This would mean that all of the founders of the nation, from Avraham and Sarah to Yosef and his brothers, were buried in Eretz Yisrael. We leave nobody behind.

It is hard to convey the extent to which yesterday’s return to Israel of Ran Gvili is seen and felt, throughout the country, as a huge release, as a final fulfilment of the IDF’s, and the nation’s, pledge. As people throughout Israel take off their yellow ribbon lapel pins and bracelets, as the clock in Hostages Square in Tel Aviv is stopped (as seen in the photo above), as shuls stop saying psalms for the return of all hostages, Israel faces a new and a better dawn.

Over the last two years, and especially over the last few weeks, I have heard Ran Gvili’s name more than I have read it, and I have read it in English far more frequently than in Hebrew. It was only today that I noticed the spelling of his name in Hebrew. In my ignorance, I would have expected his surname to be spelt גוילי, but I realise now it is actually spelt גואילי with a silent aleph between the vav and the first yud. It is easy to overlook that aleph, as I had done; it is not immediately obvious to a non-native Hebrew speaker, or to someone who is not an expert in the origins of family names, what the purpose of the aleph is. However, if you forget to include the aleph, you end up with a word that is no longer Ran’s name. An essential part of what made him what he was is that aleph. Omit the aleph and you change the essence.

Every single Israeli is like that aleph. Leave one of them out, leave one of them behind, and you diminish the meaning of the entire nation.

Our children have returned to within their borders. Today is the first day of the rest of our national life. Today is Day 844 and not counting. Today’s date is, finally, no longer October 7.

My weekly schedule changed a few weeks ago. and now not only has our day in Zichron moved from Tuesday to Monday, but, in addition, Sunday has become a bridge day (as in the card game, not the day off school or work between two existing days off).

Consequent attempts to wind myself up to write a post on the previous Friday, or the Saturday evening, have failed; I feel none of the inspiration only deadline panic can induce. Likewise, attempts to dash off a post in the journey home on Monday evening (with Bernice driving) have failed; there is not enough light and the road surface often leaves too much to be desired. As a result, I have written my last couple of posts on Monday late evening, after we return home.

I’m not sure for how long my (soon-to-be-no-longer-75-year-old) constitution – physical or mental – can take that regimen, and so I have decided to post, from now on, on Wednesday mornings rather than Tuesdays.

I can hear your sharp intake of breath from here, but, believe me, together we can handle this.

Bottom line: please look for another message linking to a post in a little under 24 hours.

Until then, have a good Monday Tuesday.

Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’

‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

If Lewis Carroll’s Alice were alive today, she could get lots of practice. The subtle difference, however, is that many of today’s impossible things are real. Here, for example, are four, all originating in Gaza and Britain. I drew them from the headlines of the last few days; I am sure they are real, but I’m still struggling to believe them, because they are still, in a sane world, impossible.

By the way, if you, like me, are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between Gaza and Britain these days, here’s a handy tip. Gaza is the place where they are apparently trying to replace the government of Islamist extremists, whereas Britain is the place where they are apparently trying to replace the government with Islamist extremists,

Impossible Thing Number One: The Make-up of the Executive Board

The White House announced two days ago the make-up of the bodies that will be responsible for overseeing the transition period in Gaza and Phase 2 of the Peace agreement. One of the major bodies is the Executive Board supporting governance and services. If its brief includes overseeing the disarming and demilitarisation of Hamas, then it will certainly be able to draw on the expertise of some of its members.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan;

Turkey hosts senior Hamas figures, some of whom have received Turkish citizenship, and provides political, diplomatic and propaganda support, as well as economic and humanitarian assistance. Hamas has established one of its most important overseas centres in Turkey, primarily operated by prisoners released in the Gilad Shalit exchange deal of 2011. It uses Turkey to plan terrorist attacks and transfer funds to finance terrorist activities inside Israel, in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, and to raise and launder money in support of its terrorist operations, including the October 7, 2023, attack and massacre.

Veteran Qatari diplomat Ali Al-Thawadi,

Qatar has, over two decades, been Hamas’s primary external enabler, providing political sanctuary, legitimacy, funding channels, and diplomatic cover, hosting its leadership and enabling strategic planning. Qatar-hosted and Qatar-supported clerical networks linked to the Muslim Brotherhood framed jihad against Israel as a religious obligation, endorsed mass violence against Jewish civilians, and later issued charters justifying October 7 and calling for global mobilization. Qatari-funded charities, cash assistance, and support for UNRWA in Gaza simultaneously providing humanitarian aid while reinforcing Hamas’s governance, military infrastructure, and control over civilian institutions. Intelligence claims Hamas leadership based in Qatar directed or facilitated terrorist infrastructure beyond Gaza, including in Europe, underscoring Qatar’s role in enabling Hamas’s regional and international reach rather than acting as a neutral mediator.

Dutch politician Sigrid Kaag.

For six years until 2004, Kaag was Senior Programme Manager with the External Relations Office of UNRWA in Jerusalem. (Israel recently outlawed UNRWA for its complicity in terrorism.) In June 2025, Kaag resigned from her position as U.N. envoy to Gaza and Israeli-Palestinian peace process point person, complaining that Israelis have too little empathy for Gazans after Oct. 7, 2023. She had earlier defended the U.N.’s refusal to offer aid to Palestinians through the Gaza Humanitarian Fund—an aid operation sanctioned by Israel and the United States to help the civilian population in a manner that removed Hamas from the process.

With these individuals among its members, how can the Executive Board possibly fail to disarm and demilitarise Hamas in Gaza?

Impossible Thing Number Two: The Retirement of Craig Guildford

I’m not sure to what extent the scandal surrounding Britain’s third-largest police force has filtered down to non-Brits, so let me attempt a brief summary.

In early November, 2024, Maccabi Tel Aviv football (soccer) club played Dutch team Ajax in a major European competition match in Amsterdam. There were considerable clashes between rival fans before and after the match, which Dutch police investigation revealed to be largely a result of a coordinated and carefully planned assault on Maccabi fans.

Exactly a year later, Maccabi Tel Aviv were scheduled to play another major European competition match. this time against Aston Villa, a leading English soccer club based in Birmingham, a city over 30% of whose population is Muslim. There were, understandably, concerns about the possibility of crowd violence and the police force responsible eventually advised Birmingham Safety Advisory Group that Maccabi fans were too dangerous to be allowed to attend the game.

Subsequent investigation has revealed that, in documenting and defending this decision, the police force relied on ‘evidence’ ostensibly extracted from the internet by AI Copilot, including a report of Maccabi fan violence at a match that never even took place. They further cited Amsterdam police accounts of Maccabi fan violence: Amsterdam police have disputed this claim, stating that they reported that the cause of the trouble in Holland was much more mixed, with Israeli fans and pro-Palestinians provoking each other. The West Midlands police also claimed their decision was taken after consultation with Jewish bodies in Birmingham, who deny that any such consultation took place. The police also uncovered evidence of apparent plans by Muslim militants to attack Maccabi fans, and failed to further investigate that evidence, or present it to the Safety Advisory Group.

There’s more, but the above is probably enough to make the point.

Amid calls for the sacking of Craig Guildford, West Midlands Chief Constable (the head of the force), the Police Commissioner, who is the only official legally empowered to fire him, insisted that he would wait for the publication of a further report. Meanwhile, Guildford chose to hastily retire, thereby safeguarding his substantial pension and quite possibly forestalling any further investigation.

Impossible Thing Number Three: NHS Guidance to Midwives about Cousin Marriage

In certain Muslim communities in Britain, as elsewhere, marriage between first cousins is very common. The statistical likelihood of the child of such a couple having a congenital disease or birth defect is 10-15%, compared to the British national average rate of 2%.

Despite these stark figures, official midwifery guidance, used for teaching midwives in Britain’s National Health Service, branded concerns about the risks of congenital diseases, or birth defects, “exaggerated” and “unwarranted” The guidance did admit there were some “risks to child health associated with close relative marriage” but claimed they should be “balanced against the potential benefits”, advising that marrying a relative can offer “economic benefits” as well as “emotional and social connections” and “social capital”,

It added that staff should not stigmatise predominantly south Asian or Muslim patients who have a baby with their cousin, because the practice is “perfectly normal” in some cultures.

Britain’s shadow health secretary has pointed out that Britain’s midwives “should be focused on protecting women and babies, not normalising practices that carry well-documented risks. Cousin marriage is not safe and healthcare professionals should never be encouraged to downplay or normalise it.”

Impossible Thing Number Four: Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain’s Schools

The number of schools commemorating the Holocaust has more than halved since the October 7 attacks on Israel. As a direct consequence of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, the number of secondary schools around the UK that signed up to events commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day fell from 2000 in 2023 to fewer than 1,200 in 2024 and 854 in 2025 — a reduction of nearly 60 per cent.

Commenting on the figures, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, the Chief Rabbi, said he feared for the country’s education system as teachers were following “the path of least resistance” by choosing to not mark Holocaust Memorial Day in the face of opposition from parents and pupils.

Bernice read this far and pointed out that I needed to provide a conclusion. I’m confident that my readership will be able to provide their own.

As I sit at the keyboard wondering what patterns to weave today (Sunday), I immediately recognise that the world’s stories and Israel’s stories are forming two fairly orderly, but long, queues outside my office door, impatiently waiting to be tackled. I just checked outside the door, and recognised, on the one side, Venezuela, Iran, Greenland, and, on the other, the Arab sector, the Haredim, the Government.

However, it’s Sunday, and you won’t be reading this until Tuesday, and even Trump (or, conceivably, especially Trump) has no idea where the world will be by then, so I embrace the coward’s way out.

Which I feel justified in doing, since, for us, the main event of last week was none of the above, but, rather, the brit of our latest grandson, Adam. The immediate family in Israel – Esther and Maayan’s parents and Maayan’s siblings – gathered for what was a very meaningful ceremony. As many of you know, Maayan was present at the Nova festival on October 7, 2023, and her pregnancy, and the beautiful son she is now blessed with, represent her very conscious decision to embrace life.

Maayan and Esther have chosen to pronounce the name in Hebrew with the stress, unusually, on the first syllable. This emphasis plays on the name’s connections to adama – earth, ground – and avoids overly close aural association with dam – -blood.

Every new life is special. Indeed, every new life is special in its unique way. Adam is certainly no exception. His name reflects a beginning that certainly feels very special indeed.

This is, I know, an unusually short post, but I can’t top the last couple of paragraphs, so I will just wish you all a good week and leave it there.

The England that I grew up in was, if my memory serves me correctly, a fairly free and easy place. If I look back at my late teenage years, I have to admit that I did not suffer unduly from social constraints. My parents, although fairly strict, were strictly fair, and I indulged in a lot of cigarettes, a bit of whisky, but none of the wild, wild women that the song quote in today’s title goes on to speak about. I got away with some things my parents didn’t know about, although I subsequently learnt that it was not as much as I had thought at the time.

However, my real addiction, beside cigarettes, was bridge, and my only real embracing of the mood of the 60s lay in playing very, very bad folk guitar. I kept up both of these hobbies into my married life, although I would be the first to admit that my skill at the bridge table far outshone my ability on the guitar. Or, to be more accurate, I played guitar even worse than bridge. For all of my years in Hanoar Hatzioni, the youth movement I belonged to, six chords, a basic sense of rhythm, and a halfway decent singing voice, served to allow me to steer a careful path through the Israeli and American folk repertoire, occasionally fooling people who were either much younger than me or who did not play the guitar (or, preferably both) that I knew what I was doing.

And then, at age 36, I came on aliya. I put my guitar aside, and then, later, passed it on to Micha’el, and, apart from reading an occasional bridge column in the Hebrew press, I forswore the game, until…

I really don’t know how to account for what happened next. ‘Next’, I should explain, was seven months ago, when a friend from shul, who had recently learnt the game and was playing regularly in a relative beginners’ school hosted by the couple who had taught him, discovered that I used to play and started nagging me to come along. His persistence paid off, and I eventually succumbed. I was initially very wary. Let me rephrase that. The first week I turned up, I was petrified. Not only had I forgotten a significant amount of what was second nature 55 years ago, but I was also acutely aware that my razor-sharp intellect had arguably blunted somewhat over the intervening decades.

To make matters worse, and here I’m afraid things get a little technical, the advice I was given was that I should learn a new (for me) bidding system. Basically, this is a set of rules and conventions for describing your hand to your partner. To make this description as accurate and efficient as possible, systems are, perforce, fairly elaborate. Learning a new system was (Who am I kidding? Not ‘was’;’is’!) a bit like learning a new language.

Needless to say, my friends around the table (both those I knew well and those I had only just met) made me very welcome, and I realised in the first week that I was not going to make an absolute fool of myself. As I started playing every week, I found that gradually I regained more of the ability to remember the cards that had been played, to count cards, to visualise opponent’s hands, to remember what the contract was, to hold two separate bridge thoughts in my head simultaneously, not to drop my cards on the floor. It’s difficult for me to judge, but I feel that I have regained 60% or so of my playing ability when I was at my best.

As a result, when a good friend phoned me a couple of weeks ago to say that her regular partner for the weekly duplicate competition in Jerusalem was unavailable, and to ask whether I was available, I agreed. I went through the usual agonies of insecurity in the days before we were to play, and spent the evenings cramming as if for an exam.

Once again, the reality was completely unintimidating. I soon realised that the players were all pupils at the bridge classes at the community centre where the competition was held, and many had only been playing for a few months. Others had been playing considerably longer, but had not started playing until they retired, and their progress up the mountain range that is competitive bridge was slow. By the end of the morning, I was enjoying myself, and finding that I was able to maintain a level of intense concentration over the three hours of competition, which flew by.

The cherry on top of the cake was that my partner messaged me later that day with the results. We had come top.

There is always a moment, in films about alcoholism or gambling, when you realise that what was a social habit has become an addiction, and the protagonist is in the grip of something that he is unable to fight.

My name is David, and I am a bridgeaholic.

The following week (last week) found me at a newly opened seniors’ residence in the Jerusalem Hills, with a new partner (and old friend), playing in a more serious competition. Once again, my initial trepidation melted away as I realised that, although the players represented a range of abilities and experience that stretched far higher than the previous week, there were also a number of pairs of much less experience and ability. My partner and I came second. This is probably the worst outcome for someone sliding into addiction. The heady delight of doing well paired with the niggling conviction that next week you will do even better.

In the intervening week I have joined the Israel Bridge Federation and paid my annual membership. This morning we played again, and I am waiting to hear how we did this week. We are a curious pair: my partner couldn’t care less about winning or losing, and I couldn’t care more. However, so far we seem to be working as a partnership, and my insecurity is somewhat allayed by the knowledge that, however appalling or egregious an error I make, my partner will laugh it off.

As if this readoption of a teenage passion were not enough, a few weeks ago I confessed to Bernice that I thought I might like a guitar for a birthday present. She was very encouraging, and so I have devised a minimum-risk plan. I have signed up for a free online tuition program, and my musical daughter-in-law Maayan has kindly lent me her spare guitar to start playing. The idea is that if, after six weeks of starting to relearn, I am still interested, I will get a guitar for my birthday.

So far, I am thoroughly enjoying the process. It is not without its humiliations. I always knew that I was a rubbish player, but I never realised the multiplicity of layers of rubbishness of my playing, and just how many dreadful habits I baked into my left and right hand over a decade or more of ‘playing’ the guitar. However, I am enjoying the real pleasure of the stimulation of unlearning some bad habits, learning some new good ones, being introduced unthreateningly to a range of techniques, and having the opportunity to play a guitar whose rich, mellow tone is a world apart from the couple of instruments I played in my youth.

I can only play one tune so far: Happy Birthday to You. (At least, I could play it when I last tried, before Shabbat. I shall discover later whether I have retained it over the intervening 48 hours.) However, the joy of playing that enchanting tune, with all of the right fingering, is precious.

There are moments in the dead of night, when, with only a tentative grip on reality, I dream of becoming a top competitive bridge player. I harbour no such fantasies about the guitar. However, if I reach the point where I can pick out tunes, play the right chords to Turn, Turn, Turn (Who knew there was an F# in there?! Who even knew what an F# was?), and maybe even improvise a little on a pentatonic scale, then I will feel vindicated in making the purchase.

Meanwhile, while the scalp feels fully 75 years old, the fingers, fanning a bridge hand or strumming an Am chord, feel 21 again. No laughing at the back there!