While we were video-chatting this morning, my brother asked me what the sense was in Israel of when, what and whether America (and Israel(?)) would attack Iran. I replied that no opinion was worth the ether it was written on. Political commentators are only going through the motions of analysing Trump’s comments and actions because they are afraid that, if they admitted that they have no better idea than anyone else what he will do next, they would be talking themselves out of a job.

There is a sense in which we are all waiting for something to happen, and kind of wishing it would happen already, so that we could drink all the bottled water we have bought, stop wondering whether we should be sleeping fully clothed, and get on with our lives. There is certainly no atmosphere of panic buying or changing plans. Bernice’s brother and his wife even came for a short visit from England, recognising that if they wait until it is ‘safe’ to come they may never make it. Their only concession to the situation was to fly El Al rather than their usual BA. We had a lovely couple of days with them, and by the time you read this, they should be safely on their way back home.

Speaking personally, I must confess to not feeling particularly, and probably not sufficiently, worried about the external threat from Iran, or, indeed, anywhere else. I am convinced that Israel’s real existential threats are internal. I don’t pretend that this is an original thought. Indeed, I would say that it is now part of the national mood.

In 2025, for the first time since Israel’s founding in 1948, the rate of population growth fell below 1%. There are several reasons for this. First, it is a consequence of Israel’s age structure: large age cohorts of Jews and Arabs have begun entering their 70s and 80s, and life expectancy in Israel is about 83.

Secondly, fertility rates are declining in all sectors: most steeply in the Arab sector, but even in the Haredi (ultra-orthodox Jewish) sector.

Finally, there has been a sharp shift in Israel’s migration patterns since 2023. In 2024, the number of immigrants entering Israel minus the number leaving turned negative, reaching -26,000. This trend continued in 2025, and is continuing in 2026, and has no precedent in the country’s history. While this mainly reflects the remigration of non-native Israelis (including many who are culturally but not halachically Jewish), it also includes increasing numbers of native Israelis.

Many of those choosing to leave wish to escape, and to take their children away from, a war zone. Months after the announcement of the ceasefire, there is no sense that the country is at peace, and parents of young children particularly are disturbed by the fact that their families are only too familiar with the drill for getting to a safe room or public shelter within the allotted time.

Others wish to escape the other stresses of life in Israel: the sectarian political squabbles; the refusal of the Haredi world to see itself as part of Israeli society in terms of military or civil service or the economy, and the clashes this refusal generates; the violence in the Arab sector and the unwillingness or inability of the Israeli civil authorities to deal with it; the burden of military reserve duty, the rise in the cost of living, the shortage of affordable housing, and so on and so on.

More and more Israelis are finding the strain of day-to-day living at this level of intensity unbearable, and are looking to escape to a simpler, quieter life abroad. Fewer than usual are looking to the US and the West, and more are looking to more remote locations in Europe and the Far East.

At the same time, other Israelis are looking at the stresses and faultlines in Israeli society and asking how the threats these pose can be met. I have only recently learnt in detail about one such group, and I thought today I would share with you the vision they are currently refining. The group is called The Fourth Quarter, reflecting the theory that young countries typically face existential challenges in the fourth quarter of their first century. This is certainly proving true of Israel, which turned 75 last May.

The Fourth Quarter is honing an Israeli Contract, designed to reflect a broad consensus on the most important challenges facing Israel. Let me present those challenges, and the proposed method for achieving common purpose to meet them.

Education

One education system with different streams.

There should be one common national education council, and a council for each stream. 50% of studies should be core curriculum, common to all streams. There should be a set budget for each child, and not differential budgets for different streams. In addition, preference needs to be given to fully national-Haredi schools, which will put an end to discrimination against Haredi pupils: every pupil is entitled to a state education. Local authorities will be compelled to set up such schools, and budgets and buildings will be made available for these schools.

Security and a Strong Army

We need a strong army and compulsory service. Currently 50% of the cohort do not enlist. The army is lacking 12,000 troops.

There should be no automatic exemption. Everyone should be required to report to the recruiting office, where priority will be given to the needs of the army. Civilian national service will be compulsory for Arabs. All those who serve will receive benefits, commensurate with their service: reductions in fees, help with childcare and housing. Exemption (at a rate of 5% of the total cohort) will be granted to the elite (in sport, music, Torah study, etc.)

The Torah World

The state should take responsibility for the Torah world. Yeshiva high schools should offer tailor-made tracks for military service. Decisions on exemption from military service should be made by the state and not by the yeshivas.

The Economy

Torah alongside work. An end to subsidising those who choose not to work. Maximising one’s earning capability should be a condition for receiving allowances and discounts. The status of ‘Yeshiva student’ should be time-limited (just like the status of ‘Student’). There should be a limited number of positions for Torah students (as there are for academics). The allocation of coalition funds (awarded to Government parties) should be restricted; it should be forbidden to award them to a particular sector only.

Law Enforcement and Governance

Governance: An end to Autonomy Outside the Law.

An emergency unit should be set up in the Prime Minister’s office to fight organized crime. An authority should be set up to oversee NGOs. The powers of private Haredi courts should be reduced.

The Keys to Lifelong Citizenship

Everyone should be aware, from a young age, that everyone serves: that is the default. A flag in every school should be a condition for state funding. Studies in Israeli history and civics should be a condition for schools receiving state funding. Everyone should receive their ID card in an official state ceremony. A high IDF enlistment rate should be a condition for a yeshiva receiving state funding. Citizens should apply directly to state institutions to receive services, not through agents.

I have presented the Fourth Quarter’s proposal in such detail both because I believe it identifies accurately so many of the pain points in Israeli society and also because I find it impossible to disagree with its proposed solutions.

Of course, the key question is: How do we get from here to there? It seems to me that the only answer is: By electing to the Knesset a new generation of politicians that are committed to effecting this kind of social change. In order to do that, we need to have leaders of that new generation who are willing to stand for election. The last two-and-a-half years have shown that suitable candidates exist. The aftermath of October 7 threw up an amazing number of social activists who displayed, and continue to display, the vision, the organisational skills, the empathy and the sheer energy we look for in a politician. What is less clear is how many of these leaders are prepared to enter the cesspit of Israeli politics.

What seems clear is that, until we eradicate the no-longer-sustainable mass exemption of Haredim from service and subsidisation of their exemption from the workforce, and until we address the inequalities and sense of abandonment by or dissociation from mainstream Israeli society felt by many in the Haredi, Arab and other sectors of Israeli society, the country will be unable to move forward from its current crises. Until political parties free themselves from the perceived need to buy Haredi parties’ support in a coalition, there is no way to move forward. However, if a political party emerges from the endeavours of The Fourth Quarter, then, at some point in the future, Israel may be able to start reshaping its social fabric to move towards its 100^th anniversary with renewed strength and confidence and a more united vision. The alternative may chillingly but realistically be that Israel will not reach its 100^th anniversary, and that is a prospect that I don’t want to contemplate.

You can learn more about The Fourth Quarter (in English) here, and you can respond to the survey they are conducting to help refine the Israeli contract (in Hebrew only, as far as I can see) here.

I inherited far too few of my parents’ many admirable traits, but one thing I am very grateful to my father for passing on to me is the Brownstein sleeping gene. If I wanted to add up the number of times in my life I have had to count sheep after failing to fall asleep within a few minutes of laying my head on the pillow, I could count them on the lambs of one litter. (Actually, on the rare occasions when I can’t drift off, I don’t count sheep. Instead, I play through an imaginary England Test cricket innings, which is usually more entertaining, and always more successful, than the real thing.)

However, I seem recently to have encountered a number of stories that threaten to disrupt even my sleep pattern. Since misery loves company, I thought I would, this week, share some of them with you, on the off chance that you’ve been looking around for something to make you feel really depressed.

First, a podcast referred me this week to a Substack article offering an insider’s view of the future of AI that, while being far from sugar-coated, does actually offer some guidelines on how to avoid being totally crushed under the wheels of the AI juggernaut. Rather than borrowing from the article (as I like to think of it) or plagiarising it (to be more accurate), and thereby failing to do it anywhere near justice, let me just give you a link to it. The article is very readable, and while, as I say, it pulls no punches, it does also offer what seems like very sound advice for those who are still (if, conceivably, not for as long as they think) in the workforce. So, pour yourself a stiff drink, and, if you haven’t already encountered it, settle down to read: “Something Big Is Happening”.

Next, the Sports pages of the Times of London. No, this is not going to be a bewailing of the inadequacies of England’s performance in the T20 World Cup. First, I realise this is a niche topic; furthermore, T20 isn’t real cricket anyway. In addition, any disappointment I feel is tempered by the knowledge that Australia, England’s arch rivals in all things cricket, haven’t even qualified for the next round of the competition, the Super 8 stage. This is a huge comfort.

What I really find depressing about the paper’s sports pages is that they are full of not-sport stories. One day it will be Sturla Holm Laegreid, the Norwegian biathlete, exploiting his live television interview shortly after winning a bronze medal at the Winter Olympics to confess that he has been unfaithful to his girlfriend. He had already confessed to the girlfriend, in private, and she had left him. By what journalistic criterion does this qualify as a news story? And even if we are currently living in a universe where the Winter Olympics biathlon bronze medallist’s lovelife is deemed newsworthy, then the story certainly does not belong on the sports pages.

Perhaps even more incomprehensible, because it is not even prurient, was today’s story about Coco Gauff, a black American tennis player ranked fourth in the world, who in a set of less than fluent answers, presumably in a press conference, stated her opposition to Trump’s recent deployment of ICE in Minneapolis. Is this a sports story? No. Is it a news story? Only if you believe that Coco Gauff has something insightful to contribute to the debate. If she has, she appears to be keeping it close to her chest. Her grandmother is apparently a civil rights figure who, in 1961, became the first black student to integrate her Florida high school. However, pedigree alone is not a sufficient qualification for Gauff.

This story followed on the heels of British-American skier Gus Kenworthy who posted an image purporting to show a urine script of ‘f*** ice’ in the Milan snow. I have to say that the neatness of the calligraphy (consider, for example, the perfect flow control required to render the dot above the ‘i’ in the picture below) leads me to suspect that the image was the equivalent of ‘airbrushed’, even before I added my censorship. So, this was not a sports story, not a news story, and almost certainly not a true story.

However, my prize for the week’s most depressing story was the publication of a report in Britain highlighting how increasing numbers of children are entering the education system in a state of unreadiness. Among the areas of unreadiness highlighted were personal hygiene, with one primary school reporting that 50% of children of the pupils in reception and nursery (ages 3–5) are not toilet-trained, and some are unable to state their own full names. An increasing percentage are also unable to interact socially at an appropriate level for their age.

The immediate consequences of these statistics for Britain are dire. Countless thousands of class-contact hours a year have to be devoted by teachers and teaching assistants to toileting, cleaning and dressing children, rather than to the curriculum’s age-appropriate education. These hours are disproportionately lost in schools whose pupils come from disadvantaged homes. Any hope of levelling up is destroyed in such an environment.

Above all, I can’t stop thinking about the home lives these children have been living for the years before they first come into the state system. The opportunities that have been lost to help them develop their innate intellectual, emotional and social abilities; the passivity of their early childhood; the stultifying lack of stimulation they have experienced.

I have been reminded in the last six years in my own family what an amazing time early childhood can be. To see how readily children respond to stimulation and how rich their potential is; to watch the joy in their discovery of the world; to see them explore and test the boundaries of humour, storytelling, music, painting. All of this is to have something of one’s faith in human nature restored, and to manage, somehow, and against all the odds, to sleep easy at night.

Sweet dreams,

I’ve spent the last four days trying to think of a topic for today’s post, and failing completely. Only just now, as I sat facing that blank white rectangle in the centre of the laptop screen, did I realise the reason for the blank white rectangle in the centre of my brain. There is an obvious topic for me to write about; it is one that I have been thinking about a lot in the last few days. However, it’s a bit contentious, and a lot serious, and I don’t quite have the necessary moral courage today to accept the challenge it represents. However, at some point in the near future it will probably loom so large that I will no longer be able to avoid it. Watch this space!

Well, if that doesn’t guarantee decent reading stats for the next week or two, I don’t know what will. Meanwhile, I’m forced to dredge up and recycle something I first mentioned in a blog post four weeks ago. You will doubtless remember that, when writing about our new lounge suite, I said:

“We confirmed the choice of fabric from the swatch book (Note to self: research the etymology of ‘swatch’ – such a wonderful-sounding word)”

I did, indeed, the very same week, research the etymology of ‘swatch’, and now, as a public service, I’m going to save you the trouble of doing the same.

Our journey begins in 16^th Century Northumberland (not an obvious tourist destination), where ‘swatch’ was a dialect word meaning: ‘a countercheck of a tally’. Now, if only we knew what a tally is, and what, indeed, a countercheck is, in this context, we’d be sitting pretty. As it is, we have traded one obscure word for two, in what doesn’t convincingly feel like progress.

So, let’s tackle ‘tally’ first. We all know, from our mastery of medieval Latin, that ‘’talea’ means: ‘a cutting from a plant, a, rod, stick or twig’. (Interestingly, in Greek. ‘talis’ means ‘a marriageable girl’, with, perhaps, the same associations as ‘Twiggy’ in English.)

In medieval times, it was common practice to record debts by a system of notches cut into a stick (the size and spacing of the notches indicating the size of the debt). This stick was known as the tally. In time, the sum indicated by the notches also came to be known as the ‘tally’. After the notches were cut, the tally would then be split lengthwise in two, so that each half retained the notch marks. One half, the master, would be kept by the creditor and the other half, the countercheck, would be given to the debtor, as a record of the debt. At any time, and particularly when the debt was to be settled, the debtor and creditor could lay their sticks side by side, to check that the two halves matched, thus avoiding any argument about the size of the debt. If one of the two parties tampered with his stick, in an attempt to cheat the other, then, obviously, the two halves would not match, or, as we say, they wouldn’t tally.

By the 1610s, in Yorkshire, the word ‘swatch’ had been borrowed and applied to ‘a tally attached to cloth sent to be dyed’. Presumably, this tally was simply a copy, on paper, of the original retained by the customer ordering the dyeing. This adaptation is an indication of the advance of literacy.

By the mid-1600s, a further meaning had developed: ‘sample piece or strip of cloth cut off for a pattern or sample’, which is, of course, more or less the normal modern meaning.

In a later development, the size and shape of swatches led to the term being borrowed by knitters, with a rather different meaning. In knitting, a swatch is a sample piece of knitted fabric used to determine the gauge of a project. It helps ensure that the finished garment fits correctly and is of the desired size. To create a swatch, you typically knit a small square (often 4×4 inches) using the same yarn and needle size as your project. This allows you to compare the gauge of your swatch with the pattern gauge, ensuring that your finished piece will match the designer’s specifications.  

One of the sources I looked up online including a graphical representation of the frequency of usage of the word ‘swatch’ over time. When I first looked at this graph, I was puzzled as to the astonishing increase in use of the term starting around 1988.

However, a few moments’ reflection were all that was needed for me to realise the explanation. In the 1970s and 1980s, Japanese companies such as Seiko and Citizen used quartz technology to threaten Swiss dominance of the watchmaking industry. In response, in 1983, Ernst Thomke, Elmar Mock, and Jacques Müller established a new company to produce trendy, Swiss, quartz watches to appeal to the younger market, and called the company Swatch. It is this company’s success that is responsible for the uptick in the graph above.

It is amusing that a name that was doubtless intended to sound modern and trendy should also be a word with such a long pedigree. The moneylenders of early-16^th-Century Northumberland could have no idea that their neologism would enjoy a new lease of life 475 years later. Such are the vagaries of vocabulary.

It takes the moon approximately 29.531 days to orbit the earth once. It takes the earth approximately 365.256 days to orbit the sun once. This means that it takes the moon 6,939.7703125 days to orbit the earth 235 times. And it takes the earth 6,939.864 days to orbit the sun 19 times.

If you could devise a calendar that measured time in lunar months, then adjusted the calendar to allow 235 months in 19 solar years, then, every 19 years, that calendar would be synchronised with the solar calendar.

The Hebrew calendar is just such a solar-lunar calendar. The length of the month is determined by the orbit of the moon. Some months are always 29 days long, some are always 30 days long, and some are sometimes 29 and sometimes 30 days. In addition, every so often (in 7 years of every 19-year cycle) an extra month is added to the year. In this way, the calendar ensures that the festivals fall at the same approximate time of year every year, and, using the fine-tuning described in the last sentences, the Hebrew calendar and the Gregorian solar calendar are synchronised.

Last week I celebrated my 76^th birthday, and, since 76 is 4×19, last Thursday was both my English and my Hebrew birthday. Sometimes the synchronicity is a day out, because of the effect of the irregular Gregorian solar leap-years (every 4 years, but not when the year is divisible by 100, unless it is divisible by 400). However, this year the synchronicity was exact: 29 January fell on 11 Shevat, just as it did in 1950. (For the purpose of this argument, I am assuming that I was born before sunset on January 29. There’s nobody left alive to ask and my brother only remembers that he was playing toy soldiers with his big cousin on the landing of our aunt’s home at the time. He can’t remember whether it was light out.)

To cut a long (76 years and 5 days, at the time of writing) story short, this year I completed four cycles, and that feels like some kind of milestone. I can already almost glimpse 2045, and my 95^th birthday, through the haze on the horizon of the next 19 years.

As if this were not enough to lead to some reflection on the transience of life, these last few weeks have brought a heavy burden of loss.

First, we heard of the death, in a freak work accident, of someone who was a couple of years older than Bernice and myself when we were all teenagers in Hanoar Hatzioni. Even though we had not seen him for many decades, the news of his tragic death came as something of a shock.

Far more painful were the next two deaths, in our closer circle. The first was that of the husband in a couple we became friendly with when they arrived in Maale Adumim from America about a decade ago. Although we had not been in close touch since they moved to Ramat Bet Shemesh a couple of years ago, we, in common with almost all their friends, felt close to them, mainly because of the incredible warmth in which they both bathed everyone they met. The husband suffered painfully with ill health for decades, but you never heard him complaining. Indeed, you never saw him without a smile on his face, and, typically, a joke on his lips. He died far too young, defeated eventually by the disease that he had refused to let define him for so long.

Also last week, my cousin’s wife was taken by a cruel cancer that made her last months a constant struggle to maintain her wonderful spirit. ‘My cousin’s wife’ fails to convey how much a part of the Brownstein family she became almost immediately and remained, over the 52 years since she ‘married in’. Her humour, her warmth, her generosity were always her signature, and she leaves a great emptiness.

Between these two deaths, I learnt that someone I was in Israel with on a year programme 58 years ago had died. We had met again at our programme’s 50^th reunion, and, in fact, Bernice and I shared breakfast with him on the day after the reunion ended, when almost everyone else had already left for home. He was a gentle, quiet-spoken and delightful man.

The sequence of these four deaths, one seemingly leading to another, and all leading up to my birthday, perhaps inevitably led me to reflect on my mortality. It is difficult to escape the sobering fact that, going forward, I can only expect to hear more and more of the same sad news, until the moment when I become the news item. The trick of fooling myself that I am still 18 years old is proving more and more difficult to accomplish.

And yet, at the same time…

I sat in shul a week and a half ago, watching the rows in front of me fill with the sons, sons-in-law and grandchildren of our dear neighbours, marking the Shabbat Chatan of their middle son. To see four generations of the family praying together, to wonder at how tall some of those grandsons are, while remembering their mother as a 9-year-old; to see a granddaughter whose father’s brit I can clearly remember; to remind myself that this family was celebrating not only a wedding, but also the birth of three new grandchildren in the preceding couple of weeks; all of this was to be reminded that just as there are always some stepping off the escalator, there are always, always, others stepping on at the bottom and beginning the long ascent.

And, if I need a reminder even closer to home, I only need to travel up to Zichron, as we did yesterday, and to hold in my arms a stirring, snuffling, warm, smiling (I swear he was, honestly) bundle of vibrantly actual and infinitely potential life. Still feeling his heft in my arms, I am today anchoring myself to the knowledge that, while mortality is individual, immortality is familial, communal, and thereby the stronger force. I can sense the haze lifting just a little on the horizon. I’m feeling ready to take on this fifth cycle!