I heard a presenter on Israel radio this week bemoaning the prevalence of car-owners using their phones while driving. He claimed, although he was clearly joking, that he personally always kept both hands on the wheel in what I would call the ‘ten-to-two’ position. Only he called it ‘עשר ועשרה’ (which transliterates as ‘esser v’assarah’ and translates as ‘ten past ten’), and which, unwittingly, set me on the path to all I need for a complete blog post this week. I apologise to those of you who have no Hebrew, because there will be bits here that won’t be easy to follow, but I have tried to imagine myself reading a similar blog post that someone else had written comparing language usage in Swahili and English, and I have managed to convince myself, if I stand back a bit, and squint, that I would find it fascinating. So, here goes…and if you’re leaving already, I’ll hope to see you next week: same time, same place.

The presenter actually set me on two paths. One is fairly well-trodden, easy to follow and hardly meanders at all, so we’ll take that one first. I found myself, first, filing the phrase ‘esser v’assarah’ away as one of those examples of a non-literal translation. Hebrew-speakers look at the position of the hands, and read the ‘time’ as ten past ten; English-speakers read it as ten to two. Neither, of course, is more inherently correct than the other, since, in most cases, the driver’s two arms are of equal length, so there is no determinable minute hand or hour hand here.

One other pair of phrases in the same file concerns how Hebrew and English describe perfect vision. In English, we speak of ‘twenty-twenty vision’, while Hebrew refers to ‘seeing six-six’ ((‘רואים שש-שש’. The reason for the difference here is rather more obvious: 6 (metric) metres being close to 20 (imperial) feet. (Just for the record, the difference is 3.78 inches (or, if you prefer, 9.6 centimetres, a difference small enough to inappropriately turn a blind eye to.)

It strikes me that there are two plausible reasons for English opting for ‘ten to two’. First, the alliteration (the triple initial ‘t’ sound) is euphonious. Second, ‘ten past ten’, correctly enunciated, requires a slight pause between the final ‘t’ of ‘past’ and the initial ‘t’ of ‘ten’ that is not easy to achieve cleanly without slowing down; whereas ‘ten to two’ trips off the tongue.

While I don’t really feel qualified to comment similarly on plausible reasons for the Hebrew choice, it does seem to me that there is something pleasing in using both the masculine and feminine forms of the word for ‘ten’ (‘assarah’ and ‘esser’) consecutively.

No sooner had I thought of this explanation than I consciously registered something that I have never, as far as I am aware, noticed before. When telling the time in Hebrew, the number representing the minutes in expressed in the masculine, while the number representing the hour is expressed in the feminine. I did what I usually do in these situations. First, I questioned both my go-to literate native-Hebrew-speaker friend (thank you, Hagit), and the handier one of my two literate native-Hebrew-speaker daughters-in-law (four hyphens in six words – an ‘Is-this-a-record?’ moment). I got from both of them the answer that I more or less expected, given that this use of numbers (in telling the time) is such a fundamental piece of language usage. They both basically said: “Wow! That’s interesting! I’ve never really noticed. I don’t know why.”

In earlier times, Hagit would then have asked her Hebrew-language teacher mother, but she sadly died a few years ago. Maayan asked her pet AI, Claude, who gave an answer that was as smug and, simultaneously, as unsatisfyingly incomplete as one would expect from something with an effete French name.

Left to my own devices, I did what I always do in these situations, and explored the excellent website of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, which brings erudition and sensitivity, but not a trace of one-upmanship, to the question of ruling on recommended Hebrew usage. I realise with a shock that I have been asking questions of the academy for 36 years, since I was employed as the founding Director of the British Council’s English Language School. When I drafted our first posters in Hebrew advertising classes, I had no idea whether to write the lesson times (for example 19:00–20:30) left-to-right (as one does in English) or right-to-left (for example 20:30–19:00). At the time, the Academy informed me that both conventions were acceptable, which seemed a little bizarre to me. In the end, I opted for right-to-left, so as not to interrupt the natural reading direction.

On the question of number gender for telling the time, the Academy has a lot to say about the peculiarities of number-gender in Hebrew in general, but nothing specifically about telling the time. It is an odd feature of Hebrew (and, apparently, all Semitic languages, so it is an odd feature that began in antiquity) that the normal method of forming the feminine in Hebrew is stood on its head when it comes to numbers. The usual root form for an adjective is the masculine: ‘tov’, for example, means ‘good’. The feminine is then typically formed by adding a ‘ה’ to the end of the word, pronounced ‘ah’. A similar form is used if nouns have a masculine and feminine form. So, a good male friend is ‘haver tov’, whereas a good female friend is ‘haverah tovah’.

Numbers behave rather differently. The masculine and feminine forms of numbers 1 and 2 are irregular. Those forms of 3–10 are the reverse of the normal rule: the feminine is the simple root form, and the masculine is formed by adding a ‘ה’. The numbers 11–19 are formed as compounds: ‘one-ten’, ‘two-ten’…’nine-ten’, with the ‘ten’ having different compound forms for masculine and feminine. From 20 upwards, the masculine and feminine forms are identical.

So, 4 is ‘arba’ah’ (masculine) or ‘arba’ (feminine) and 14 is ‘arba’ah assar’ (M) or ‘arba essrai’ (F).

This allows a number used as an adjective to agree in gender with the noun it describes. So, ‘hamishah banim’ (5 boys) but ‘hamesh banot’ (5 girls). Since the number that looks and sounds feminine is in fact masculine, and vice versa, learners of Hebrew have great difficulty using numbers correctly.

Turning our attention to telling the time, when we say ’10 past 10’, we mean, of course, ‘ten minutes past ten o’clock’. Clearly, the first 10 is an adjective describing the ‘understood’ ‘minutes’. Since minutes is ‘dakot’ in Hebrew, a feminine noun, logic demands that we should say ‘esser l’esser’ and not ‘assarah l’esser’.

Incidentally, the second ‘10’ is not an adjective describing ‘hours’, but a ‘standalone’ number, like the number of a bus route or a road. In Hebrew, these numbers are, by convention, always feminine (for numbers 3–10, the simpler form of the number). So, even though ‘kvish’ (road) and ‘kav’ (bus route) are both masculine, Hebrew speaks of ‘kav shalosh’ and ‘kvish shesh’.

Going back to that first 10 – the one that ‘ought’ to be feminine but is masculine – I could not think of any reason to explain this usage, and I could not find an answer on the Academy’s website. So, I used their ridiculously straightforward messaging system on the site, and asked the question. Within ten minutes, I received an email. I assumed that it was an automatic acknowledgement of receipt. However, when I opened it, I found it contained a link to an article on their website that fully explained the peculiar usage.

Let me just say that again: in response to an online query, an Israeli quasi-governmental national institution responded within 10 minutes with a precise and exhaustive reply to my query.

For the benefit of those of you (or should that be the one of you) who want (or, perhaps, wants) to admire the thoroughness and erudition of the response, I am including a link here.

For the other one or perhaps two of you who are still reading, here is a summary of the Academy’s response.

This usage is probably a relic of the past when the unit of time ‘daka’ was called by another name, and more precisely by other names. The more familiar name is ‘rega’ (M). In the language of the Biblical sources, a rega is a very short time. It was then used generally to mean any period of time smaller than an hour. In later generations, it began to be used to mean ‘one sixtieth of an hour’. The word rega in the sense of ‘minute’ was accepted until recent generations, and is still heard here and there, especially in phrases such as ‘Wait a minute!’

Another word that was used to denote one sixtieth of an hour is dak (M). This word found its way into Hebrew poetry:

In modern times, the feminine form daka began to be used alongside the word dak. In the end, daka prevailed. However, the regaַ and dak that were used here in the past left their mark in the common patterns ‘esser v’assara’, ‘hamisha l’chamesh’ and so on. A similar phenomenon also occurs in the field of money (when talking about a unit that is 0ne-hundredth of a shekel: the grush (in the masculine) was indeed replaced by the agora (in the feminine), but it retained its masculinity in formulations such as ‘shekel v’assarah’.

These linguistic practices are deeply rooted in speech, and it is doubtful whether there is any point in seeing them as a real disruption and fighting them. However, those who are careful with their language would prefer ‘esser dakot l’esser’, ‘hamesh v’shalosh dakot’, and so on.

So there you have it. The Academy provides a scholarly analysis. The original even quotes the Talmud’s use of ‘rega’ and also two early-modern Hebrew poems that use ‘dak’. However, as a bottom line, it recognises that a spoken language belongs to its speakers, and that attempting to rectify this ‘mistake’ would be a divisive and lost cause, and so, it concludes that, realistically, ‘esser v’assarah’ is here to stay.

And today’s most important takeaway is, in the words of the immortal Avons’ British hit of 1959:

Keep your mind on your driving
Keep your hands on the wheel
And keep your snoopy eyes on the road ahead.

And, with a scarcely detectable segue, I wish those of you celebrating later this week: Hag Shavuot Sameah.

If you are reading this, then it means that it has made it through several portals. As I am writing it, I am not at all sure what its final resting place will be. I may decide that it is nothing more (and, at the same time, nothing less) than an entry in the diary that I do not keep. On the other hand, I may decide to show it to Bernice, and then to discuss with her whether it should go any further. Separately, and together, we will probably discuss whether it will be shared with two other pairs of eyes. We may even, although that will be a huge step, both feel that it is appropriate for a general audience. In that case, you will be reading it…indeed you are reading it, which, I suppose, means that both Bernice and I felt that was the way to go.

Our story begins on Monday afternoon, when we were, as usual, in Zichron. Maayan asked me a question about bringing bikkurim to Bet Hamikdash (bringing first fruits to the Temple), and, after I had answered, Raphael then asked her what Bet Hamikdash was, a question that Maayan passed on to me.

(Both of my daughters-in-law often ask questions connected with Jewish religious practice. Since they both come from secular homes, but both grew up in the Israeli mainstream, their questions are difficult to predict, and, often, challenging to answer. This was not something I realised I had signed up for until it started happening, but it keeps my on my toes.)

I should explain that Bernice was, at that point, in the bedroom, attempting to persuade Adam that it was in his best interests to go to sleep. (He tends to be, during the day, a catnapper, believing that 10 or 15 minutes is all the sleep he needs.) If Bernice had been available, this would have been a question for her. She, after all, was a ganenet for decades, whereas I don’t have a lot of experience explaining such concepts to four-year-olds. Still, needs must when the Devil, or, indeed, God, drives, so I took a deep breath and a step back.

I began by asking Raphael whether he knew anything about Hashem, and, from his response, I decided that needed to be my starting point. Both of our children, and their partners, are respectful of our religious beliefs, and also welcome us exposing our grandchildren to their Jewish heritage, so there was no tension of any kind in my talking to Raphael about God and the Temple. I presented Hashem as the Prime Mover and Creator of the universe and everything in it (not quite in those terms, but you get the idea), including the mechanisms by which the universe continually recreates itself. I then explained that Hashem loves everything he has made, but has a special relationship with the Jews, and has given us the Torah, to explain to us how we should behave, treating everyone and everything kindly, and thanking God for all He has provided us with. The Jews built the Temple as a place where they could come to meet God and thank Him for all the wonderful things He has created and provided for us.

This seemed to satisfy Raphael, and the conversation soon turned to whether it was time yet to eat something sweet. I found myself revisiting this conversation this morning. I started the day by harvesting the last of our loquats and the first of our nectarines. On the kitchen table, I set out the fruit in order to take trumot and ma’asrot, the tithes that, in Temple times, would be given to the priests. As I went through the ritual that is, over the years, starting to feel familiar, I suddenly found it refreshed and invested with its full meaning by the explanation I had given Raphael the previous day. I was struck by the thought that we need to see the world more often through the eyes of a four-year-old, to guard against our becoming jaded, and taking the everyday world for granted. As one of the sayings of the day offered me by my computer this week put it, in a phrasing attributed to Einstein, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

I can attest that in setting aside the tithes this morning, I was far more actively conscious than I usually am of how minor is my role in producing the fruit that our garden yields, and how much it is a gift from God. I was very grateful to Maayan for having created the opportunity, and yielded me the place, to think, at a fundamental level, about our relationship with Hashem.

Later this morning, I found myself reflecting on the life choices that our two children have made. I recognise now that, when the children were growing up, whenever I visualised their adult lives, I always imagined them growing up to become much better versions of myself. As I write that last sentence, I am appalled by the egocentricity it reveals.

As things turned out, both Esther and Micha’el, in their very different ways, made life choices as they matured that brought them to very different places from the ones I might have chosen for them. Along the way, there were moments when my egocentricity made it more difficult for me to be entirely happy in their happiness. But I realised, very quickly, the rightness of those choices for them. Each of them has found a life partner who truly completes them. Each of them has built a wonderful family. Each of them is shaping a life of meaning, commitment, purpose and values.

Above all, of course, each of them has grown into not a better version of me (what an awful idea), but, rather, a better version of themselves, which is, at bottom, what we are all put on earth to achieve. The precious time that Bernice and I spend with our family is an opportunity to enjoy watching not only our grandchildren grow up, but also our grown-up children build a meaningful life. I relish the prospect of many more years of watching those adventures unfold.

Blogger’s Note: On Thursday of this week, local elections are taking place for 136 ; authorities in England, including some of the largest cities and the whole of London. I have a very real fear that, once the results of those elections are announced, it may be a very long time before I feel like writing a light-hearted blog post again. So, this week, I am making the most of the sunshine while it lasts.

Here in Maale Adumim, the season has very definitely changed. Last week saw me in open-toed sandals, and even in shorts on a couple of days. It is true that, since then, we have had a light sprinkling of rain, and, as I write, on Tuesday afternoon, the wind is once again setting the towering cypress swaying gracefully and our screen door banging gracelessly. However, it is impossible to miss the fact that spring is very firmly here.

In our front garden, the birds had clearly decided last week that the loquats were ripe enough to eat. Despite my clearly explaining to them every year that they are more than welcome to any fruit over three metres high, they still insist on having a taste of the lower-hanging fruit as well.

Fortunately, our tree yields enough fruit to keep both the birds and us happy. I have now, in three batches, harvested all but the last couple of kilo of fruit. Our total yield this year is likely to be about 13 kilo, which is more than enough for me to add a half-a-dozen loquat to our morning fruit salad for a few weeks, for us to offer bags of fruit to our neighbours (at least those who don’t have their own tree), for me to freeze several two-cup portions to make batches of ice-cream through the year, for us to take a bag every week for three weeks to Esther, and, as I decided last week, for me to make 3 kilo of jam.

All of which explains why I spent a good couple of hours last week removing the seeds and the innards from about 5 kilo of loquat. As always, I washed the seeds and laid them out to dry in the sun for a week, before soaking them for a month in alcohol, with lemon zest and vanilla pods, to make my loquat liqueur, which, unsurprisingly, is very similar in flavour to amaretto. Unfortunately, the seeds were exposed to yesterday’s brief rain shower while we were in Zichron, so I may have to give them an extra day or two to dry out completely. I don’t actually have a lot of wiggle room, because, as I realised with a shock after laying out the stones, if they are to sit in the alcohol for a month before I add a sugar syrup and bottle the liqueur, I will be completing the process only a couple of days before our next trip to Portugal, in mid-June.

All of which, of course, assumes that we will actually be going to Portugal in mid-June, and not, once again, running from home to air-raid shelter, or, another possibility presumably, being grounded because of a world oil crisis. These are possibilities we are trying, for the moment, not to contemplate.

After I had finished all of my loquat prep, I became aware, over the next day, of two distinct pains in my right thumb. I soon realised that I must be suffering from what I have termed LGBT – loquat-gutter’s buggered thumb.

For you to understand the pathology of LGBT, I should tell you (or, rather, remind you, since I did explain this on this very site just over five years ago) my technique for preparing loquats. The most important point is that, for ice-cream and jam, I don’t skin them. In preparing ice-cream, my Vitamix zaps the skin without missing a beat; in jam-making, the skin enhances both the flavour and the texture. My technique for ‘filleting’ the fruit is to hold a loquat between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, with the stalk facing up. I then place the thumb of my right hand on the calyx (the opposite end from the stalk), and push that thumb up through the centre of the fruit; almost as if by magic, the seeds, the membrane and the calyx all emerge cleanly from the stalk end of the fruit.

To clean 5 kilo of fruit, repeat this process about 200 times. You will end up with 5 kilo of very juicy, succulent fruit, a large bowl of innards and calyces, 2 litres of smooth, shiny seeds, and, of course, LGBT, which manifests as two separate conditions.

The first, and more immediate, condition is a fairly acute pain deep under the right thumbnail. I eventually decided this must be caused by tiny pieces of grit, twig and plant fibre that I had repeatedly pushed deeper and deeper under my thumbnail. I spent much of the next day with a nailbrush and a manicure set, trying, with limited success, to dislodge the more stubborn flecks of detritus. I am happy to report that, over the course of four or five days, the matter has decomposed sufficiently to no longer be an irritant.

The second condition I was vaguely conscious of by the end of the day, but only became fully aware of when, on Shabbat, I shook the hands of one or two shul members who have what we used to call a manly grip. This condition is thumbsprain – a word I am particularly pleased with for its five consecutive consonants. Incidentally, and coincidentally, the word in English with the greatest number of consecutive consonants (eight) is also a medical condition: congenital aganglionosis of the gut goes by the name of Hirschsprung’s disease. (Some people will claim that aspartyltryptophan – the dipeptide formed from the amino acids aspartic acid and tryptophan – has nine consecutive consonants, but the two y’s are both actually vowels in that word.

Eight days later, my thumb is now fully recovered, and I know that the jam, the ice-cream and the liqueur will more than compensate for the temporary incapacity. Even if our art is only culinary, we artists must, it appears, be prepared to suffer for it.