My writing of any particular week’s blog post can be plotted as a specific point on a three-axis graph. The x-axis represents how many topics I have to choose from; the y-axis represents how difficult I find it to choose a topic; the z-axis represents the ease with which I write the post, once I have decided on a topic. Broadly speaking, if x=0 or x>3, then y>5. In other words, if I can’t think of a single topic, or of I can think of several topics, choosing one is difficult. Also broadly speaking, the larger y is, the larger z is. In other words, if it takes me a long time to decide on a topic, then it will take me a long time to write my post.

But not this week! This week, there is only one topic: Israel’s general election. As I write, polling opened over three hours ago. By the time you read this, the polls will have been closed for at least ten hours, and probably considerably more.

Which is why, uncharacteristically, even though I knew last Tuesday what I was going to have to write about this Tuesday, I still have absolutely no idea what to write. Predicting the future is not an easy thing, especially when it hasn’t happened yet. Making a prediction whose inaccuracy will be evident by the time most of my followers read it is an especially thankless task.

However, as James Joyce’s remembered rhyme about corporal punishment in schools goes:

It can’t be helped;
It must be done.
So down with your breeches
And out with your bum.

Throughout the weeks of what, for want of a better word, I shall call this election campaign, we have been told that this election is of tremendous significance: phrases like ‘a critical hinge election’ and ‘the most consequential election in Israel’s history’ have been bandied about. However, these words do not describe what, from where I’m standing, the campaign has, for the most part, looked like. It has rather been, by and large, a tired rehash of what we grew only too used to in the six election campaigns we suffered through between September 2019 and November 2022.

Amid the blitz of character assassination attempts, dire warnings of the consequences of voting for a particular party, the reduction of positions to cheap slogans, scare-mongering, it has not been easy to discern any discussion of policies. One commentator pointed out that, since no single party is going to achieve a simple majority of the vote, and, therefore, of the Knesset seats, a coalition government is inevitable, and, for that reason, when deciding which party to vote for, the question to ask is not: ‘What does this party stand for?’ but, rather, ‘Who is this party prepared, and who is it not prepared, to sit in the government with?’ and to cast your vote for the party whose potential choice of partners you are most comfortable with.

Singling out a worst offender in the trivialisation and sloganeering of the campaign is not difficult. The Likud campaign has been predictably simplistic and misrepresenting, and I have no doubt that some time this afternoon it will also play its traditional scare-mongering card, with an announcement that ‘the Left’ (and/or possibly ‘the Arabs’) are turning out in vast numbers and Likud is in danger of being defeated. The slogan which they chose to end their campaign with was ‘The Right or Palestine’ (which rhymes in Hebrew), a lie so egregious as to be embarrassing.

The fact is that, on matters of external security and the relationship with the Palestinians, there is very little daylight between Likud and the three or four mainstream parties to its left. Indeed, in terms of security, the labels ‘right’ and ‘left’ have little meaning in the Israel of 2026. This is, in fairness, not true of the far right and far left parties, but the security consensus spans a wide range of parties (not always in their slogans, but rather in their actions).

—– o 0 o —–

It is now seven hours later – 5:20PM – and the two things we know are that the promised/threatened rain has started to fall, and that the voting rate by 4PM was 55.7%, 12% higher than in any previous election at that hour. Of course, these two facts may be linked; it is possible that people voted early to beat the rain. It is also possible that the estimated 67,000+ Israelis who flew back from abroad specifically to vote voted early, or that the 640,000 first-time voters also got up early to vote (although in my experience, that age group does not include many early risers).

I had more or less decided that I was not going to be tempted into a prediction, which is, let’s face it, a mug’s game. However, I’m going to stick my neck out. I still believe, as I have throughout the campaign, that the greatest likelihood is not only that neither major party (Netanyahu’s Likud and Eisenkot’s Yashar) will win an absolute majority (and that is, I will admit, not so much a prediction as a statement of the obvious), but also that neither of the natural blocs that form around those two parties will win an absolute majority – 61 seats.

However, the size of the turnout suggests to me that the opposition parties may perform well. In addition, Naftali Bennett’s personal grassroots campaign has been very lively and very much focussed on the issues. He has participated in countless local meetings, fielding specific questions and providing detailed answers. I believe that his performance in this campaign may win him a surprisingly large vote. I complained earlier about the staleness of this campaign. My comments don’t apply to Bennett.

And there I think I will leave it, with my neck stuck out right over where the guillotine is liable to fall. Sometime in the next couple of days, I will know whether to expect the blood-curdling sound of the metal sliding down towards me. Depending on the degree of humiliation, you may or may not hear from me next Wednesday, and, even if you do, today’s offering may be my last attempt at political comment for a very long time.

One final observation. Despite the flippancy of my tone in this week’s post, I do not take lightly the astonishing fact that 7,300,000 Israelis have the right today to exercise their vote and play their part in determining the direction that this incredible country will take over the next four years. Not many generations ago, our forebears would have found it very difficult to believe what is taking place throughout the country today. Both in the sweep of Jewish history, and in the sweep of the Middle East, free and fair elections, with universal suffrage, are a precious rarity that we take for granted or dismiss as trivial at our peril.

Even by my standards, I think that’s an obscure referential misquote, but I wouldn’t put it past one or two of my readers to be sufficiently nerdish Star Trek fans to catch the echo. For the rest of you, fear not: all will be revealed in due time (and it has nothing to do with Star Trek really).

In the 1960s, scientists built an English-Russian-English translating computer. To test its ability, they fed in the English saying: Out of sight, out of mind. They then took the Russian output, fed that back in, and the computer translated it back into English as: Invisible idiot.

I used to love this joke in the 1960s. Thinking back, I suspect I loved it for two reasons. First, it illustrated what I characterised as the richness of expression in English. The same phrase – Out of sight – can be understood either from the perspective of the unobserved, indicating that it is hidden or invisible, or from the perspective of the observers, indicating that said observers themselves are not in a position to see it. It strikes me now that you could argue that this indicates the paucity of vocabulary in English – one phrase with two very different meanings – but essentially I find the potential ambiguities of English a tremendous strength of the language.

The second reason why I loved it was that it relished the fact that machines would never be able to match the linguistic creativity and nuance of humans, which was immensely reassuring for someone who harboured dreams of becoming some sort of writer.

It was also, of course, a joke of its time, illustrating the linguistic iron curtain that separated the English-speaking West from the Russian-speaking Soviet empire.

Fast-forwarding to 2021-22, as editor of my shul’s magazine I started using Google Translate as a first step to translating articles written in English into Hebrew. Not only did this save considerable time, but as a bonus, when I sanity checked the first draft, I found I had enough mistranslations for an amusing article at the end of the magazine. It’s not easy to find any that will be understandable to those of my readers who are not bilingual, but here’s one. One writer, describing the scene in the gym, wrote about a ‘Nike-track-suited trio’. Google translated this as שלישייה מתאימה למסלול של נייקי – ‘a trio appropriate for a Nike track’.

Incidentally, if you haven’t used AI to render a translation in the last five years, you should note that the quality of the translation has improved exponentially.

Of course, it was way back in 1996 that IBM’s computer Deep Blue first played a series of chess matches against world champion Garry Kasparov. Although Kasparov won 4-2, in the following year Deep Blue won the rematch series 3½–2½. There were experts who argued that Kasparov played significantly below par in the rematch, and was considerably disturbed by his probably correct apprehension that any mistake of his would be pounced upon and mercilessly exploited. Nevertheless, that felt like a watershed moment.

At the same time, those of us who still believed that AI would never be able to match human creativity in language comforted ourselves with the thought that, though the possible combinations of moves arising from any situation on the chessboard are huge, they are finite, and a powerful enough computer can match a human chessmaster’s intuition and genius by pedestrianly working through the possibilities. Once the computer got fast enough at calculating all the possibilities, it became a worthy, if uninspired, opponent.

But language, we (or at least I) smugly contended, was different, and until ten days ago, I could point to evidence that supported my claim. When programmers first started training computers to solve cryptic crosswords, the results were laughable. While the computer might stumble across the occasional correct answer, it would, much more often, provide an ‘answer’ that either did not contain the right number of letters or that had no connection to the clue. Endearingly, the computer would always offer what it hoped you would believe was a carefully reasoned argument as to why its answer was correct.

For example, the following clue: Number achieved victory, we hear (3) might be answered by an LLM as follows: ‘The answer is ICE, because ice makes you numb and it sounds like ‘ace’ which is a winning serve in tennis.’ The problems with this answer are that ‘ice’ does not sound like ‘ace’ (unless the clue included a reference to Cockney pronunciation, ‘ace’ does not mean ‘achieved victory’; that would be ‘aced’ (possibly), and, finally, an ace is not a victory, it is the means by which the player achieves victory in a point. If you think I am being pedantic, then you need to understand that cryptic crossword clues must, perforce, satisfy the most pedantic of pedants. The great crossword clues are those that you don’t solve but which, as soon as you read the answer, you see how it fits the clue perfectly and uniquely.

The answer to the clue Number achieved victory, we hear (3), incidentally, is ONE, which is a number, and which sounds like (we hear) WON, which means ‘achieved victory’.

Even last year, when Professor Siddhartha Chatterjee, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, brought his AI program Darmok to the Times Crossword Puzzle Championships in London, it failed to beat the human winner of the competition, although it performed frighteningly well. When Professor Chatterjee returned with a more mature Darmok this year, the program performed better on each of the four puzzles than any of the human competitors. When I read the news, I confess that combobulateion was totally dissed.

To give you an idea of the level of sophistication required, here is a clue from the final puzzle that stumped two of the final four humans.

Wolf trap missing its lowest crosspiece (5)

This was a down clue, and the across clues that intersected it in the answer grid provided three of the five letters.

S    A    F

Give yourself 100 bonus points if you got the answer: SNARF.

Give yourself 50 bonus points if, knowing the answer, you can explain why it is the answer.

The explanation is that a SNARE is a trap and, remembering that this is a down clue, the answer contains four crosspieces: the horizontal stroke in the middle of A and the three horizontal strokes in the E. If you remove the lowest crosspiece, the E becomes an F, and the word becomes SNARF, which means to eat greedily, or to wolf your food.

I tackle the Times cryptic crosswords most days of the week, and I can never remember seeing a clue to solve which which you needed to remove a stroke of a letter to create a different letter. So, assuming the AI realised this explanation, that represents impressive lateral thinking. I actually believe it is more likely that the AI – and, indeed, the human competitors – used the three ‘lights’ (the S, A and F provided by across clues) to arrive at SNARF, and didn’t worry about parsing the cryptic part of the clue. Remember that these finalists were solving a 30-clue puzzle in somewhere around 3–4  minutes, which leaves precious little time for much more than seeing the answer almost instantly and writing it in.

Let me offer you one more clue from the same crossword, to indicate the level of linguistic subtlety and agility required,

Faint but persistent echo, winding along gorges. (8)

In crossword parlance, I would say that this clue has a beautiful, smooth surface. In other words, the clue reads very naturally, but, to solve it, we have to parse the language very differently from what appears on the surface.

Here we go:

‘Faint but persistent’ is the definition, and the answer is SNEAKING, in the sense: ‘I have a sneaking suspicion most of you have stopped reading by now.’ It’s fair to say that this is a secondary meaning of ‘sneaking’.

‘Winding along’ is ‘’snaking’, which ‘gorges’, in other words swallows or contains, the letter E, which is indicated by its NATO phonetic alphabet word – ‘echo’.

So, we have SN E AKING.

To solve this clue, you must recognise ‘gorges’ as a verb, whose subject is ‘winding along’ as a gerund/adverb phrase. On the surface, ‘winding’ is a gerundive, and ‘along’ is a preposition governing the noun ‘gorges’. All of that is beautiful misdirection. You must also separate ‘faint but persistent’ from the rest of the clue and recognise it as the definition, and associate ‘echo’ with the NATO alphabet.

All that remains is for me to unpack, in a similar fashion, this week’s blog post title. It is a misquote of a memorable line from ‘Darmok’, an episode of Star Trek in which Picard eventually realises that the alien civilisation the Enterprise has encountered speaks in metaphors. One of Picard’s memorable lines when he finally manages to communicate with this initially aggressive civilisation is ‘Shaka, when the walls fell’. You can watch Patrick Stewart utter the immortal line, here. (Incidentally, I am in absolutely no sense a trekkie, and I only stumbled across all of this sub-Tolkein bunkum when I googled ‘Darmok’ to find out the origin of the AI program’s name.)

Having uncovered the meme, I felt that it described my feelings when I learnt that Darmok had out-performed the humans in cryptic crossword solving. I was, indeed, shaken, when the walls fell.

But, I ask myself, could AI ever create a cryptic crossword puzzle? Let’s answer that question with a crossword clue. Be the first to post your solution in the comments below this post.

Which pastas, etc get cooked.? Look here! (5,4,5)

In just under two weeks, Israel is going places. One of the places it is definitely going is to the polls. A second place it is almost certainly going is to the dogs, and the two are not unrelated.

Israel desperately needs this election, in order to start moving on from a position of stagnation on multiple fronts. However, it is far from certain that the results of the election are going to leave the country in any position to move on.

As has more than once in the past been the case, I have not yet decided which party I will be voting for. There are, as has always been the case in the past, several parties I already know I will not be voting for, but, sadly, that still leaves a wide choice.

I thought today that I might describe some of what I would like to see come out of this election. Perhaps that will help me decide how to cast my vote on October 27.

First, I’d like to see (or rather to have seen) each party publish, the day after the election date was declared, a 5–10 page manifesto: a clear, practical statement of what they plan to achieve if they form a government, and how they plan to achieve it. A few parties have such a blueprint, but many do not. If I have to intuit what a party’s platform is, and what its plans are, beyond slogans like “Anyone but Bibi” or single-issue statements like “Sharing the national burden evenly”, then I can hardly make an informed decision.

Next, I’d like to see far fewer parties in the next Knesset. If a party wins four or five seats, there is one of two possible outcomes. It may be lucky enough to find itself holding the balance of power in the Knesset, and joining the governing coalition, while extorting from the largest Government party a ridiculous number of Government ministries – some newly minted purely as a bribe – as well as getting funding for some project that favours their particular constituency. On the other hand, it may find itself out in the cold of the opposition, where, with a handful of members, it will have no real impact on public life.

The way to achieve my desired result is probably to increase the electoral threshold to something like 8%. This would, I imagine, lead to politicians grouping together as a single party under a broader tent. This would mean that when I cast my vote, I would know who would be in the government if my party won. There would be no unexpected and unacceptable coalitions.

Raising the electoral threshold is one way. A more far-reaching change, and one that I would also welcome, is to move, partially or wholly, from a proportional representative system to a constituency system, where an individual MK is elected in a local constituency, competing against individual MKs from a range of other parties, in a first-past-the-post race. The prospect of having a local MK who is required and incentivised to represent all of his constituents is very attractive,

I would also welcome the setting in place of a process that would eventually lead to a constitution and reform in the balance between executive, judicial and legislative powers. The country needs that reform, and deserves leaders who have the maturity and responsibility to create a framework that can arrive at a programme that unites, rather than divides, the country.

If the balance of power still needs to be held by a Haredi party (and I hope it will not but suspect it will), then I would like it to be The Charedi Public, a new party that advocates for secular studies, workforce participation, and IDF conscription for anybody who does not study full-time in yeshiva.

Lastly in this list, I would like to see the back of Bibi. He was, for many of his years in Israeli politics, a tremendous national asset: as Finance Minister, and, in many ways, as Prime Minister, However, it is clear that much of his naturally diminishing energy is now devoted simply to his political survival, rather than to the survival, and progress, of the nation. The time has come, indeed it came some time ago, for him to hand the baton to the successor generation – a generation he has, throughout his career, striven to stifle.

I’m not sure in what order I would rank the above ideas. However, if I could only have one wish, then it would be that the very first action taken by the new government be the appointment of a state inquiry into the events of 7 October. Simple justice cries out for this, so that those responsible for the failure are compelled to take responsibility. National security requires this, so that the necessary lessons can be learnt and changes made to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. The nation as a whole needs this, as a vital stage in healing and moving on from 7 October.

The upcoming election feels tremendously important, and yet the build-up to it gives no sense of significance. I hope and pray that, before October 27, and after it, the nation finds that sense and moves forward with purpose.

Well, blow me down. You turn round twice and it’s Tuesday again and, yet again, I have no idea what to write about this week. So far today I have been playing very elaborate avoidance games. We were in Zichron yesterday, experiencing the weekly double whammy of not only getting to spend quality time with our grandchildren, but also having our children express their gratitude to us for doing so. I keep telling them they’ve got that backwards, but they don’t seem to have caught on yet.

While we were in Zichron, two parcels arrived at our home in Ma’ale Adumim.

Following on from last week’s rant against delivery staff, I could tell you how one of the drivers called me to say that he wasn’t familiar with Ma’ale Adumim and wanted me to direct him to Hashminit Street! He then asked me where Number 14 was. I explained that he should find an even-numbered house, walk to the next house and check its number to discover whether he was walking in the right direction or needed to turn round, and then walk until he came to the house that has a 14 on the gate and two 14s on the wall of the house. He then called to ask me if the gate was painted black.

I congratulated him on having found the house and asked him to leave the parcel (which, incidentally, weighed less than a kilo) next to the electricity box, out of sight from the street. When we arrived home that evening, we found the package, in a box large enough to contain a microwave, placed just inside the front gate. As I say, I could tell you all this, but two weeks in a row would start to sound like an obsession, and, anyway, all of you have stories that can top that, and, as one of my readers commented last week, at least the parcel contained what I had ordered.

Which was, as it happened, a digital photo frame, to replace the one that died on us a few months ago. In preparation for its arrival, Bernice and I had sorted through the photos we had taken on her birthday, when all of the family were with us, so I spent a couple of hours this morning working out how to transfer from my laptop to the frame, which involved trying to deduce where my younger self would have stored the Micro-SD card after he last used it many years ago, and then working out whether the photos were better as ‘fit to frame’ (with a slight border on one axis) or ‘fill the frame’ (with the danger of lobbing off tops of heads or severing fingers, but usually then being able to slide minimally to restore the missing body part).

Then, having finished my granola yesterday, and returned from Esther’s too tired to make another batch last night, I cleared with Bernice that we would move breakfast to lunch today, so I breakfasted on boiled eggs and a toasted platzel, and made granola in time to lunch on fresh fruit salad, granola and yoghurt.

Which means (I realise I am risking my life beginning two paragraphs in one blog with a subordinate clause acting as a sentence, but, if I don’t start living dangerously at 76, what’s life for?) that I now have about an hour and a half to write my blog before we go off to join my brother and sister-in-law, Martin and Adèle, for an earlyish dinner in Jerusalem. That would serve as an excellent segue into one half of today’s topic, had I not decided to start with the other half.

What a week it has been. Apparently, if you ask AI how, as a suicidal jihadist co-pilot, it would recommend overpowering the pilot, taking control of the plane, and crashing it into a skyscraper in Israel, it will give you a much better plan of action than attacking him with the fire axe stored in the cockpit. So, until AI manages to organise its agents sufficiently to take over the world, and either kill us all or keep us as pets, which many estimates seem to suggest may be soon after Chanukah, it should be able to ensure much greater success for Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.

Then there’s the Irish football team, who seem to have missed the memo about either refusing to legitimise Israel by playing them or agreeing to play them and behaving in a civilised way. They preferred to have their cake and eat it. Or perhaps they simply wanted to make up for not having expressed the appropriate moral indignation when they were exchanging Heil Hitler salutes with the German national team back in the day.

All of this was, of course, topped by the Durban Revivalists, aka The Green Party of the UK, who, at their annual conference this week, passed a motion declaring that Zionism is Racism. Apparently, backing a “single, democratic Palestinian state in all of historic Palestine” is not racist, despite the fact that this state would ethnically cleanse Palestine, and (in the best-case scenario) expel all Jews. I still don’t really understand the process by which most of the ecological evangelists became mindless antisemites, but that is undeniably what has happened in Europe.

In addition, of course, publication day for this post is October 7, the third anniversary of the pogrom of 2023. The huge shadow that this casts is even darker because of the double realisation that the process of understanding how Israel failed to predict or immediately respond to the horrific assault has not even started yet, and that, despite three years of military and political efforts, despite the progress that has been made, the multiple threats to Israel are still present on all fronts.

And yet…

And yet, our sweltering and seemingly endless summer appears, right on cue, to have ended. Sukkot, for the first time in years, gave us the most clement of weather: dry, but bearably hot-to-warm, with no strong winds. If you suffered in your sukkah in weather different from this, then perhaps you should consider taking the hint that the best place to build your sukkah is… in Israel. Just saying.

Now we seem to be moving into that shortest of seasons in Israel: autumn. Mornings start crisp. Days are sunny but feel a little fresher and lighter. Evenings are pleasant. We no longer need the ceiling fan on in the bedroom at night. We are seriously discussing whether we need to take sweaters when we go into Jerusalem this evening.

It really feels as though summer had ended, and it has been a very special summer. It began in earnest with Tslil, Micha’el and the boys over here for almost five weeks, and is ending with Adèle and Martin returning to England this week after a month in Israel – their first proper visit in three years. Nothing personal, national or global happened to interfere with those trips, and we were able to spend a lot of quality time with our nuclear and extended family.

All of the last few books that I have read aloud with Bernice have lived up to their promise – which is not always guaranteed – and we have enjoyed some good film, theatre and concerts in recent months. On Sukkot we both were entertained in friends’ and family’s sukkot, and entertained family in ours. We met up with friends we haven’t seen in too long.

For me, the tefilla in shul over Tishrei very much helped me to celebrate the chagim in a frame of mind and spiritual state that brought me much closer to where I would like to be than is sometimes the case, something that was helped by a book that I am halfway through reading at the moment and will probably write about here some time in the next month.

From the sublime to the gorblimey, as we used to say. Sub specie aeternitatis, it matters not a jot, but, I’m sorry, I can’t help my petty competitive streak. Shortly after I started playing bridge again, I joined the Israel Bridge Federation, and started competing in a weekly duplicate competition in Jerusalem. Beginning as a Registered Player, I quickly gained the handful of points needed to rise to the level of Advanced Player (a very generous misnomer). Last week I played not with my usual partner, but with a friend whose mental acumen at the age of 92 I aspire to. We came top, and the four points this earned me raised me to the next level: Vice Master. While I recognise this is a name open to misinterpretation, I feel ridiculously, and totally disproportionately, chuffed at having reached these giddy heights.

So, while it is true that some of the glass is full and some is empty, I’m not at all sure that, for me at least, and at this distinct point in time at least, the dividing line is as far up the glass as halfway. It honestly feels more like three quarters. I genuinely hope that the same is true for you. The secret, I read this week, is always to have aspirations and never to have expectations. My aspirations start with me having Bronze Vice Master in my sights. I invite you to pursue your own.

Blogger’s Note: Good grief. I’ve just written an upbeat self-help column. I certainly didn’t see that coming!