First this week, a bit of housekeeping (actual, genuine, housekeeping, as it happens):

Following my description of Pesach baking last week, I had feedback (boom! boom!) from a couple of people, asking for recipes . Ever ready to oblige, I offer you not only a PDF of the recipes, which you can access here, but also, at no additional charge, a bonus. Since, by the time you access the Pesach recipes, I can’t imagine anyone will want to do any Pesach baking, you will have to keep the recipes until next year. (I have been told that the recipes work during the rest of the year as well, but I’m not sure I really believe it, and I have absolutely no intention of finding out.)

By the time you get around to reading this week’s blog post, Pesach may even be over already, in which case what you will be looking for is a good bread recipe. Unfortunately, sourdough starter is almost certainly what the Torah calls se’or, which is the one thing above all others that we are not allowed to possess during Pesach. This means that this year, as every year, just before Pesach, I poured away the last of my starter. The first thing I plan to do after we have changed back after Pesach is mix flour and water in a jar, place it on our kitchen windowsill (or, if the weather is cool, on top of our water machine) and place a large sign next to it that will read:

DEAR BACTERIA.

PLEASE FORGIVE ME FOR MOVING YOU TO THE DUSTBIN LAST WEEK. I HOPE YOU WERE ABLE TO FIND ANOTHER FOOD SOURCE THERE.

I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW THAT WE ARE BACK TO BUSINESS AS USUAL AND I HAVE SET UP THE ADJACENT HOTEL JUST FOR YOU.

PLEASE CONTACT OUR STAFF IF THERE IS ANYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO MAKE YOUR STAY COMFORTABLE.

If past experience is anything to go by, the local bacteria will be very quick on the uptake, but, even with the best will in the world, the starter won’t be robust enough to perform its magic in bread dough for four or five days. Meanwhile, of course, Bernice and I will be longing for some real bread.

Fortunately, I have a couple of recipes that produce a fairly hearty loaf even though they use only baker’s yeast, and not sourdough starter. This means that the second thing I plan to do after we have changed back is to make a batch of rye bread with caraway seeds (heimishe brown bread). If you can bear to wait just over two-and-a-half hours, you can enjoy a tasty loaf with very little effort.

You can access the fairly quick and simple rye bread recipe here.

Ed Note: It’s just struck me: if someone had told me, twenty years ago, that I would, at some point in the future, be writing a weekly blog in which, among other things, I shared recipes with my readers, I would have laughed in their face. But life sometimes contrives to manoeuvre you into an unexpected corner.

So, here we are, a third of the way into this week’s post, and the question, as ever, is: Where do we go from here?

Let me reference first a thought-provoking haggada produced this year to a commendably high standard in a very short time. It is a conventional haggada, illustrated with very striking photographs taken at the protests against the Government’s planned programme of judicial reform. To the text have been added a range of commentaries on Pesach and the Seder’s relevance to this struggle, contributed by a range of Israeli people of letters. Click the title to view the הגדת החירות – סיפור של מאבק ותקווה, also available with the commentaries translated into English as The Freedom Haggada – A Story of Protest and Hope.

I took a good look through this haggada before our Seder, which we celebrated with Esther, Maayan, and even Raphael, who managed to stay engaged until after he had performed his Ma Nishtana dance. While I do not agree with every sentiment of every reflection in the collection, I was delighted to be able to find enough material that I could bring to the Seder, confident that it reflected the common ground that we and the girls stand on. I know that not all of you will agree with the content, but I hope we can all celebrate the fact that it is, at the very least, an illustration of the continuing relevance to the Jewish people of our reliving the story of the Exodus.

End of lecture. Rapid change of subject.

Walking repeatedly through our front garden in the last couple of weeks, on my way from the house to the rubbish bins as we cleared out our cupboards, from the house to the front hedge as I put the disassembled and scrubbed kitchen drawers out to dry, and then on my way from the house to shul and back again, I could not fail to notice that Pesach is not called Hag He’Aviv – the spring festival – for nothing. Bernice and I were very late in saying the once-a-year blessing on seeing fruit blossom on trees for the first time, and by the time we got around to it our nectarine tree had barely any blossom left. Indeed, I was surprised to see, it already had fruit – and, in comparison with previous years – lots of it.

So, yesterday, I decided the time had come to protect the nectarines from the birds. This was a job that I undertook fairly early in the morning, before Bernice was up and about. Let me explain why that is necessary.

Among the television programmes Bernice ‘enjoys’ watching are programmes that follow the stories of patients who arrive at the A&E/emergency/casualty departments of hospitals. It appears that almost all of these patients are men in their 70s who fail to realise that they can no longer zip up and down on ladders: arthritic knees, sudden spells of dizziness, wasting leg muscles, impaired inner-ear balance mechanisms, all conspire to make going up on a ladder a very stupid thing for a man in his 70s to do. All of this means, of course, that I have to do it when Bernice isn’t looking.

I am, naturally, tremendously careful, and all the time I am balanced up there I take tree-hugging to new heights, but nevertheless I do realise that it is a very stupid thing to do and, if it makes you feel any better, I promise I won’t do it next year and will, instead, wait for either my daughter (or, more probably, my acrobatic daughter-in-law) to arrive from Zichron, or for one of our neighbours’ strapping sons in their twenties, stamping their alpha male-dom all over my deflated ego, to breeze in from next door, and attach the netting in 10 minutes, doubtless while balancing on a slender branch on one leg.

The fact is that I spent 70 minutes yesterday wrestling with a nectarine tree that has undergone an adolescent growth spurt in the last year and could now play basketball for The Summer Fruits in the Israel tree league. After all that time, I was sweating heavily, I had managed to dislodge about 30 immature nectarines (which is arguably more than the birds would have eaten), and the tree still looked barely protected, even to the untrained eye.

I plan to tackle the shesek (loquat) tree tomorrow (now today – Tuesday), which is much more straightforward. I have a deal with the birds that I cover this tree only up to a height where I can safely reach. Anything above that is theirs. Unfortunately, I’m not entirely sure all of the birds understand the small print of this agreement.

As for the much smaller and more manageable peach tree, with its very modest harvest, I won’t have any netting left over, so I may have to play a game of chicken with the birds, and see if I can manage to pick each individual fruit just before the birds get to it.

When our gardener suggested several years ago that he plant three small nurslings – peach, nectarine and lemon – it seemed a charming idea. Nobody explained to me the expenditure of physical effort and mental strain that this would entail. Where the prophet Micah writes that “each man shall sit under his grapevine or fig tree with no one to disturb him”, I always thought that the vision of the Messianic age was one free of war and strife between man and his fellow-man. I never realised it also encompassed freedom from the war between man and birds, and, indeed, between man and gravity. I think I must be acquiring the wisdom of age, or something.

Meanwhile, if our three grandsons continue to explore the world around them with the same curiosity and enthusiasm they are all showing now, they will probably, on their way up, meet me, on my way down, somewhere on the slopes of the mountain-range of human wisdom, some time frighteningly soon.