Consider the following text:

If I were to wake at 6AM on Thursday, the sourdough I had prepared the previous evening would, by then, have been rising for nine hours. I would need to punch it down, and the dough would be ready an hour later for shaping into loaves, which would mean that I would not have had enough time to shower, dress and eat breakfast.

The above text is an illustration of one of two theories that I have developed over the years, to explain extraordinary phenomena. I thought today would be a particularly appropriate time for me to share these with you, principally because, after three days of musing, I still cannot think of anything to write about this week, but also because of two experiences I have had recently.

Let me leave that tantalizing text hanging for a moment, and consider instead Brownstein’s First Law – the Law of Sport. I long felt the need to develop such a law, because I have for decades been troubled by my relationship to sport.

A couple of months ago, to properly prepare myself for my weekly Zoom call with my brother, I checked the fortunes of Spurs (that’s not the San Antonio Spurs of basketball’s Western Conference, whatever that is, but rather Tottenham (no less exotic, in its own way, than San Antonio) Hotspur of English football’s Premier League.)

I dutifully noted their 2-0 defeat of Arsenal, and dropped a casual reference into my next call, knowing that, as an ex-Arsenal fan and now a Spurs supporter, Martin would be feeling good about this result. Sadly, I couldn’t keep the feigned interest up, and, when Martin made a reference to Spurs’ subsequently dismal fortunes a couple of weeks later, I had no idea what he was talking about. I simply don’t ‘get’ football.

The same is true of American football. However, at work, when I found myself at a lunch table surrounded by Americans, I found that ‘What about those Packers, eh!’ was usually all I needed to establish my street creds.

When I used to travel on business, my first act on leaving the airport in Sofia, or Copenhagen, or Vienna, or wherever, would be to find a taxi to take me to my hotel. Inevitably, the taxi driver would feel obliged to make cheerful taxi-driver conversation.

In Warsaw, the taxi-driver’s ice-breaker was ‘You want me to fix you up with a nice girl to come to your hotel?’, which is more or less where the conversation ended. In almost every other city outside the United States, the driver’s opening gambit would be: ‘Where do you come from?’

This was, in many ways, a more difficult question to answer. During the period when I was travelling, Israel was often not Europe’s pin-up country, and I had to try to avoid getting into an argument, when all I wanted to do was get to my hotel, shower, change and get to work.

So, I would usually say: ‘England’, not really a complete answer to the question, but technically not actually a lie. Unfortunately, my escape from the frying pan of the Middle East only landed me in the fire of England’s most important cultural export. The taxi-driver’s face would, without fail, break into an enthusiastic grin, as he intoned the sacred words: ‘Manchester United!’.

I was then required to spend ten minutes simulating enthusiasm for, and trying to conceal my ignorance of, and total lack of interest in, football. More than once I found myself musing what exactly there was in the nature of football that fed that lack of interest – or, perhaps, what it was that there wasn’t in football, whose absence meant the sport left me cold.

At one point, I started compiling two lists: of those sports I enjoy watching, and of those I don’t. So, here’s your starter for 10: In what ways are tennis, cricket and golf different from football? The answer I eventually came up with is that I enjoy watching sports where a match stretches over a considerable period of time, and where the play is in short intense bursts, separated by lots of thinking time.

It is the taut, psychological battle that appeals to me, and that is more intense in an individual sport than a team sport. Cricket is, of course, a team sport, but it very often plays out as a clash between two individuals. It is that clash that I relish, whether between bowler and batsman, tennis players facing each other across the net, or a golfer wrestling with nothing more or less than his own demons.

I realise that I need to define my terms a little more closely. In cricket, ODIs and even T-20 can be fun, but they’re not really cricket; there’s red ball and then there’s everything else. To be honest, there’s a five-day Test and then there’s everything else.

Similarly, a five-set tennis match is a great deal more than one-and-two-thirds of a three-set match. Four days of the Open Golf contain more than four times the drama of a single round. The longer formats elevate these contests to an epic stature.

This must be why I even enjoy snooker – not the first choice of most intellectual and cultural snobs such as myself.

So, here’s a tentative formulation of Brownstein’s First Law: The degree of interest inherent in a sport is in inverse proportion to the ratio of actual playing time to total duration.

I have never actually timed a golf tournament, but a rule introduced in 2019 set a limit of 40 seconds to play a stroke. This means that a golfer taking the maximum permitted time, and playing 4 rounds for a total of 270, should spend three hours actually playing through his four rounds, while he will have been on the course for a total of about fifteen hours. The same is more or less true for tennis.

By this token, I suppose I should also enjoy watching chess….but it turns out that I’m the one person who didn’t even enjoy The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix.

Right! That’s sport sorted! Now let’s tackle the secret of Israel’s success.

I had promised myself not to talk about corona in my blog, but I must just mention that Bernice and I went for our first vaccination on Sunday. Despite the Government having twice brought forward the launch date for the vaccination campaign, all of the health funds, after some initial hiccoughs – websites temporarily down because of the amount of traffic; helplines not answering for an hour – had a system that was working effectively within a few days. We were processed efficiently and fairly quickly. All of this (the changing plans and the quick recovery) was typically Israeli.

You will often hear it suggested that at least one of the secrets of Israeli success is the extraordinary ability of Israelis to think on their feet and to improvise. From the boardroom to the battlefield, there are no end of thrilling and inspiring stories of Israelis instantly assessing an unforeseen situation, and exploiting it to their advantage.

Of course, there is another way of looking at this. If, surprisingly often, you find yourself confronting unforeseen situations and unanticipated developments, perhaps what you should consider is whether you need to brush up your skills in the areas of foresight and anticipation. Unfortunately, investing months in careful planning is much less of an adrenalin rush than brilliantly seizing a sudden opportunity.

The highest compliment that could be paid to an outstanding manager in the company I worked for was not to call her a splendidly methodical planner with an uncanny eye for detail, but, rather, a totach, which translates literally as ‘cannon’. In other words, sudden, explosive, and obliterating her target by being pointed vaguely in the right direction. In contrast, I never heard anyone praised for being a sniper.

Received wisdom in Israel is that this talent for improvisation is first discovered, and nurtured, in the army, where, so we are told, very little is predictable, and the ability to think on your feet is perhaps the most important survival skill. I do not agree with this theory. I believe that the fundamental reason why Israelis improvise so well, is precisely because they do not plan well. And they do not plan well because of…..Hebrew grammar.

Let me explain. The text with which I began this week’s post is a fine example of the multiplicity of verb tenses in English. There are no fewer than 17 tenses in English. Excluding the imperative, they are as follows:

Present tense
Present simple tense — I do
Present continuous tense — I am doing
Present perfect tense — I have done
Present perfect continuous tense — I have been doing

Past tense
Past simple tense — I did
Past continuous tense — I was doing
Past perfect tense — I had done
Past perfect continuous tense — I had been doing

Future tense
Future simple tense — I will do
Future continuous tense — I will be doing
Future perfect tense — I will have done
Future perfect continuous tense — I will have been doing

Past future tense
Past future simple tense — I would do
Past future continuous tense — I would be doing
Past future perfect tense — I would have done
Past future perfect continuous tense — I would have been doing

You should care about this, even though it isn’t in the test, because, as the sample text about baking bread demonstrated, you may need all of these tenses in order to be able to express complex temporal relations between different events.

Hebrew, on the other hand, has only four tenses – past, present, future and imperative. This makes any kind of forward planning much more difficult to conceptualise, and even more difficult to discuss.

Now that we have Gantt charts, this probably matters less. A Gantt chart is, put simply, a colored-bar visual presentation of the breakdown of a series of scheduled tasks over a certain period.

It is used in business to recognize how the dependencies between different tasks in a process (you can’t tile the roof until you have erected the walls) influence the possible timeline. In my experience, the primary purpose of a Gantt chart is to tell you that, in order to meet your deadline, you need to have started your project six months ago!

Gantt charts are all well and good in business. (And, for me, in synagogue mishloach manot projects – a reference I have neither the time nor the patience to explain, I’m afraid. As we say in Hebrew: ‘He who understands will understand.’ – It sounds snappier in Hebrew.) However, in everyday life, we still need the ability to talk clearly and concisely about these temporal relations. We can do that in English, but not in Hebrew.

So, Brownstein’s Second Law states: The ability of a nation to improvise effectively is inversely proportional to the number of verb tenses in its language.

Of course, if you want to develop an analytical mind that can visualize future developments, it’s never too early to start playing the ultimate game of strategy – Go.

By the way: at the time of the video, Tao had a filthy cold, but that was two months ago and he is now completely recovered.