I’m a great believer in pushing the envelope, and so this week I am performing a dramatic experiment with the form of the blog post. Consider this a post-modernist expression, exploring the limits of the medium.

Due to circumstances more or less completely beyond my control, I am not in a position to write a post this week. Nothing sinister; don’t panic. I have it on good authority that the sun will rise tomorrow. It just isn’t possible for me to produce a post today. The sausage factory has simply run out of you-really-don’t-want-to-know-what-we-put-in-them.

So, I would like you all just to take a moment to reflect on what you imagine I might have chosen to write about this week, and then to allow your mind to explore the nooks and crannies of what you imagine I might have said.

This is, I admit, something of a calculated risk. The golden rule of blog-writing, all the self-help manuals insist, is consistency. With the exception of one calendar hiccough, I have produced the goods, every Tuesday, week in, week out, for the last 267 weeks. That’s about 400,000 words. Mostly drivel, it’s true; but never mind the quality, feel the width. And now, here I am, risking the entire edifice crashing down on me.

Even more risky is the fact that you may conclude that your imagined version of my post is a lot better than what you usually read, and, from now on, you’re going to cut out the middle man, and just go straight to imagining what I have written about every week.

Still, for better or worse, I’m not in a position to do anything about it. Here’s 300 words and change; if you want any more this week, I’m afraid you’re going to have to write them yourself.

As far as I am in control of this monster, I undertake to rectify the situation next week, when normal service should be resumed. Meanwhile, it’s over to you.

Blogger’s Note: No animals were harmed in the writing of this post: one ego, but no animals.

Dateline Monday. I owe a debt to several commentators, whose recent reflections are a direct trigger for this week’s post. I would particularly mention Rabbi Doron Perez, Melanie Phillips, and, as always, Daniel Gordis. If your reading habits are similar to mine, you will recognize their fingerprints everywhere below.

This week, there is only one story, although there are many takes on it. Yesterday afternoon, three young Israeli women – Doron Steinbrecher, Emily Damari and Romi Gonen – were released by Hamas and returned to their families. Doron and Emily were both abducted from Kibbutz Kfar Aza, while Romi was snatched from the Nova festival.

Around midnight last night, 90, or possibly 96, Palestinian prisoners were released by Israel, the large majority (62, or possibly 69) women and a small minority minors. It is further reported that none of them had been convicted of murder, although at least some had been convicted of crimes of terror.

Thus was completed, with no major hiccoughs, the first stage in the hostage-for-prisoner exchange planned for the coming weeks as part of the ceasefire agreement.

I don’t want to discuss here whether this is an agreement that Israel should have accepted. I’m not even sure whether Iseael’s refusal to accept essentially the same deal when it was floated last June represented, at the time, a sensible decision. I don’t sit in on security briefings, so it is difficult for me to assess the situation in Gaza. Nor am I privy to conversations between Washington and Jerusalem, so I cannot determine how much pressure was applied.

(At the same time, I can’t entirely escape the suspicion that Bibi may have invited Trump to twist his arm, thereby potentially buying Bibi a little credit with the demonstrators while allowing him to plead force majeure when confronted by his right-wing coalition partners.)

Instead, I want to reflect on the duality of this situation, and to suggest that to recognize, and live with, that duality requires a quintessentially Jewish understanding of the world.

The public sphere in Israel has not, over the last 15 months, or, indeed, over the last two days, been characterized by much recognition of this duality. The Israeli mainstream media focused all of its attention on the release of the hostages, and the general mood of the country has been exultantly celebratory.

The release of the hostages was timed perfectly for Israel TV and radio, and for today’s newspapers. The release of Palestinian prisoners was timed to be too late for Monday’s papers, and so early as to be stale news by Tuesday. No details of the release were made public in Israel, and there has been little to no focus on them. There were, however, some demonstrators outside a prison, protesting the deal, and some arson of Palestinian cars and homes, apparently protesting the reception the released prisoners received in some West Bank villages.

It seems to me that the appropriate response to the events of the last 24 hours, and to the entire exchange agreement, is profound joy. After 471 days in Hamas captivity, three young women came home, with the promise of many more to come in the next 6 weeks.

It also seems to me that the appropriate response to the events of the last 24 hours, and to the entire exchange agreement, is deep sorrow and rage. After 471 days in which we have, reportedly, destroyed Hamas’ battalions and killed or taken prisoner the vast majority of its fighting force, Hamas still feels capable of continuing to torture us by raising new objections at every turn, over-running agreed deadlines, cynically offering the hostages, on their release, goodwill packages as a memento of their incarceration, and turning out in full force, armed to the teeth, to escort them, in a victory parade, to the waiting Red Cross vehicles.

A day into the ceasefire, Hamas continues to pledge to repeat the pogrom of October 7, 2023. Not to mention the horrendous price we have agreed to pay in terms of releasing security prisoners.

All of which means that the Zionist promise – the promise of “Never again” – is still shattered. It broke on October 7, and, if anyone harboured till now any fond hopes that it could be glued back together, those hopes have been exposed by recent events as delusional. We are now entering a new phase of Jewish history, although at the moment it seems a lot like reentering a previous phase.

We believed, perhaps most of us, that the existence of Israel meant that Jews would never again be left defenceless, without a response to antisemitism. The era of Jewish victimhood was over. We also believed, many of us, that the world, or at least the civilized world, would never again stand idly by when antisemitism reared its ugly head.

Both of those beliefs have been shown, in the last 15 months, to be baseless. The thousands sheltering in their ‘safe’ rooms and in roadside bomb shelters undermined the first belief. As for the second, I will offer two observations.

Until October 7, Palestinians depended partly, for world sympathy, on Pallywood, the enactment for the camera of staged fictions, allegedly demonstrating Israeli barbarity. These days, there is no need for Pallywood. Where previously much of the world required the figleaf of ‘documented proof’ before it would publicly accept the Palestinian lies, now no such figleaf is needed.

Indeed, much of the world is now able to block out the actual documentary evidence that the Palestinians themselves provide, whether it is evidence of brutality and rape on October 7 itself, or the footage of thousands of Gazans, looking fit and full of energy, dancing in the streets and celebrating their victory with trays of baked goods being passed around the well-dressed crowds, and all this in a Gaza strip that had been the victim of Israel’s genocide and that was suffering a famine.

My other observation is that 241 Israelis, alive and dead, were snatched from their beds and from a dance party and abducted to Gaza, to be held for hundreds of days, in appalling conditions… and the world effectively stood by and watched. The United Nations, the Red Cross, the EU, carried on as if it were not their concern. No ad hoc group of like-minded political leaders issued a joint statement of condemnation.

There was no united call for Hamas to return the hostages immediately. No international action was taken, or even threatened, against Hamas. In its silence and inactivity, the world sanctioned the mass abduction of citizens of an internationally recognised state from their homes and a party. .

Imagine a similar abuse of the citizens of any other country. For example, suppose a South Korean or Tibetan terrorist group brutally murdered over 1200 random North Koreans or Chinese and abducted 241 others. Such an act would not be met by the same lack of response from the world at large. This also clearly exposes anti-Zionism as the antisemitism it is.

That represents, I think, a shift in sensibility in the world at large. If the world chooses to define antisemitism (to cite Sir Isaiah Berlin’s aphorism) as ‘hating Jews more than is absolutely necessary’, then the world has, over the last 15 months, raised that bar considerably. It is now acceptable to hate Jews considerably more fiercely than it was 50 years ago, without risking being branded by the world as an antisemite.

So here we stand, at this crossroads: thanking God that some more hostages have begun to return to their lives, and worried sick over what the future holds for us. How are we expected to cope with that?

The answer lies, for believing Jews, in the example set by our daily prayers. Towards the end of the Amida that we recite three times daily are two seminal blessings: Shma Koleinu (Hear our voice) and Modim Anachnu Lach (We give thanks to you). In the first, we beseech God to answer our requests. It is customary to interpolate into this prayer any individual requests that we may have, for ourselves or our family. Then, almost immediately afterwards, in Modim, we thank God profusely for creating and sustaining us.

There is an apparent contradiction here. If I sincerely and wholeheartedly thank God, how can I still have any requests of Him? If I have problems in my life that I beseech God to resolve for me, how can I wholeheartedly thank Him.

The answer, suggests Rabbi Perez, is that we have two hearts: a broken heart and a whole heart. Our challenge, as Jews, is to love God with both of our hearts (which may be the reason for the second letter bet in the first paragraph of the Shema, in which we are besought ‘to love the Lord your God’ בכל לבבך, instead of the more normal בכל לבך. The second ב of לבבך suggest two hearts (indicated by ב, which represents two).

How can we love God with both of our hearts? How can we serve Him as faithfully at our times of greatest loss as at our times of greatest joy. How can we, as we are required to do, proclaim Baruch Dayan Ha’emet (Blessed is the Judge of Truth), the blessing recited on hearing bad news, typically the news of a death, as wholeheartedly as we proclaim Hatov veHameitiv (the One who is good and who does good), the blessing recited on hearing good news?

The ’simple’ answer is that we serve God by saying the first blessing with all our broken heart, and by saying the second with all of our whole heart. This requires being able to sustain both hearts. And how can we achieve that? The answer lies at the very beginning of the Amida. The first two blessings acknowledge God as He who will ‘bring a redeemer’, who is ‘eternally mighty’, who ‘revives the dead’.

It is not given to us to understand the ways of God, nor the exact nature of the Messianic age and the revival of the dead, but it is given to us to accept that everything that happens is part of God’s plan. That acceptance is never easy, and sometimes all but impossible, but if we can achieve it, then we can love God, in good times and bad, with one of our two hearts.

And if we can achieve that acceptance, then we also have the perspective to view history as something that we can shape, to recognise that the promises of Zionism have not been fulfilled, that the promises of Western liberalism have not been fulfilled, and that it may be time to rethink how Jewry as a people and Judaism as a religion is to continue to thrive and to continue to offer enlightenment to the world.

This has happened before. To cite the most obvious example: Judaism adapted dramatically after the fall of the Second Temple, developing Rabbinic Judaism, which enabled it to survive dispersion to the diaspora and to flourish there.

And if we can achieve that acceptance, we can also, on this bittersweet day, laugh for joy wholeheartedly and weep in pain broken-heartedly.

At this point, I am picturing some specific readers of mine who will be vehemently shaking their heads. You, particularly, I thank for reading this far.

Well, that plan didn’t work out very well. There I was, last week, thinking: “I know. I’ll plug Baron Finkelstein’s latest book on my blog, give him a while to register the jump in his royalty cheques, then write to him with a link to the blog post and see whether I can wangle an invitation to rub shoulders with genuine nobility.”

And what happens? One of my readers asks to borrow our copy of the book, one borrows a digital copy from her local library, and a third one listens to it on an audiobook app which had an amazing Black Friday offer. What does it say about me that the followers of my blog are such a bunch of cheapskates?

Ah well, back to the drawing board.

Meanwhile, I’m knee-deep this week – well, the whole of this month, really, and a fair bit of last month, to be honest – in production of the latest edition of our shul magazine. Whereas last time I had to keep extending the deadline for submission of articles, this time, for no discernible reason, we had a full complement just 48 hours after the deadline. In addition, partly by luck, and partly as a result of a little forethought on my part, we ended up with not the usual uncategorisable mix of articles, but, rather, with enough material for two or three themed sections, which I am very pleased about.

In addition, a chance encounter two weeks ago has really reignited my enthusiasm. We were invited to dinner by Bernice’s sister and brother-in-law, and the other guests were a couple who made Aliyah from Leeds a few years ago. In the course of the evening, it came up in the conversation that the husband also edits his old shul’s magazine.

I initially found this depressing. Part of the reason that I am willing to move to Zichron (if it works out; no concrete developments at time of writing) is that I will then be able to hand over the editing of the shul magazine. However, it now appears that it is possible to edit a shul magazine remotely; even moving to a different country doesn’t automatically disqualify you. Perhps I need to volunteer for a stint on the space station.

Needless to say, we starting chatting about the pleasures and pains of editing a shul magazine. I was initially delighted to discover that he too, like me, handles the layout and graphic design. However, his wife then informed us that, when one of the umbrella organisations coordinating synagogue activities in Britain ran a competition for best shul newsletter, my new friend’s magazine won…twice…after which the competition was scrapped.

He then revealed that, before retiring, he had worked for a daily newspaper, with responsibility for the layout. I realised that here was a golden opportunity for me to get a free crash course in layout, and I confess that I monopolised his company for the rest of the evening. In my defence, I will say that he seemed very willing to share his expertise with me.

In the course of the evening, he gave me the names of a couple of online resources that I wasn’t previously aware of. He also suggested that we swap links to examples of our work online. The following morning, he sent me a link to a couple of copies of his shul magazine. What I saw when I followed the link was, simply, professional. This is, perhaps, not surprising, since he is, actually, a professional. He produces a shul newsletter that looks like a tabloid daily paper, in terms of its layout, with a very large percentage of the page being given over to photos and illustrations, flexible division of the page into various areas, and witty and punchy headlines.

Unsurprisingly, I was a tad intimidated by this. In fact, it took me the rest of the week to pluck up the courage to send him a link to our shul magazine online. In the end, I decided that I had nothing to lose but my self-esteem, and, by this stage, that was in tatters anyway. So, I wrote him an email apologising for the delay, and linking to our last four editions, to show the work that our graphic designer produced until she was unable to continue, and the two editions I have produced, attempting, with limited success, to replicate her house style.

I was shocked, the following day, to receive a return email, which was, in essence, a 1300-word critique of the examples I had shared. My new friend even went so far as to illustrate several of the points he made by resetting a double-page spread from one of my editions. He expressed the hope that I wouldn’t be offended by his critique. I have to say that he opened by saying that my efforts “look pretty good”, and all of his criticism was entirely constructive.

He recognised the limitation that I impose on myself by publishing the same story in Hebrew and English versions on the same page. He argued strongly for switching to an online-only edition, which would enable me to produce two separate versions – English and Hebrew. He suggested that would not mean double the work, because I could design each page in English and then mirror-image the page for the Hebrew version.

While his idea sounded very attractive, and would reduce production costs to zero, I don’t believe that this would work in our community. Many of our members are technologically challenged, and many others always like to read the magazine on the actual chag for which it is produced.

However, he has given me the courage and energy to implement a change that I was always in favour of, and, starting with the edition I am currently laying out, our magazine will consist of two halves: a left-to-right half in English and a right-to-left half in Hebrew, with two front pages. The two halves will meet at the centrefold.

I very quickly responded to this second email, assuring my mentor that, far from being offended by his comments, as he feared I might be, I was delighted to receive them, and he should expect me to take him up on his generous offer to help further with any advice whenever I feel I need it.

Since then, I have been unable to stop thinking about ideas for making the layout of the magazine more inviting, attractive, and involving. Now, when I pick up a newspaper or magazine, I find myself reading not so much the words as the whole page. I hesitate to call what I have experienced an epiphany, but it has certainly been an eye-opener.

My chance encounter was in this particular niche where I find myself with no real training or preparation, beyond wide experience with Microsoft Office. What other areas of my life could be similarly enhanced by similar chance encounters? Would 90 minutes chatting with Rod Laver have helped me develop a penetrating topspin backhand drive. If I had found myself on a plane sitting next to Picasso, might I have unleashed artistic talents I am still unaware of.

Having said all which, I am really setting myself up for a humiliation, when I unveil the Tu b’Shvat edition of the magazine in 4 weeks, and none of the readers notices any difference. My more astute readers will realise that this week’s post is an attempt to forestall that possibility, by spreading the word in advance. Last week, and now this week: it seems every post has a dark, ulterior motive.

Recently, Bernice and I finished reading Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad, a family memoir written by British journalist and political analyst Daniel Finkelstein. As we progressed through the book, I found myself thinking about the qualities needed to write a successful family memoir, and I thought I might share some of those thoughts with you today.

The most important point, it seems to me, is to choose your grandparents wisely. Here, Finkelstein has done an exemplary job.

His mother’s father was Alfred Weiner, a decorated Jewish German World War I soldier, who then, as early as 1925, identified the Nazi Party as the chief danger to German society as a whole and began collecting documentary evidence of the true nature of the Nazis. This collection eventually became the Wiener Holocaust Library, a unique resource that provided most of the documentary evidence used in the Nuremberg Trials and in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In 1939, Alfred moved to London, and later New York, to continue his work.

From then until 1945, Alfred’s wife, Finkelstein’s maternal grandmother, raised her three young daughters as a one-parent family. Their hardships under the Nazis brought them to Bergen-Belsen. Eventually, the family were reunited and settled in England.

Finkelstein’s paternal grandfather, a successful industrialist in pre-War Lwów, joined the Polish army. Arrested in 1940 by Stalin’s NKVD, he was eventually deported to Siberia. His wife and their pre-teen son, Finkelstein’s father, were later deported by Stalin to an even more remote area of Siberia. Miraculously, all three survived and were reunited in 1942, eventually settling in Tel Aviv in 1943 before arriving in Britain in 1947.

Having met and married in England, the two survivors, Mirjam from Berlin, Bergen-Belsen and stations in between, and Ludwik, from Lwów and Tel Aviv, via the frozen wastes of Semipalatinsk, produced three children. All three children have successful public careers, in academia, politics and the Civil Service, and, like their father, all three have been awarded multiple honours. They are, respectively, a baron, a knight, and, most recently, a dame.

So, yes, Daniel Finkelstein certainly chose his family well. It hardly needs saying that he has an incredible tale to tell. It increasingly seems to me that every Holocaust survivor story is amazing, because the Nazi death machine was so single-minded, and most of Europe was either vociferously, or quietly, in favour of the Nazi Final Solution. Of those who were not, most were happy to stand by and do and say nothing. So, any survivor must have shown remarkable strength of character, and almost certainly had at least some strokes of luck.

However, I have read enough Holocaust memoirs to know that not every amazing story reads well. It requires a gifted storyteller to bring it to life, and this is the second point I want to make. Finkelstein is a masterful story-teller, and his mastery manifests itself in two distinct ways.

First, he is telling his own family’s personal story, and family records, conversations with surviving family members and meticulous research enable him to provide the telling intimate details that lift the story off the page. We become emotionally involved with all of the major players in this story, through the generosity with which Finkelstein shares their lives with us.

It does not matter whether it is Daniel’s aunt’s autograph book marking her 8^th birthday, with messages from her older sister and her father, or the tricks of survival that Daniel’s paternal grandmother Lusia devised to ensure her own and her son’s survival and mental stability through a Siberian winter; we always feel that we are privileged to be allowed to share these intimate details.

The second area in which Finkelstein displays his mastery of his story-telling is the flip-side of the first area, and is, in my opinion, an almost inconceivable achievement. He manages to tell, alongside the intensely personal story of his immediate family, the sweeping story of not just one, but two, geopolitical realities: the Final Solution and the oppression of Stalin’s Russia. A frontispiece map traces the journeys of Daniel’s parents and grandparents: Germany–Holland–Germany–Switzerland–France–USA–England; Poland–Ukraine–Russia–Kazakhstan–Uzbekistan–Turkmenistan–Iran–Iraq–Palestine–England. This gives some sense of the scale of the story.

However, it is not only a huge geographic and political scale. The story also needs to convey the scale of the mass human tragedy. This is one of Finkelstein’s most impressive achievements. To give just one example: there is a brief passage, about five pages, fairly early in the story of Daniel’s mother’s experiences, in which she, her sisters and her mother, are living in Amsterdam in 1941. Together with a group of friends, the girls form a club, with membership cards, a newsletter, subscription fees. Finkelstein describes the club in enchanting detail, then states that it folded when the family were forced to move from their family home.

Over the next five pages, Finkelstein details the fate of every single member of the club. Most of the stories end in Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor or Auschwitz, and the cumulative effect is to make graspable the scale of the Holocaust. This one tiny slice of Amsterdam life exposes us to the scale of the destruction of life.

Then Finkelstein zooms one level out, and points out that the survival rate of the members of the Joy and Glee Club (oh, the aching irony of the innocence and optimism of that name) was higher than that of the residents of the street where the family had lived. In half a page, he moves from house to house in a stark catalogue: …Number 3, killed in Amsterdam; Number 5, murdered by gas in Sobibor; Number 8, murdered by gas in Auschwitz…

This was one of many, many passages in the book that brought me to tears. Bernice and I usually read as we drive up to Zichron every week, and my only criticism of this book is that we were never able to carry on reading after we finished a chapter, no matter how far from Zichron we still were. Each sobering chapter in this book needs to be pondered over before reading on.

It is possible to imagine this story being told by someone who had neither Finkelstein’s organisational skill, nor his sensitivity of language. It would, in anyone’s hands, undoubtedly be a powerful story, because it tells of extraordinary people summoning the will to triumph over unimaginable adversity.

However, it takes a particular kind of genius to balance the detail with the over-arching narrative, the intensely personal with the national and international. The author has at all times absolute command over his material. The extraordinarily complex tale he weaves is told with stunning clarity.

If you read only one history book this year, make it this. If you read only one Holocaust memoir this year, make it this. If you read only one adventure story of survival against all odds, make it this.

And if you suspect 388 pages is too long a read for you, visit us one day and I’ll let you read the first three pages. It may make you change your mind. I’m not sure I’ve ever been reduced to tears by the end of page 3 of any book, but I was by this.

[Blogger’s Note: American publishers are a strange lot. They clearly felt that the title of the book was intimidating, with those British references to ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ (as opposed, presumably, to ‘Mom’ and ‘Pop’, or, just possibly, ‘Maw’ and ‘Paw’), and so in the US it is published as: Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family. I assume they haven’t tampered with anything other than the title. I am, however, reminded that the first Harry Potter volume was entitled, in the US, …and the Sorcerer’s Stone (shades of Mickey Mouse in Fantasia) rather than …and the Philosopher’s Stone, which has the virtue of being an actual (if mythical) thing.]

A confession: I had to go online just now, to check on a mainstream news site how many days it now is since October 7, 2023. It is 451. That I had to go online to check is confirmation to me that I no longer carry in my head and my heart, all day every day, the scale of the tragedy of October 7. I am no longer continually reminded of the continuing suffering of those of the 100 hostages not yet returned by Hamas who are still alive, and the continuing suffering of the families of all of the 100, alive and murdered, and the continuing trauma of all those injured on October 7 and since then, and their families, and the continuing trauma of all those not physically injured, but still caught up in, and witness to, the horrific events of October 7, and their families.

There are those who will tell you that this amnesia, whether at some level elective or subconscious, is natural: as human beings, continuing to live, we have to ‘move on’. To which the Israeli answer is: “How can you move on when so many of your brothers and sisters don’t have that privilege?”

There has undoubtedly been a certain lifting of spirits in Israel in the last two months. The brilliance, effectiveness, and fundamental morality of the pager attack on Hizbollah operatives; the continued assassinations of key Hamas and Hizbollah figures; the humiliation of Hizbollah; the overnight destruction of the Syrian military threat, at no loss; Israeli dominance over the skies of Syria and Iran; all of these have helped to restore a certain spring to the step of the Israeli in the street.

Yet at the same time the roller-coaster ride of the hostage negotiations has continued, and, even now, none of us can feel at all confident that a deal will be struck. Many of us admit that we also do not know whether we feel that a deal should be struck, if its terms are the mass release of terrorists with blood on their hands. Speaking for myself, I thank God that I am not the person who may, ultimately, be faced with the decision whether or not to accept a deal on such dreadful terms.

Of course, the families strive every day to keep the hostages in the forefront of the nation’s consciousness. The media, too, continue to keep the story front and centre: even now, after 451 days, every day on the radio family members of hostages are interviewed about their understanding of developments, about how they are coping, and about the hundred and one ways in which their family’s hostage is exceptional and normal. At this stage, there are radio show hosts and relatives of hostages who have built a personal rapport that can be heard on air.

Into the uncertainty of the hostage situation, the Israeli Ministry of Health last week delivered its report entitled “The State of Israel’s Submission to the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment Report on hostage-taking as torture: legal frameworks, supporting victims and families, and strengthening global response”. Among its other impacts, the report makes it clear that talk of time running out for those hostages that remain alive is not hyperbole. Here we have an undeniable, and undeniably immediate, humanitarian crisis.

If you want to understand the Israeli, indeed the Jewish, approach to life, you need look no further than this report. Its first four pages cover “Aspects of neglect, ill-treatment, torture and humiliation of the returned hostages and their consequences on their physical and mental health”. The 19 paragraphs cover the following topic areas:

• Physical and sexual violence against men, women and children (1 paragraph);
• Torture by withholding medical treatment or causing intentional pain during treatment (3 paragraphs);
• Starvation, poor nutrition and holding of hostages in harsh sanitary conditions (5 paragraphs);
• Psychological abuse of the hostages (10 paragraphs).

The last page comprises an annex giving details of specific examples of the treatment covered in the first four pages.

So far, the report reads as an impassioned, if dispassionate, attempt to confront the United Nations with the facts of the inhumanity of Hamas’ treatment of the hostages.

Between these two sections is a one-page section that has a completely different purpose. It seeks to find, in this darkest of accounts of man’s inhumanity to man, some ray of light. The section is entitled: “Beneficial Therapeutic Models for Returned hostages – Insights from the Field” and its six paragraphs offer general guidelines to any other national health service unfortunate enough to find itself confronting a similar situation.

It is easy, but, I believe, careless, to overlook the significance of this section. Out of the depths of the horror of this situation, Israel’s Ministry of Health has identified, and exploited, an opportunity to offer just a little light and hope to a humanity that may, sadly, face similarly unimaginable situations in the future.

We are currently moving towards the end of Chanukah. In the words of the title of Raphael’s favourite Chanukah song: Banu choshech l’garesh – ‘We have come to drive out darkness’. If, may it be when, the hostages are returned to the bosom of their families, we know that the treatment they receive from the first day of their return will be built on the lessons learned from the treatment the hostages returned almost 400 days ago received. As a nation, Israel is magnificent at playing the hand that it has been dealt.

However the hostage situation plays out, there are more than 1,815 people whose families will never welcome them back alive. Even more so than for the hostages, as the days turn into months and now well over a year, the challenge of keeping alive the memory of those fallen becomes greater and greater. Recently, I have become aware of two very similar initiatives to keep the flame of the memory of these 1,815 burning.

The first is on Reshet Bet, the news and current affairs station of the national broadcaster. Every day, multiple programs are interrupted by a one- or two-minute slot that features one of the fallen. It gives their name, cherry-picks a few of their defining characteristics and often adds an audio clip of the person talking or singing or joking.  

The second, very similar, is designed for smartphone display. Our niece posts one of the brief sketches every day. Over the background of a photograph of the person is printed a brief portrait, again focusing on a handful of vivid details.

In both cases, the person focussed on emerges as a unique and very special person, while, at the same time, being a very normal person. This recognition of the uniqueness in the normal, the specialness in the mundane, is, I would argue, part of the essence of our humanity. Each of these 1,815 people is irreplaceable, obviously to their family and friends, but also to anyone who cares about humanity.

One last observation, one which I have made before. Israel has a very small and close-knit population. Repeatedly, radio hosts have revealed that one of the previous day’s fallen was someone known to them personally. Himmelfarb High School, a prestigious Jerusalem religious Zionist high school, with an annual intake of about 140 boys, has, today, lost its tenth alumnus, Staff Sergeant Yuval Shoham, by all accounts another extraordinary, ordinary, young man. In any country, in any war, every fallen soldier is someone’s son or daughter. However, in Israel, he or she is much more likely to be the son or daughter of someone you know, or your neighbour knows, or your doctor knows, or the guy who sits behind you in shul knows.

A glance at the calendar this week confirms that, whichever side of the Judeo-Christian alliance (or, if you prefer, divide) you stand on, you’re liable, if you’re not careful, to be within range of the season of giving presents this week. It may be doughnuts or mince pies you’re committing to limiting yourself to one of. You may be delaying until the last minute any attempt to clean the year-old wax off the chanukiya or a year’s accumulated dust off the synthetic tree. Either way, you’re almost certainly failing to come up with one good present idea…or, alternatively, eight.

Personally, I never find buying gifts for someone else easy. By the time you know the recipient well enough to be confident about what they would like, you have already probably bought them all the things that you are sure they will like. As thinking of a suitable gift gets easier and easier, it gets more and more difficult to find something you haven’t previously thought of.

One would expect that this is one of the areas where artificial intelligence would be able to help out. Feed in the name and ID number of the recipient, define an acceptable price range, and AI should be able to come up with a surefire suggestion or two for the gift that will light up your loved one’s face in delight, surprise and gratitude.

You might have thought that you would need to provide some background information about the recipient’s hobbies, interests, taste in music, books, jewellery, cars or real estate, depending on your budget. If so, you either don’t possess a smartphone or you really haven’t been paying attention these last couple of years.

For it has gradually dawned on the rest of us that our device has, for some time, been serving not only us. Unwittingly, we generously carry around, at all times, a sophisticated piece of eavesdropping kit, which records, it would appear, every keystroke we make.

It can’t have escaped your notice that, if you check out, say, car rental deals, or model figures compatible with Lego, or bluetooth speakers, or, indeed, anything, then, starting immediately, and for what seems an unconscionably long time afterwards, your phone will present you with advertisements for the same or similar items. It seems that your phone passes on the information about your internet habits to interested parties.

It must now be 20 years since I first, at work, heard talk about the fact that the real winners in the race to make big money from technology were going to be the people who “owned the eyeballs”. If you controlled what people saw on their phones, companies would beat a path to your door to pay you for ensuring that what people saw on their phones was what those companies wanted them to see.

These days, it’s even worse than that. You, like me, have probably noticed, more than once, that it is not only what you look for and look at online that ‘prompts’ what adverts you are fed; it is enough, these days, to mention a topic in conversation, on the phone, or in person. Your device is always listening, and always, it appears, relaying what it picks up. That highly sensitive inbuilt microphone is listening out for you even when you are unaware of it.

All of which is stunningly, and frighteningly, clever. And yet…and yet. There is one respect in which AI seems totally artificial and completely unintelligent. As it happens, I have, in the last week, encountered a classic example of this.

In the last couple of months, my electric shaver has been playing up. It has been growing more and more noisy; it does not shave as closely, and the shaving experience is significantly less comfortable than it used to be. I could possibly have simply replaced the shaving head, but I decided, instead, to treat myself to a new shaver with integral sideboard, moustache and beard trimmer.

While this sounds painfully bells-and-whistles expensive, it actually was very reasonable, nestling close to the bottom of Braun’s range of shavers, a range that reaches, in the heights of Series 9, an eye-watering four-digit price tag, while offering a shave that, according to Which consumer magazine, is not significantly closer than that offered in the humble foothills of Series 3, where you will find me.

So smooth is the shave I now achieve that the only person not impressed is Raphael, who still finds me much too tickly when I kiss him.

The point of this story is not simply the hope that Braun will reward my careful product placement by offering me a lifetime supply of free replacement heads. No, the real point is that, since I made the purchase online, my phone has not stopped bombarding me with adverts for electric shavers, and, specifically, Braun electric shavers. I can state, with absolute confidence, that the single product that I have absolutely no inclination or need to buy at this point in time is an electric shaver, and, specifically, a Braun shaver.

You had probably already guessed that, and you might have expected that the cumulative genius of the algorithms of AI might also have guessed it. Curiously, I take a little comfort from the knowledge that the system is, as yet, far from perfect. However, only a little comfort; I’m well aware that the intelligence gap is closing exponentially.

Mind you, having struggled for over a day to think of a topic to write about this week, the prospect of my blog being taken over by AI some time soon looks less worrying and more attractive that you might have suspected.

It’s not that I don’t want to write something profound about the situation, you understand. It’s just that I don’t feel I have anything useful to add to the mountains of commentary on Syria.

Is it a good thing that a sadistic and brutal tyrant has been forced out of office and into exile in a matter of days? Of course it is.

Is it a good thing that, overnight, the Syrian airforce, navy, and miliary capability were eliminated before they could fall from the wrong hands into potentially wronger hands? Another no brainer. (No need to thank us, world, but if you could avoid accusing us of genocide in Syria, we would appreciate it.)

Is who is going to replace Assad and what is going to replace his regime going to turn out to be an improvement? Ah, there you have me. You see, I think it’s still a tad early to be making predictions, especially, as they say, about the future. There’s a couple of big questions we need answers to first.

Can the Al-Qaida leopard change his spots? You will, I am sure, understand my scepticism.

Is the artificial construct known as Syria, sketched on a map in haste by a couple of outsiders, when the world was a very different place, a thing of the past? Are we looking at its breakup into several smaller states?

Just how far does Erdogan’s dream of the new Ottoman Empire stretch?

Whoa. Some heavy stuff there. So, if it’s all the same to you, I’m going to wait for just a little more dust to settle before making a fool of myself. Safer all round, I reckon, to write about nothing in particular this week.

Take, for instance, the definition of the word “word”. My Oxford English Dictionary (admittedly vintage 1972, but I really don’t believe the definition of “word” has shifted significantly in the last 52 years) offers a definition which I shan’t bore you with in full, but which basically boils down to “a sequence of sounds constituting the basic unit of meaningful speech” and “represented in writing as a sequence of letters flanked by spaces”.

So, it’s rather a shame that the Oxford Dictionaries, as a body, did not consult the Oxford Dictionary, as a resource, before deciding that their word of the year was “brain rot”. Or, as we say in English, ‘their phrase of the year was “brain rot”’. Clearly, the “language experts” from Oxford who compiled the shortlist of six from which the public voted the winner not only proposed “brain rot” but also suffer from it. Words, dear reader, fail me… as they seem to do them.

Passing swiftly on. Men, as we all know, are from Mars, and women are from Venus. In conversations recently, I have been made aware that one of the fiercest battlegrounds of modern life on which that difference is thrashed out is the dishwasher. Apparently, I am not the only man who has a scientific method for arranging the dirty dishes in the washer, nor is Bernice the only woman who hasn’t the faintest idea what her husband is talking about.

It’s beyond my wit how she can’t see what is perfectly obvious from the topography of the space and the array of the racks. It is beyond her wit why I attach any importance to this. I’m now trying to decide whether I find this reassuring or disturbing. On balance, I think, despite momentary petty frustrations, vive la difference! I am reassured by the knowledge that it will all come out in the wash.

While we’re on the subject of diverse opinions within a marriage, one of those questions that never seem to appear on the questionnaires prospective couples are sometimes encouraged to fill out before pledging their troth, in order to determine their compatibility is the question of the temperature of fruit. Nothing, to my mind, compares with the first refreshingly chill bite of an apple or orange straight from the refrigerator. Bernice, however, prefers her fruit chambré (with the room, as the word suggests, preferably being in the South of France, rather than the South of Wales).

To complicate matters further, Bernice enjoys summer fruits when they are not yet fully ripe (or ‘rock hard’, as I put it), whereas I prefer them ripe (or ‘edible’). In the brief peach season, to take one example, this can prove taxing, since I have to hide some of the fruit, so that Bernice doesn’t eat it all before I have even started.

Of course, I can’t hide it in the fridge, because that is the first place she will look. This means that, when it is, to my taste, ripe, it is at room temperature. What we need, I have come to realise, is a microantiwave, that can bring a piece of fruit from room temperature to 6^oC in 30 seconds. Yes, I know it is a first-world problem, but that’s where, most of the time, I happen to believe I live.

While I’m feeling not particularly gruntled, let me vent about another of the world’s petty injustices. Several months ago, while Esther’s car was parked outside their house, a neighbour smashed into it. (This, incidentally, had the wholly positive effect of pushing the girls over into seriously looking to move, which quickly yielded a wonderful result. It is, as they don’t say, an ill wind that has no silver lining.) While the insurance claim was being processed, Esther, following the insurer’s instructions, had the car repaired at her own expense and submitted the receipts with her claim.

Negotiations with the insurance company were rather protracted. In fairness, this was in part due to the fact that the insurance company customer is myself, rather than Esther. (Esther’s car was originally ours, and the insurance premium stayed lower if we kept the policy as part of my package of policies with the same company.) This meant that there was a certain amount of juggling, explaining, and passing on of codes sent to phones to be done every time Esther tried to expedite the claim.

Eventually, the insurance company was ready to settle. This happened while we were in Portugal. We transferred to Esther the amount of the payment that we were due to receive from the insurance company. (No need for her to wait while they dragged their heels.) Meanwhile, I checked our account every day for the transfer from the insurance company. About a week later, I received an email from the company, informing me that they would be sending a cheque to me within a day or two. Those of my readers who are of a certain age may remember cheques from the last century.

Under ordinary circumstances, I would have fumed at the weaselly method of posting a cheque (through Israel’s decrepit postal service) rather than electronic transfer. As we all know, the extra few days’ interest that the insurance companies enjoy on the millions of shekels they delay paying out cumulatively fund their annual bonuses. However, in this case, I was much more furious at the fact that, when the cheque did arrive in our postbox in Maale Adumim, it would sit there for days or weeks while we languished helpless in Penamacor.

When we did return home, I nipped down to our local mall to pay the cheque in through our bank’s ATM. (To pay in across the counter, you need to make an appointment in advance, and you are charged for the transaction.) I wasted 20 minutes, attempting to pay in the cheque by machine, at two different machines, but each time the display informed me that it was unable to read the details. This was, needless to say, a cheque filled entirely by machine; the print was as crisp as it could possibly be.

It was only after we returned home that Bernice remembered that cheques can also be paid in online through the bank’s app. This proved ludicrously quick and simple. In my defence, I will say that I cannot remember the last time I received a cheque, so this all seemed like very new territory to me.

A couple of days later, the insurance company wrote to ask me to complete a customer satisfaction survey. I must admit I derived a certain satisfaction from venting my wrath at their antiquated and devious reimbursement method, even though I knew my rage would crash against some completely unsympathetic manifestation of AI   If they were really smart, the insurers would write and ask me to complete a survey stating how satisfied I was to complete the customer survey. It was very much a therapeutic exercise.

Well, thank you. I feel a lot better having got all that off my chest. You will gather that there are ways in which life here sometimes seems to be returning to something that occasionally feels close to normal, although, of course, it can’t really.

It can’t, while 100 hostages, dead and alive (many, one fears, barely alive) languish in Gaza. It can’t, while tens of thousands have still not returned to their homes in the North or the South. It can’t, while a whole population of schoolchildren have still barely known a normal educational experience. It can’t, while thousands of family men (and some women) are only now beginning to be able to focus on attempting to rescue their stalled businesses and careers, and find again the rhythm of their family life. It can’t, while some ten thousand are still undergoing physical rehabilitation of some form or other, and who knows how many thousands are receiving, or should be receiving, psychological rehabilitation.

And then, of course, we read the International section of the paper, and know that we couldn’t possibly live anywhere else.

I promised you two weeks ago an update on Micha’el and Tslil’s plans. So here, only one week late, it is.

Part of me – and it’s the part that I really strive to nurture – embraces the excitement of being Micha’el’s father. One of the traits that best characterises Micha’el is the enthusiasm and commitment with which he embraces new initiatives. When life’s measuring spoons were being handed out, Micha’el got only the one-cup spoon; he is incapable of doing anything by half-measures.

This can, naturally, be wonderfully thrilling and exhilarating, although there sometimes comes a point where I, personally, feel ready to come off the roller coaster and spend a little time on the roundabout. However, at the moment, a moment which looks suspiciously like the start of a ride on a whole new roller coaster, I am really looking forward to seeing how this pans out.

For some time now, Micha’el and Tslil have realised that their original hope that they would be able to commit themselves full-time to developing their piece of land is not realistic. A combination of circumstances have compelled them to adapt to a changing situation: two young sons at home full-time; COVID’s effect on international travel preventing an influx of short-term visitors to share work on the land in return for bed, board, and a taste of working the land; the vagaries of Portuguese bureaucracy.

Currently, Tslil is teaching some frontal and some online yoga classes and Micha’el is teaching English online. However, these endeavours are not enough to generate surplus income that can be invested in developing their land and they are not prepared to take the time away from parenting that would be necessary to earn enough from this work to provide that income.

In parallel to their exploring a business proposition with the potential to generate that needed revenue flow, Micha’el in particular has been going through some fairly drastic lifestyle changes. A couple of months ago he finally managed to quit smoking, in its various forms, and, at the same time, started a regime of physical exercise and a protein-rich diet designed to get him back in shape and build up his muscle.

The effect was instantly noticeable when we arrived in Portugal five weeks ago, both in Micha’el’s shoulders and upper-arms and in his energy first thing in the morning. He is very happy with the changes that he has made and is determined to keep it up. While we were staying in the house, Micha’el lost his exercise room (our bedroom) and had to exercise early every morning in the backyard. Now that the bad weather is coming, he will, I am sure, be grateful to have got his ‘gym’ back.

A few months ago, Micha’el and Tslil agreed on a suitable project which ticked all their boxes. If successful, it has the potential to generate the income they need. It could at the same time make a significant contribution to the community life in Penamacor, something in which the kids are very invested. The project represents something they both believe in and are very willing to pour their energies into. It also gives both of them an opportunity to play to their individual strengths.

After that build-up, you are doubtless curious as to what this multi-box-ticking idea is. [Pause for a suitable drumroll.] It is to open a health-focused bodyweight gym. Don’t think arrays of expensive machines, or even, initially, weights, but only minimal simpler equipment such as rings, and with the emphasis firmly on body weight exercises. These will include, but eventually not be limited to, calisthenics, yoga, Pilates, and martial arts. Both Tslil and Micha’el will be teaching classes, and also functioning as personal trainers, a role for which they are formally qualified, as well as both having very much the right personality.

They have pitched their proposition to the local municipality, who have offered to provide the use of a suitable hall for three months, rent-free, and to cover the utility bills. This trial period will allow the kids to make an informed judgement as to whether their business plan is viable, with minimum investment, before committing themselves by moving to permanent premises in which they can, we hope, grow their business.

Since there is no gym less than a 40-minute drive from Penamacor, there is a sizeable potential market. The kids have carried out informal market research, which has been very encouraging. As well as producing a thorough business plan, they have developed a website and publicity materials; they will be advertising in the mainstream media in their catchment area, which is the towns and villages in the administrative area of which Penamacor is the principal town, as well as social media.

If all goes well, then the long-term plan is for them to be able to generate sufficient revenue to employ one or two personal trainers, and for Micha’el to focus on running the business. They hope that this will leave them both able to devote time and money to developing their land.

The other major project looming is the question of Tao’s education. The Portuguese authorities require children to be in an educational framework from the age of 6, so next academic year Tao will be starting school. The state system in Portugal – and certainly in the rural region where the kids are – is fairly formal, and the one certainty at the moment is that they do not want him to attend state school.

They are seriously considering home-schooling, which is legal in Portugal, but which is fairly closely monitored by the Education Ministry. There is an official curriculum that must be followed, including, obviously, Portuguese language and literature, and Portuguese history and culture. The kids would, naturally, need to employ a tutor to cover these subjects, while between them the kids would be well able to cover the other subjects. They are currently exploring a number of options, including possibly sharing the cost of the tutor with other parents in a similar situation.

While we were in Penamacor last month, Tslil picked up some tahina from an Israeli couple who own land nearby and who import the tahina from Israel. One reason I did not offer to make the one-hour round trip was because they live at end of a dirt track and, having once got our rental car stuck in the mud of such a track, I am now considerably more wary. The other reason is that ‘picking up some tahina’ is fairly simple when it is a one-kilo tub; this, however, was a 20-kilo bucket.

While she was there, the seller excitedly told Tslil of a development in local education. Apparently, the Portuguese Ministry of Education has just granted a licence to the Clonlara School, to open its first campus outside the United States. Clonlara is an American initiative started in 1967, to provide an environment where students’ interests and curiosity guided their curriculum. Starting with a campus in Ann Arbor, Michigan, it has grown into a global learning community offering campus, off-campus and online programmes for students in over 70 countries. You can learn more about the community here.

The campus that Clonlara plans to open in Portugal, for which a licence has just been granted, and for which a contract was signed in 2022 with the local council, for the provision of a building for the project, is actually, and amazingly, in Idanho-a-Nova, the town 25-minutes’ drive from Penamacor, where our favourite supermarket is. I don’t yet know when the school will be opening, and whether it will open with 1^st grade, but the kids will, I strongly suspect, be exploring the possibility of enrolling Tao in the program, whether on- or off-campus.

All in all, 2025 looks like being a big year in the saga of the family’s life in Portugal. There will undoubtedly be several big decisions to make, and life in Penamacor may look significantly different when I am writing my blog a year from now. It’s fair to say that, with the advancing years, I have lost some of my own enthusiasm for embarking on new adventures, but I still enjoy the vicarious thrill of watching the next generation build its family’s life.

In the last few weeks, I seem to have been taking an additive with my normal diet. This additive is marketed under the brand name ‘My Words’, and here I am eating them again this week. You may remember that last week I cavalierly wrote (not having learnt my lesson from two weeks previously) “Incidentally, all being well, I plan to share with you next week details of one of [Micha’el and Tslil’s] projects”.

Well, I’m afraid that you’re going to have to take a rain check on that. Something much more urgent has come up. Not urgent as a topic for this week’s post; rather, a task for me to complete today. This week’s post will have to be a brief explanation of why you are being short-changed.

I mentioned last week that Ollie does not find our departure from Penamacor easy. In the couple of weeks after we left in the summer, every time he sensed an injustice being visited on him by his parents, he would call for his Nana to rescue him. Being a younger child, injustices were, he felt, being visited on him at fairly frequent intervals. (I can sense all the younger siblings among my readers nodding sympathetically, and all the older siblings wondering what I am talking about.)

This time it is my turn to feel guilty for having deserted him. I received a voice message from Tslil and Ollie yesterday, in which he initially would only say “Grandpa”, and left it to Tslil to explain his request, which was for me to record and send to them a rendition of all the songs that I regularly sang to Ollie over the month we were there this time. After Tslil had finished, Ollie burst in, with cries of “Grandpa. Sing songs with Ollie”, almost breaking down. It was a heart-rending message, and it took me some time to recover from hearing it, I can tell you.

As I mentioned last week, Bernice and I had fully intended to record such a recital, and, to that end, I photographed the contents pages of the nursery rhyme book Ollie insists on us singing from. However, since our return, life has rather intervened, and we haven’t yet got round to recording.

Looking through the list of songs after receiving the message yesterday, I realised there were several that I did not know by heart. (Do you know all four two-line verses of Mary Had a Little Lamb? I always thought it ended with ‘to see a lamb at school’.) I began to wish that I had focussed more on learning my lines and less on dramatizing my rendition over the month.

So, I shall have to devote considerable time today to locating and printing out the lyrics of sundry nursery rhymes. Bernice and I had never heard of the following, for example, before we encountered it in the book. I find it charming, with ample opportunity for varied characterisation, and a suitably violent, though unbloody, conclusion:

Mrs. Mason bought a basin,
Mrs. Tyson said, What a nice ’un,
What did it cost? said Mrs. Frost,
Half a crown, said Mrs. Brown,
Did it indeed, said Mrs. Reed,
It did for certain, said Mrs. Burton.
Then Mrs. Nix up to her tricks
Threw the basin on the bricks.

Then, Bernice and I will hope that we are able to live up to our reputation as ‘one-take’ recorders, and not repeat our performance while recording a video message for Esther’s birthday, when we managed to break down in uncontrollable laughter three times before finally managing to get all the way through ‘Happy Birthday to You’.

All of which is a long-winded way of explaining why you are being significantly short-changed this week. I truly value your interest and loyalty, dear readers, but I’m afraid you can’t compete with a two-year-old’s tearful request for his Grandpa. Normal service will, we hope, be resumed next week.

As writing desks go, the one I am currently sitting at (which, I hasten to add, I am renting, rather than having bought it) is pretty expensive. That’s because it is attached to a Boeing 737, and is currently cruising at several thousand feet above the Mediterranean. It’s either 8PM or 10PM on Monday evening, depending on whether I have switched my watch back to Israel time yet, or more correctly 9PM, since we are currently off the Spanish coast. All of this means that publication time for this post is a slightly intimidating 11 hours away, so I had better get cracking.

A little under eight hours ago we kissed the kids and the grandkids goodbye, calculating how long it is until our next trip – probably only two-and-a-half months. Leaving is always hard. Micha’el and Tslil are able, while we are with them, to devote more time to their various joint and separate projects than they usually can. Our departure means, for them, a return to full-time family and household duties. (Incidentally, all being well, I plan to share with you next week details of one of their projects.)

As for the boys, Tao is now old enough to understand what we mean when we start talking about ‘going back to our home in Israel’. That doesn’t necessarily make it easy for him, but at least he knows what to expect when our last day in Portugal arrives. For Ollie, on the other hand, however much we talk about it over the last few days, our leaving comes as a shock. Needless to say, this makes saying goodbye even harder. Thank goodness we have the option of video calls to soften the blow.

Also designed to soften the blow for Ollie is a job Bernice and I have set ourselves. Several years ago, we gave Tao a book of nursery rhymes – all 74 of them – which has now become Ollie’s absolute favourite. The book is illustrated with lively watercolours, full of charming and often humorous detail. These illustrations are clearly part of the appeal of the book for Ollie, but his main enjoyment comes from the songs, to which he listens, and with which he joins in, albeit selectively, with rapt attention, Throughout this latest visit, it was only rarely that Bernice or I could escape without singing or reciting every single rhyme and song in the book, and there were days when we were each reciting it three or more times.

Before we left, I photographed the Contents pages, and we plan to make a video in which we share working our way through the entire book. Micha’el will then be able to set it up on a loop for Ollie. No substitute for seeing Nana and Grandpa live in concert, but, we hope, an acceptable second best.

As I have often remarked, part of what makes our stay in Penamacor special is that it is nothing special; instead, we become part of the daily routine and rhythm of family life. However, we seem to have adopted two traditions which we try to honour on each trip. The first of these is that the two of us get a ‘date day’, when we go out by ourselves. I don’t want anyone getting the wrong idea about this romantic rendezvous. This time, we visited a hypermarket and Decathlon in Castelo Branco, hunting for various items of clothing, household goods and toys, on a shopping expedition for which the boys would not have had the patience.

After a successful morning, we retired for lunch to our usual vegan restaurant, where the regular ritual was observed. A waiter who has started work since our last visit asks us whether this is our first visit to the restaurant. I wittily point out that we go back further with the restaurant than he does. He then explains the lunch ‘concept’ of the restaurant: a soup, a main course consisting of a tasting platter of four dishes, the exact nature of which is determined by whatever was ready to harvest at the restaurant’s smallholding that morning, and a choice of three desserts. As always, the vegetable soup was delicate, subtly seasoned and excellent, the mains (in this case, a burger, a hot cabbage dish, couscous with pomegranate seeds and a lettuce and melon salad) were all very tasty, and offered a range of textures and flavours, and the desserts were, I’m guessing, all rather over-sweet and lacking in texture. However, the vegan espresso was much better than I anticipated. In all, the food, service, ambience, and smooth jazz soundtrack were all very much to our taste, and the bill was no less pleasant for being less of a surprise than the first time we went there.

Our second outing is a day out with the boys. This time, an online search for local activities suitable for families with younger children yielded a pedagogical farm, curiously located in Fundao, a large town about 40 minutes’ drive from Penamacor. Tslil phoned the day before to confirm that the farm was indeed open for individuals, and so, one day last week, off we set, arriving at the farm at 11. It’s fair to say that our expectations were not overly high, not least because Talil had established that admission was free for children under six and 1.50 euros for adults (1.50 each, I hasten to add).

On our arrival we were greeted by two women, one of whom spoke better English than she had indicated on the phone. She chatted with us, and particularly with Tao, who explained that he was trilingual, having acquired Portuguese in ‘school’, and that he had lived in Penamacor since he was a baby. Her colleague, she explained, runs the onsite bakery where, I believe, they use their home-grown wheat, milled in their own watermill, to bake their own bread. The farm apparently offers group workshops that explore this process in depth. A few minutes later, another employee, whose English was very good, arrived. He took my money (such as it was) and explained that the farm is laid out on a circular route, which we were free to walk around by ourselves.

Meanwhile, the boys had been playing in the small playground, despite the slide having been soaked from the previous night’s heavy rain. Fortunately, the weather that day was bright and sunny. We collected the boys and set off on our adventure. Over the next hour, we stopped at various small animal enclosures, housing in turn, a horse (“Big!”), a donkey and a long-haired pony (“Aaaah!”), two goats, two pigs. A much larger enclosure contained a couple of sheep and, rather incongruously, a deer and an ostrich, who was singularly displeased with our presence. We also saw dogs, rabbits and geese (also less than delighted to see us).

A largish pond featured a quaint wooden bridge and two artificial fountains. The stream feeding the pond powered the watermill (or, more accurately, didn’t power it while we were there.) In all, there was enough to keep the boys very engaged for a good hour, at the end of which we drove to a nearby park that we had visited a couple of years ago with Tao. The park boasts an excellent jungle gym playground, where we were struck by how Tao has grown in confidence in the last year. Ollie is still very much at the very young end of the playground’s age range, but he still thoroughly enjoyed himself.

After all this walking, running, climbing and sliding, we were ready for lunch, and went to a nearby vegan restaurant that we had visited once before. The owner was very ready to accommodate the boys’ needs, and they in their turn were very patient during the inevitable waiting time. Bernice and I have always said (since our own children were toddlers) that it is wonderful if you can take children out to a restaurant confident that they understand the difference between being at home and being out. Our grandsons certainly do.

The two boys slept soundly on the drive home. Grandpa would have been happy to join them, having scaled the heights of the spider’s web rope frame at the park, determined not to be outdone by a five-year-old. Fortunately, Nana was on hand to make sure Grandpa stayed fully alert as we wove our way home through the countryside.

And there you have it: the highlights of our month. Time to go home, make our month’s absence up to Raphael (and his parents), catch up with friends, reimmerse ourselves in the madness that is life in Israel, and recuperate, gathering up strength for our next trip. As I may have mentioned before, Bernice and I keep reminding each other that we are truly blessed.