Most weeks I get to choose the topic of my post. However, some weeks the topic chooses me. This is one of the latter weeks.

One news story of the last week defines for me so clearly the best and the worst of Israel in September 2024 that, difficult as it is to write about, I feel I have to write about it.

A shiva call is rarely an easy thing to make. If I am not particularly close to the mourners, I often feel awkward about finding something suitable to say. However, if I take my lead from the mourners themselves, as we are required to do by Jewish law, and allow them to initiate and lead the conversation, then some way will usually suggest itself for me to offer comfort to them, which is, of course, the object of the call. At the very least I can offer a listening ear.

I do not envy public figures who are expected to make regular shiva calls as part of their duties. Some clearly have a natural empathy that is clear to see; Israel’s President Herzog seems to be such a person, Others clearly don’t.

One of the noticeable features of the last eleven months has been the fact that Prime Minister Netanayahu has not made shiva calls to the families of those, civilians and soldiers, killed on October 7 and in the war. Clearly, this is a conscious decision on his part to avoid situations that will potentially expose him directly to the anger of bereaved families who feel that he has at best let the country down badly, producing scenes that will play very badly in the media.

However, last week, Netanyahu, and his wife, chose to pay a shiva call. They visited the family home of Ori Danino z”l, one of the six hostages executed underground by Hamas. Ori had been at the Nova party, and, after he managed to escape the party unharmed on October 7, he chose to return to try to help others escape, and managed to save three others. He himself was then captured and taken hostage.

Why did Netanyahu choose this particular shiva house? It is difficult to think of any reason other than the feeling that Ori’s father, Rabbi Elhanan Danino, and his family, whose roots lie in Morocco, represent part of Netanyahu’s core constituency. Netanyahu must have felt that he would be among friends.

If this was his reasoning, then it was a severe misjudgement, because, some time into the visit, Rabbi Danino informed Netanyahu that he had some hard truths to tell him. He suggested that Netanyahu might prefer not to hear them, but rather to cut short his visit. However, Netanyahu chose to stay.  

Rabbi Danino then criticised Netanyahu’s long-term response to the rise to power of Hamas in Gaza and his handling of the war. The appropriate way for Netanyahu to respond to this criticism would have been in humbled silence. Instead, he responded with the following self-pitying comments.

“I won’t tell you what happened behind closed doors. It’s not very interesting anyway.” (Here Sara Netanyahu interjected: “You were pretty much alone.”) “Alone.” (Sara: “Facing the whole world.”) “Exactly. Facing the whole world. Facing the US President. I went into the room every day and asked myself: ‘Why am I here? What am I here for? For what? For the perks of office?’” (Sara: “What perks?”)

I don’t want to understand this response in the way I’m going to explain it, but I cannot see any other explanation. Netanyahu is here appealing for sympathy from the family of a 23-year-old man who was kept prisoner underground for 11 months and then shot in cold blood. He is asking for their sympathy for him because, surrounded by his adoring family and his loyal supporters, commuting between his home in Jerusalem, his luxury home in Caesarea, and the White House, given standing ovation after standing ovation while addressing the US congress, he felt alone: while their son was rotting, underfed, starved of fresh air, urinating in a bottle, in a tunnel in Gaza so low-ceilinged that he could not stand upright.

Contrast the content of this (and, if you listen to the recording on YouTube, contrast the tone of voice) with the content and tone of Rabbi Danino’s response.

“You didn’t do this for 15 years. Don’t come now, when they are there, to do this. 15 years you sat quietly. You didn’t do anything.”

After R Danino accused Netanyahu of equipping Hamas with swords, tunnels and dollars, Netanyahu politely asked if he could reply. R Danino said that he didn’t intend to get into this. He asked whether Netanyahu had come to listen or to be heard, because what Netanyahu had to say we had been hearing for 15 years.

Rabbi Danino later begged Netanyahu to stop wasting time and energy on what he called nonsense. He then explained that he was referring to the endless pursuit of mandates and studying of opinion polls – what’s going to yield political results and what isn’t.

At one point in the shiva call, Sara Netanyahu accused Rabbi Danino of repeating what others had told him to say. She couched this in an apologetic tone, but it is, obviously, a deeply insulting observation. This elicited a wry laugh from Rabbi Danino, and a response that asserted, as was very clear from his whole manner and dignity throughout the visit, that he was his own man and beholden to nobody.

Eventually, Netanyahu referred to the fact that he too is one who has suffered bereavement, citing his older brother Yoni, who was the only Israeli fatality during the dramatic rescue of 102 of the 106 hostages from Entebbe in 1976. There is a way to introduce a reference like this into a conversation like this and to make it a way of recognising, and identifying with, the depth of the grief of the newly bereaved family. When Netanyahu refers to his brother’s death, and he certainly refers to it very often, it is with something of a sense of competing for sympathy, rather than expressing empathy.

After this shiva call, Netanyahu addressed the nation, stating: “I hear the cry of the families of the hostages. I hear. I listen. I don’t pass judgement either.” I can’t imagine a more patronising comment, a greater demonstration of Netanyahu’s total incapacity to understand the relationship between one paying a shiva call and the mourner, than that reference to not passing judgement.

Rabbi Danino urged Netanyahu to rewind to the time of Yoni’s death and to recapture his true Zionist self from that period, forgetting the distractions of the last 50 years. He also urged him to reflect on the fact that he has been charged by God with the welfare of the Jewish state, and he recommended that he close his office door for 10 minutes each day and ask himself what the Jewish value is that he is bringing.

The contrast in human dignity between the two men in this exchange is as stark as it could be. To empathise with Rabbi Danino and his family is very easy. To empathise with Binyamin Netanyahu is more difficult. However, there is one sense in which I feel very sorry for him. As a young adult, he lost the older brother he adored. He then set out, I believe, to devote his life to matching his brother’s achievement. However, this was always going to be a hopeless task. Yoni z”l paid the ultimate price in a truly heroic and magnificent military operation. Nothing that Bibi could do could match that. He has, I fear, spent his whole life measuring himself against Yoni and, inevitably, finding himself wanting. Eventually, such an effort takes its toll on a person. Along the way, he has lost his way, and is in danger of dragging the country after him. I can only hope that some of Rabbi Danino’s measured, quietly impassioned, words found their mark, although, sadly, all the evidence to date suggests not.

I pray that next week I may have something more uplifting to write about. At the time of writing, sadly, all the evidence suggests not.

Blogger’s Note: There’s esoteric and then there’s just impenetrable. Having googled and discovered Prima Donna, I couldn’t resist enlisting it for my title, but I won’t pretend I was familiar with it before. It is, apparently, a Dutch cheese, closely related to Gouda but with notes of Parmesan. This week’s title is therefore a Rigolettoish rendering of ‘Somebody moved my cheese’. If you’re waiting for an explanation of Rigoletto, or Gouda, then you’re probably here by mistake. If, on the other hand, you suddenly feel you must listen to the aria in question, let it not be said that I don’t anticipate my readership’s every last wish. This is, I’ll have you know, a class establishment.

Regular readers will know that I am not one to let himself be troubled by the vicissitudes of daily life. I’m always ready to make lemonade at the drop of a lemon and I cut the bread in half before I freeze it, so that there’s never a risk of it going a bit Saint Agur bluish before we manage to finish it. In other words, ours is a kitchen where half a loaf is not just better than no bread; it’s ideal.

Blogger’s Note: Two paragraphs and already three cheeses named. If you think you’re detecting a theme here, you’re completely wrong.

So, no, I take the rough with the smooth, roll with the punches and whistle while I work. But, my goodness, this has been a tough week. Scarcely a single cheese has been left unmoved.

For starters, here’s a handy tip: if you listen to Reshet Bet of Kan, Israel radio’s news and current affairs station, don’t drive through Ma’ale Adumim. As you approach Ma’ale Adumim from Jerusalem, you find that you need to retune from 95.0 or 95.5 (which of the two is stronger seems to depend on wind direction) to 95.2. In Ma’ale Adumim itself, this gives good reception in most of the city, although Mitzpe Nevo is, in this as in so many things, a bit of a law unto itself. Poised as we are on a ridge running between Jerusalem and the Judean Desert, our ears are competed for by Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian stations. However, 95.2 will serve you pretty well within MA.

Or at least it did until last week, when, suddenly, the signal became weaker in various locations, including our street, and 95.0 and 95.5 became louder. If this reflects a permanent change, then it may well turn out to be a good thing, since it will render obsolete retuning to 95.2 on entering the city and from 95.2 on leaving. However, where was the memo from the broadcaster? I can’t be doing with these unannounced changes.

Note to Bernice (the rest of you can skip this paragraph): Are you listening? I can’t be doing with unannounced changes.

Then, the following day, I bent down to retrieve my ground coffee from the freezer. (Yes, I pre-grind my beans once a week, and keep the ground coffee in the freezer. I know at least one of my readers needs smelling salts at this point, but there it is.) I opened the middle drawer of the right-hand side and there the little Tupperware container wasn’t.

It was mere seconds after that, as I staggered, distraught, around the kitchen, that Bernice blithely informed me that she had needed the room in that drawer and had therefore moved the coffee to the drawer below, without telling me. Even as I typed that last sentence, I needed to pause to breathe deeply into a brown paper bag. (I wonder, incidentally, about people who don’t bake their own bread and store it in brown paper bags – more, to be honest for the frisson of nostalgia than for any reason connected with keeping the bread fresh. What do these people breathe into when they need to calm down?)

Then I discovered that America may not be named after Amerigo Vespucci, who set foot on what was to become known as American soil in 1498. However, it was John Cabot who first explored, and set foot on, coastal North America, a year earlier, under the commission of Henry VII, King of England. Cabot’s sponsor in Bristol was Richard ap Americ ( a good Celtic name). The continent may well be named after Richard rather than Vespucci.

Why should we favour Richard over Vespucci as the origin of the name America? One good reason is that one cannot imagine the Medicis, Vespucci’s patrons, being ecstatic when he returned from ‘discovering’ the New Word, and proposed naming it after himself, a mere navigator.

On the other hand, we have the evidence of a humanist, Martin Waldseemüller, who, in 1507, reprinted the “Quattuor Americi navigationes” (“Four Voyages of Amerigo”), preceded by a pamphlet of his own entitled “Cosmographiae introductio,” and he suggested that the newly discovered world be named “ab Americo Inventore…quasi Americi terram sive Americam” (“from Amerigo the discoverer…as if it were the land of Americus or America”).

On the third hand, Richard ap Americ was the man who paid for Cabot’s voyage. Arsenal still play football in London, but their new stadium is known as Emirates Stadium. ‘Follow the money’ is a reasonable working practice in these cases.

Anyway, if my further research confirms the Cabot theory, then this will be right up there with the revelation, several years ago, that bears don’t actually hibernate, a fact that still has me occasionally waking up in a cold, gaslighted, sweat.

To round off what has been a very tough week, while we were out in the car yesterday, we saw a teenager with mauve hair. A little disturbed, if not in the least surprised, by the warmth of Bernice’s admiration of this, I tentatively inquired whether she was considering something similar herself. She pointed out, very fairly, that when, a couple of decades ago, she had wanted to dye her hair aubergine, I had expressed my opposition. (2024 David is, of course, shrieking: “And just what do you think it has to do with you?” Unlike John Osborne, I tend to look back mostly in acute embarrassment.)

In response, the best I could think of by way of belated apology was: “You shouldn’t really have married me, should you?”. I’m not sure exactly what response I was expecting, or indeed hoping for, but whatever I was expecting was a bit wide of the mark. What she actually said was: “If I’d known you were always going to be a miserable old ****, I wouldn’t have.”

Blogger’s Note: I feel I must explain that **** represents a word much less shocking that what you are probably thinking, although more shocking than Bernice’s Mum, z”l would have thought.

Since then, 18 hours have passed, and we’re still together, so I expect our marriage will survive this particular hiccough. I know that the lesson to take from this is not to ask a question to which you are not prepared for the answer. I also know that I won’t take this lesson. I also know that Bernice didn’t really mean what she said. And I also know that she meant every word.

What is a mystery to me is how somebody who knows so much can feel so often as though he doesn’t know anything, and as soon as he does know something, somebody moves his cheese. Ah! Sweet mystery of life!

As far as I can ascertain, the list below contains the names of all those, Israelis (Jews and Bedouin), and foreigners, still held captive by Hamas, and possibly other terrorist organisations, in Gaza on Day 331, and believed to still be alive. Pray for them; think of them; read their names. Behind each name is a person and, by extension, a complete world.

If you have any capacity for prayer left after that, pray for the families of those slaughtered by Hamas, whose bodies are still held in Gaza.

If you have any capacity for prayer left after that, pray for the future of the State of Israel. It needs your prayers no less than the hostages and their families do.

I have no other useful words to add today.

This week marked a first for Bernice and myself. We ran a mini Kaytanat Savta. Just how mini I will explain shortly, but first some of you not steeped in Israeli culture may need a word of explanation about Kaytanat Savta. This translates basically as Grandma’s (or, in our case, Nana’s) summer school. To help working parents cope with the two-month summer break from school and kindergarten, a range of summer activities is organised for, mostly younger, children. These range from summer schooling activities held on school premises, through usually day (in other words, not sleepover) summer camps organised by local authorities, youth movements, enterprising teenagers and others, to rotating day activities organised by a group of parents for their children and hosted every day by a different parent.

For some reason, these organised activities all take place in July, and the month of August looms horrifyingly large for many parents. Even if the family have a week’s summer holiday somewhere, and each of the parents takes a second week of leave to stay at home with the children, this still leaves a week or more of loose end.

Enter the grandparents, who will often volunteer, or sometimes be volunteered, to take the grandchild(ren) for half a week or a week. It is into this group that we have just been initiated.

A brief note. Not for nothing, at least in our case, is this called Kaytanat Savta, rather than Kaytanat Savta v’Saba. I fully acknowledge that the partner with the training, qualification and experience in early childhood and nursery education is the one carrying the load here. The rest of us am along for the ride, to a large extent.

Esther, Maayan and Raphael are due to move within Zichron, from their current three-room house into a four-room flat on Thursday this week. Esther is due to start a new job on the same date, and had managed to finish off all of her other work commitments by Monday lunchtime this week. This means that there is just a chance they have enough time to pack up their house, move, and unpack essentials, before the new job/new year at gan/back to work of next Sunday. Our repeated offers to help in any way they wanted were negotiated down to taking Raphael back home with us on Sunday and keeping him overnight.

Raphael is, of course, coming up to two-and-a-half. He has never spent a night away from his parents, although he is used to staying in other people’s houses, and is very familiar with his ‘bed’ at our house (a mattress at the foot of his parents’ bed). When Esther and Maayan first broached the subject of him staying overnight at our house without them, he was very keen. Indeed, every time we see him or speak to him over the last couple of weeks he has wanted to “go to stay at Nana and Grandpa’s house today”.

When we drove up to Zichron on Sunday morning, as soon as we arrived he wanted us to leave with him. Even so, none of us was sure how he would react when we actually abducted him. I don’t know what we were worried about. After an early lunch, and several carefully repeated explanations of exactly which of us were and which of us weren’t going to be going back to Ma’ale Adumim, Raphael was totally undaunted. Even after he had hugged Mummy and Ima goodbye, and, accompanied only by Storm (his octopus) and Tiger (his tiger), been strapped into his seat in our car, he was unperturbed.

On the 100-minute journey back to Ma’ale Adumim, he slept for most of the way. When he woke up, he was his usual animated self, commenting on every lorry, bus, motorbike, emergency vehicle and piece of construction equipment we passed on the way. For the next 28 hours, he was disturbingly undisturbed, not once asking for his parents. As Bernice explained to Esther afterwards, this is a demonstration of the confidence that he has, that they have given him, in them. It is, of course, also a mark of the bond that he has forged with us (but especially with Bernice) over his short life.

We had a fairly flexible brief from Ground Control in Houston/Zichron. We were not required to make any complicated efforts in terms of activities; Raphael is a child who takes delight in life’s simple pleasures. We already knew full well that we needed to make sure the pantry, and especially the fruit bowl, were well-stocked. ‘Children’s coffee’ (which is actually almond milk, but please don’t tell Raphael) had to be strictly limited to two very small glasses at breakfast. And so forth.

On Sunday, we stayed close to home, going to our closest park for some climbing, sliding, swinging and seesawing. Later, we filled the paddling pool and Raphael cooled off and splashed around. The rest of the day was filled with eating, listening to stories, and playing games. Bernice took an exhausted little boy up to bed fairly early, and he slept, undisturbed, from 7:45 until 6:45 the following morning (which meant that I got to say hello/goodbye to him before I went to shul).

After breakfast, we drove to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, where we spent a very hot but very enjoyable two-and-a-half hours. It struck me that if an alien were sent to earth to seek out the most intelligent local species, and if that alien happened to land at the zoo on an August morning, he would never select humans. As we made our way round, it was clear that the animals were far smarter. The monkeys lay back along the boughs of trees, listlessly grooming each other. An elderly chimp sat on a ledge, carefully peeling a mango. The lions broke their langorous reclining only to yawn extravagantly. The bears refused to emerge from their dark house at all. Only the humans raced from enclosure to enclosure, in the ever-hotter August sun,

However, Raphael took everything in, and thoroughly enjoyed himself. He particularly liked the penguins (who, naturally, were fairly animated in their air-conditioned enclosure), but also was taken with the browsing giraffes. In a masterstroke of accidental timing, we arrived at Noah’s Ark (at the very end of the zoo), just as the children’s train arrived, and so we were able to ride back to the entrance in style.

The 25-minute sleep Raphael enjoyed on the drive back to our house meant that he couldn’t manage to drop off for his midday nap at home. So, the afternoon passed with more games and stories, and then it was time for us to take the bus to the Jerusalem railway station, where Esther took over. I hope she wasn’t too offended by the fact that Raphael seemed much more excited at the prospect of going home by train than he was at seeing Esther. When she explained that they would, in fact, be taking two trains, I thought he would burst with anticipatory excitement.

He was slightly disappointed that we wouldn’t be travelling back to Zichron with them, but I reminded him that, when we next came, we would be visiting them in their new home.

I suspect that the first edition of Kaytanat Savta may prove not to be the last. Providing that we always manage to get sufficient time to recover between sessions, that will be absolutely fine with us.

In the introduction to his last book, Morality, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks explains the difference between history and memory.

History is an answer to the question, ‘What happened?’ Memory is an answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’ History is about facts, memory is about identity. History is about something that happened to someone else, not me. Memory is my story, the past that made me who I am, of whose legacy I am the guardian for the sake of generations yet to come. Without memory, there is no identity, and without identity, we are mere dust on the surface of infinity.”

As Rabbi Sacks stresses throughout his writings, Judaism is a religion, and the Jews are a people, whose identity is profoundly shaped by a shared memory. We need only look at the nuts and bolts of the Jewish calendar cycle to see how true this is. The classic example is Pesach, when, at the Seder night at the very start of the festival, we do not simply recall but rather strive to relive the subjective experience of achieving freedom from slavery in Egypt. We are enjoined to see ourselves as if we came out of Egypt on that very evening.

Of course, it is not only Pesach. We erect a temporary dwelling on Sukkot to ‘relive’ the experience of dependence on God’s protection that the Children of Israel enjoyed in the desert. Moses reminds the second generation, about to enter the Promised Land, that God is making his covenant that day not only with them, but with all the as-yet-unborn generations of their descendants. We have a tradition that we were all ‘at Sinai’, as well as a profound sense, reflected in both the liturgy and the philosophy, that each day we receive the Torah anew.

And, to differentiate, as the Hebrew phrase has it, with a thousand differences, every year, on Tisha b’Av, we adopt the customs of mourning, dim the lights in shul, sit on the floor or on low stools, and weep for the destruction of the first and second temples and the twice-visited exile from the Land. Perhaps the most painful part of the day is the recitation of kinot, laments, in shul at the end of the morning service. Over the centuries, laments have been added to mark particularly tragic events in Jewish history, be it the slaughter of rabbis, the path of death and destruction that the Crusaders cut through Jewish Europe on their way to the Holy Land, or the Holocaust.

I must confess that, while I always take part in the recitation of these laments, and am usually one of the ten or so members of the congregation asked to each introduce two or three of the laments, and give a brief background, there are years when my performance of this ritual is just that: the performance of a ritual.

One of the legacies of October 7 is that it stripped away, in a single day, 75 years, since the foundation of the State of Israel (or, if not that, then certainly 56 years, since the Six-Day War of 1967): more than half a century of believing that the helplessness of Jews in the face of antisemitic attacks was a thing of the past. I sat in shul on Tisha b’Av this year and read the graphic descriptions of the unspeakable acts of savagery visited on men, women and children after the city fell. For the first time, I did not have to imagine these scenes. I had seen the video shot by the Hamas savages themselves. The images that came unsummoned were not the jerky black-and-white news footage of the 1940s, but the full colour phone videos of 318 days ago.

For the first time I did not have to imagine those scenes in a past that, even if its most recent manifestation was the Shoah, is still from before my lifetime. Rather, it was my recent memory and, much more powerfully and significantly even than that, it was a still-extant existential threat. October 7 has taken us back to the default position of Jews ever since the fall of the Second Temple, the sense that our life is as precarious as…well, Tevye says it better than I can. I now feel viscerally something of what must have been the day-to-day emotional experience of Jews throughout the two thousand years of exile.

There were, of course, some better periods and some worse periods over those two thousand years. But any Jew who left Spain after 1492 should have known that any Golden Age comes with an expiry date, and, however well things worked out for him in Italy, Holland or England, he was living on borrowed time.

This is the hard lesson that, I fear, Jews in New York and London need to internalise today. As for Jews in Jerusalem, we have, at the very least, to acknowledge that Israel does not, at the time of writing, have all the answers. The filmed horrors of October 7 are deeply harrowing. In a very different way, the uncertainties that Israelis are feeling are equally harrowing.

I am speaking not only of the physical uncertainty of whether, and when, Iran will attack. I am not even speaking only of the tortuous uncertainties of whether any more hostages will be released, alive or dead, and at what terrible price in the release of bloodstained terrorists, and at what terrible price in more future victims of terrorism. I am, rather, speaking of whether it is possible to build an Israel that is physically secure enough to survive the unending enmity that the world directs at us, and that at the same time is morally secure enough to remain worthy of surviving, and to be recognised as such by its amazing population.

Let me be clear. I am not describing Israel as she is today. By any objective measure, the IDF is a moral army fighting a moral war in Gaza. Don’t take my word for it. Read what the High Level Military Group (an association of military leaders and officials from NATO and other democratic countries) says.

However, it is undeniable that one of the prices Israel pays for standing up to Palestinian terrorism is that it becomes increasingly challenging to act morally. At an individual level, and, potentially, at an institutional level, it becomes ever more difficult to resist being dragged down to the level of the enemy you face. If, as may well happen over the next year or two, significant numbers of idealistic young nation builders feel that Israel offers no way forward to a future that can be both secure and moral, and seek their personal future somewhere else (Where, for Heaven’s sake?), then the balance of the fabric of the nation may start to tip.

At the same time, we may be about to see a massive influx to Israel of idealistic and moral Jews who no longer see a future for themselves in the Diaspora. If that happens, then the future may look very different indeed.

As a Danish parliamentarian apparently said in the late 1930s: “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” And yet, our Jewish perspective should perhaps encourage me to be rather more optimistic. It is difficult to see our current position, depressing as it is, as the darkest moment in Jewish history…or even in Jewish history of the last 100 years. From 1944 to 1948, from the heart of the Shoah to the establishment of the State, was, incredibly, only four years. As Ben-Gurion said, “In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.”

I’m still keeping my fate tied with Israel’s. If you knows of a better ‘ole, go to it. And, Iran willing, I’ll see you back here next week.

As I built up to starting to write this week’s post, I felt that I really had to write about the situation. However, I don’t feel I have anything particularly insightful to say that you couldn’t glean from the few media outlets I regularly mention. Nor, indeed, did I feel like adding to a mood of despondency in a week that is already coloured grey by the looming imminence of Tisha b’Av, the fast commemorating the destruction of both Temples and the exile from the Land.

At the same time, when the elephant in the room plants its rump on your lap and sticks its trunk in your morning coffee, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. So, I thought I would explore a mildly interesting and less ponderous aspect of living in Israel in August 2024, and couple that exploration with one or two utterly trivial diversions.

Diversion 1. Bernice and I celebrated our wedding anniversary last week by going into Jerusalem for a meal and ice-cream. First the light rail, then the extremely popular downtown restaurant, then the heart-of-downtown ice-cream parlour were all so much emptier than they should be in early August that we were able to get seats on the light rail, a table at the restaurant, and served at the parlour without having to wait at any point. The almost total absence of foreign tourists was matched by the equal scarcity of out-of-town Israelis; those not wary of leaving the safety(?) of Tel Aviv for the danger(?) of Jerusalem were probably trapped abroad, regretting that they had chosen to fly AbandonAir, rather than reliable El Al. Just saying. I’m not saying I welcome the Iranian threat for enhancing our anniversary experience, but I am saying I’ll take any silver lining I can find.

Living in Israel: Much of the talk around these parts in the last ten days has been about the reaction of the Israeli in the street to the threat of Iranian retaliation for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Ever since Israel did or didn’t eliminate Haniyeh by planting a bomb in his hotel room or firing a rocket from across the street using either a human launcher on a nearby roof or a remote launcher, or by firing a missile either from beyond Iran’s border or from an aircraft flying over Teheran…whatever. Ever since then, Israelis have been watching out for Iran’s promised retaliation, while at the same time observing fellow Israelis’ reactions to the threat of retaliation.

I have to report that the public’s reaction has been more low-key than last time round, in April. The Home Front has advised that we stock up on water and canned goods, ensure that we have a torch, a rechargeable radio and a first-aid kit, and keep a radio on over Shabbat, tuned to a ‘silent station’ that will only broadcast in an emergency. However, on our visit to the supermarket last week, we saw no panic buying of anything. This may be partly because many people keep a permanent emergency supply, which they use and replenish on an ongoing basis. It is certainly true that everyone seems to be taking impending Armageddon in their stride.

We haven’t actually been into our pharmacy to seek advice about a first-aid kit suitable for dealing with the after-effects of a direct hit by a Shahab-3, with its fetching pastel yellow décor and its 750kg payload, but we suspect that our Mister Men elastoplasts and small tube of Polydine might not quite do the job.

However, we have bought a radio: a curious blend of old and new that I find very satisfying. Its colour scheme is evocative of the Swiss Army Knife, and it also has some of the same compact heft and gee-whizz versatility that makes said knife so seductive. Let me take you on a short virtual tour.

The front panel sports a satisfyingly 1960s transistor radio analog tuning dial and display. The top panel offers solar charging panels and the button to activate the side-panel LED light, which has two different strengths: emergency “I’m down here!” and subtle atmospheric background saferoom. Holding down the button also activates a piercing siren and automatic flashing of the lights to produce SOS in morse code. The back panel houses the FM aerial and the handcrank as an alternative method of generating power. The other side panel features a socket for charging the radio from the mains, and a USB outlet for recharging mobile phones.

In short, all it lacks is that most coveted tool on the Swiss Army Knife: a thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves! Personally, I can’t wait for Iran to attack and knock out our power supply.

Diversion 2: Spoiler alert: prepare to have a long-held illusion shattered.

It’s not actually a thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves. The item in question is the right-hand tool of the three that unfold from the right-hand side of the knife: apparently a blade that comes to a point and has a hole in the centre a third of the way down.

Online research reveals that it is not a hoof pick, both because hoof picks are hooked to enable getting under the stone to prise it out, and also because a hoof pick has a rounded, rather than pointed, end, to avoid puncturing the horse’s hoof. Here are two examples.

Some online commentators believe the tool is actually a marlin spike – used for separating rope strands and for other rope-related tasks. However, I am persuaded that it is in fact an awl or punch, a tool for making a hole in leather or canvas. The hole in the awl is for passing thread through if it is being used to carry out a repair on a tent.

You might also call it a punch/reamer. Making a hole where there wasn’t one before is punching it, done with an inserting motion. Opening it up wider, with a twisting motion, is reaming it.

It appears that the only person who actually had a knife with “a little thing for getting stones our of horses’ hooves” was Dorothy L Sayers’ amateur sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey. Everyone else has an awl. (By the way, the radio serialisations of Sayers’ Wimsey novels, starring Ian Carmichael, are highly recommended if you need an escape from today’s insane world. They are doubly evocative of earlier eras: both the era in which the stories are set (upper-class England of the 1930s) and the era in which the radio adaptations were produced (the 1970s and 1980s). You can find an example here – Have His Carcase.

I think that has carried us satisfactorily away to a place of comfort and safety, where the worst thing that happens is a single gruesome murder, so I’ll leave you there for another week.

Let’s begin with a song, to wake us all up. Your starter for ten is: whose national anthem are these sentiments taken from?

Heroes of the sea, noble people,
Valiant and immortal nation,
Raise once again today
The splendour of ???????!
Among the haze of memory,
Oh Fatherland, one feels the voice
Of your distinguished forefathers,
That shall lead you on to victory!

To arms, to arms!
Over land, over sea,
To arms, to arms!
For the Fatherland, fight!
Against the cannons, march on, march on!

Let the echo of an offence
Be the sign for a comeback.

Ten points if you spotted this as the national anthem of quiet little Portugal. A bonus of twenty if you know the back story of how this became Portugal’s national anthem. No? Well, let me plug this gap in your education.

England and Portugal, as you may know, are the co-signatories of the oldest alliance still in force. The Treaty of Windsor was signed on 9 May, 1386, 638 years ago, and is still active today. However, despite the alliance, relations have not always been amicable between these two great erstwhile maritime powers and imperial nations.

In the mid-19^th Century, Portugal strove to consolidate its control of territories in Southern Africa, creating a ‘rose-coloured map’ of contiguous control of a large area of land linking its colonies of Mozambique and Angola, passing through what are now Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi, and essentially offering a Portuguese land route between the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean. England disputed Portuguese claims to these territories, and eventually issued the British ultimatum in 1890.

This was a memorandum sent to the Portuguese Government by Lord Salisbury on 11 January 1890 in which he demanded the withdrawal of the Portuguese troops from the areas where Portuguese and British interests in Africa overlapped. It meant that the UK was now claiming sovereignty over territories, some of which had been claimed as Portuguese for centuries. Within a year or so, Portugal had, with scarcely a struggle, acquiesced to the demands, an action seen by many Portuguese as a national humiliation. This led ultimately to the fall of the government, and contributed to the overthrow of the monarchy 20 years later.

In response to the ultimatum, republican Portuguese composed a patriotic protest march, which was adopted, after a democratic government replaced the monarchy, as the national anthem.

All of which is merely an introduction to this week’s topic: a look at national anthems. If you want a hook to hang it on, consider the fact that the world will, over the next two weeks, be listening to a lot of national anthems, at the Paris Olympics. (Portugal’s anthem may not feature, since Portugal won its first gold medal at its 16^th Olympics, in 1984, and in the nine subsequent Games has won only another four.)

The Portuguese national anthem celebrates a glorious history, while wryly recognising that things have gone a bit downhill since then. “Portugal has not perished…Let the echo of an offence be the sign for a comeback”.

Compare that to Britain’s national anthem (especially the verses that never get sung).

God save our gracious King,
Long live our noble King,
God save the King!
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the King!

O Lord our God arise,
Scatter our enemies,
And make them fall!
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks…

…Lord make the nations see,
That men should brothers be,
And form one family,
The wide world o’er.

No recognition there that things have gone downhill! Rather a declaration that, with Charles on his throne, and God on their (our?) side, the British will conquer all enemies and, simultaneously, teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

Our next exhibit is the French national anthem. Composed overnight during the French revolution, and reflecting the invasion of France by Prussian and Austrian armies, it does not pull its punches.

Arise, children of the Fatherland
Our day of glory has arrived
Against us the bloody flag of tyranny
is raised; the bloody flag is raised.
Do you hear, in the countryside
The roar of those ferocious soldiers?
They’re coming right into your arms
To cut the throats of your sons, your comrades!

To arms, citizens!
Form your battalions
Let’s march, let’s march
That their impure blood
Should water our fields.

Banned outright from 1804-1830, for its revolutionary associations, it was officially reinstated only in 1879.

Which brings us to the American national anthem, and a nuanced change. The war and bloodshed are confined here to the country’s foundational struggle, like La Marseillaise but unlike God Save the King or A Portuguesa. However, The Star-Spangled Banner is written from the perspective of a time in the immediate wake of the struggle for independence. The struggles are all in the past. The anthem celebrates the golden age.

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream,
’Tis the star-spangled banner – O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Bosnia and Herzegovina, as befits a country created artificially as an amalgam of various ethnic groupings, has been unable, to date, to reach consensus on a suitable lyric, and so their anthem is officially wordless. However, the following unofficial lyrics are sometimes sung. You will note that they are carefully uncontroversial. Despite that, even the tune is not universally accepted, with Bosniaks generally liking the national anthem, Croats being ambivalent towards it, and Serbs overwhelmingly disliking it,even booing it at some performances

You’re the light of the soul
Eternal fire’s flame
Mother of ours, o land of Bosnia
I belong to you

The beautiful blue sky
Of Herzegovina
In the heart are your rivers
Your mountains

Proud and glorious
Land of ancestors
You shall live in our hearts
Ever more

Generations of yours
Show up as one
We go into the future
Together!

Which brings us, finally, to an anthem that is, I suspect, unlike any other. I have brought only a few examples here, but many others that I have read in preparing this post tread the same well-worn path: celebrating the bloody foundation, either at the time (as it were) – La Marseillaise – or the day after (as it were) – The Star-Spangled Banner – or declaring the justice of the continuing struggle – La Portuguesa, God Save the King – or celebrating the beauty and greatness of the country – the as yet untitled anthem of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Let us look, now, at the Israeli national anthem.

As long as in the heart, within,
The Jewish soul yearns,
And towards the ends of the east,
An eye gazes toward Zion,

Our hope is not yet lost,
The hope of two thousand years,
To be a free nation in our own land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

Consider the following.

Hatikva (The Hope) was written as a poem by Naftali Herz Imber in 1878, 70 years before the state was founded. After he came from Poland to Eretz Yisrael, the poem struck a chord with the pioneers, and, in 1887, Shmuel Cohen sang the poem using a melody he knew from Romania. The song then spread rapidly throughout the Zionist communities of Eretz Yisrael, and was eventually adopted as the anthem of the Zionist movement in 1933.

What makes this anthem unusual is that it reflects neither on the qualities of the country nor on the struggle for independence. In the only verse that has been retained since its adoption as the official anthem of Israel there is no fulfilment, not even any genuine anticipation; there is, instead, hope. The only emotion expressed is hope; the ‘triumph’ is nothing more than the fact that this hope is not yet lost. While it is understandable that, in the uncertainty of the state’s early years, this emotion may have resonated with a population engaged daily with creating a state from nothing, it is, perhaps, a little surprising that this unfulfilled note was not ‘updated’ after the Six-Day War in 1967, when even Zion and Jerusalem were suddenly in our hands.

Listen to the uncertainty in this lyric:
“As long as…” and no longer.
“Our hope is not yet lost”; not yet, but it could be, at any moment.

It strikes me that this is a lyric that has become more resonant, again, since 7 October, when we woke up to the realisation that to be a free people in our own land is still as much an aspiration as a reality. While hostages languish in subterranean dungeons in Gaza, while tens of thousands of citizens in the North have no prospect of returning to their homes, many of which have been damaged by rocket fire, while tens of thousands of reservists face another tour of duty that wrenches them from their families and their livelihoods, talk of being a free nation in our own land seems, once again, as much a dream as a reality.

Hatikvah is an expression of yearning for becoming, not a celebration of being. As such, it seems to me profoundly Jewish, and profoundly diasporic. It is in a minor key (a rarity for a national anthem), cut from the same cloth as the image of the fiddler precariously perched on the roof. (Any excuse to watch that opening monologue.) In the good times, the aspiration expressed in Hatikvah can be inspirational. In the less good times, it can sometimes seem melancholic. Having been profoundly moved by it throughout my life, I still yearn for the day when, with the entire Jewish population returned to Zion, and Israel living at peace and in prosperity with its neighbours and itself, the Knesset will vote unanimously to replace the no-longer-relevant Hatikvah with a new, celebratory, national anthem, in a major key. If that ever happens, I shall miss it terribly. However, rereading the vision of a future Israel that I have just painted, I don’t see Hatikvah becoming outdated any time soon.

Sorting through my store cupboard of potential topics, I see that I still have a few odds and ends from our trip, so, for the purposes of this week’s post, my heart is still in the West (of the Old World, you understand).

First, an epiphany for Micha’el. (If you’re not tech-minded, feel free to jump to the next paragraph.) One of our annual pleasures is asking Micha’el what he would like for a birthday present, because almost every year he asks for something which, until that moment, we had not realised existed. This year was no exception. He asked for (I do hope I get this right) a DIY ergonomic, split keyboard kit (specifically a Dactyl manuform iterated and modifiable open-source design). Once he had shown us the idea online it made a lot more sense, and once he had explained the cost of an off-the-shelf product, his desire to take the DIY route also made a lot more sense. DIY in this case means, among other things, 3D-printing the keyboard and soldering the mechanical keys. We look forward to seeing the final result when we next visit. Meanwhile, here’s an illustration using a Qwerty layout. (Micha’el is going to try using Halmak.) Here endeth my impersonation of someone tech-savvy (a term that is probably, as someone will doubtless point out, forty years out of date).

All of this is only a prologue to Micha’el’s early Chanukah present. His birthday present from Tslil was a punchbag (or, more accurately, a heavy kick-boxing bag). He planned to suspend this from a bracket arm attached to the solid wall of the outhouse/shed. He fashioned an excellent bracket from an old bicycle fork and then started drilling the holes in the wall. When I realised that over an hour’s work had resulted in one-and-a-half holes, and a considerable sweat, the penny dropped that Micha’el did not possess a hammer drill. When I questioned him about this, he said, reasonably enough, that it had never achieved a high enough position on his list of priorities.

I explained that that was because he had never used a hammer drill, and, after a brief conversation, Bernice and I offered him an early Chanukah present. Fortunately, thanks to Amazon Germany, whose service to Portugal is very fast, the drill arrived a day or two before we left. This was when I discovered that Micha’el had not ordered hammer drill bits; indeed, he had not realised that he needed different bits. Fortunately, his local hardware store stocked them, and so I was able to witness the moment of epiphany, when Micha’el first drilled into the wall with the correct tool. It was, as I suspect it is for anyone who has long struggled to penetrate a wall with a rotary drill, a moment as powerful as hearing Verdi’s Requiem for the first time. His whoops of delight were well worth the cost of the drill.

On the subject of presents, Ollie and Tao received a joint gift of a bumper bundle of books, among which was one that I have subsequently been thinking about a lot. The book is entitled Where’s the Poo?. The reader is challenged on every page to “search for six very special poos in every scene”. For the benefit of those of you who had managed to get through life until now without being aware of the book, I’ll pause here for a moment to give you time to read that sentence again.

My initial reaction when I looked at the book was one of extreme discomfort. Since I don’t think of myself as a prude or particularly Victorian in my attitudes, I was curious as to why I found it so distasteful. Having given a great deal of thought to the matter (conceivably an unwarranted amount), I have come to certain conclusions that I would like to share with you.

First, there is the fact that the concept of the book (searching for something hidden in plain sight in a very ‘busy’ pictorial scene) is shamelessly copied from the Where’s Waldo books. In this case, even the style of drawing and the palate used seem to me modelled on Waldo. The book makes no attempt to develop the concept at all; it simply plagiarises it.

Second, the premise of the book, that poos with distinct characters and appearance (an Elvis poo with shades and pompadour, a Queenie poo with a crown) wander around shopping malls and airports once they have been flushed, is clearly ludicrous. However, the book does not attempt to develop the potential humour in that situation at all. Everything is presented in a serious and informative tone.

Whereas many children’s books operate simultaneously at two levels, designed to appeal equally but differently to the child being read to and the adult reading, Where’s the Poo? Is completely flat and one-dimensional.

All of the ‘humour’ lies in the bad taste. This is, for me, a disturbing trend in modern children’s fiction: the introduction of scatology as a substitute for humour. Let me emphasise: this is not scatological humour – it is not jokes based on scatology; it is rather scatology used as humorous in itself. There is nothing clever, or funny, or witty, in saying:”Poo!”

The reason why children find saying “Poo!” funny, and exciting, is because they know it is dangerous and forbidden. Where’s the Poo? removes all of that excitement, danger and humour, by making the adult complicit in the seditious act. For an adult to share this book with a child is to deprive the child of an important experience of childhood rebellion. This book should be passed secretly from older to younger child, and hidden between the mattress and the bedsprings, not read out to the child by an adult.

For some reason that I cannot fathom, neither Micha’el nor Bernice share my discomfort. They both enjoyed searching for the poos with Tao. Here endeth the rant.

Let me end with a less controversial topic. On one of our major supermarket visits on this trip, at the checkout the cashier, who spoke good English, asked me whether we had a cartão de poupança or savings card. When I said that we didn’t, she urged me to get one, because it could save us 10% of our bill. Since that seemed a significant saving, I told Bernice that, next time we came, I would start by enquiring about the card at the main desk.

This I duly did, or would have done, had there been anyone at the main desk. I pointed this out to a cashier, who put out a call for an English speaker, and, within a minute, a young male shelf-filler arrived, and explained to me that “My colleague will return in 20 minutes.” Sure enough, when I interrupted my shopping to check, there was a woman on the desk. I managed to explain to her what I wanted, principally by pointing to the poster advertising programa geração +. Some 15 minutes later, when she had put into her computer all of my passport details, and my NIF (a financial identity number that serves as the standard ID in Portugal), she handed me a card with a barcode, and explained that all I had to do was to present the card to the cashier before checkout. In addition, she gave me a second strip of plastic with perforations that made it easy to split it into three mini-cards, each of which contained the same barcode. This enables families to share a card. There you have another example of a simple, smart idea that has been adopted in one country but not another.

Presenting the card worked perfectly. Unfortunately, when I looked at the final bill, I saw that no reduction had been given. When I questioned the cashier about this, she explained that I was not eligible for the geriatrics’ card, because I wasn’t old enough. I wondered whether, given the aging population in rural Portugal, the age of eligibility was perhaps 75, but, anyway, I asked. When she told me the age of eligibility was 65, I thanked her for making my day and returned to the main desk to get my card amended.

That was quickly done. However, when I returned to the cashier to request a new bill and a refund, she said that the card wasn’t eligible. When I asked why, I thought that the reason she gave was that the card only becomes active after 10 days, and this was only the 9^th day. Since it wasn’t the 9^th day – I had only had the card 5 minutes – I realised I was missing something. Eventually, after carefully rereading the poster, I realised the truth. The card can be used to obtain a 10% discount only on the 10^th of each month, and that day was, as luck would have it, the 9^th.

Now, of course, we will have to try to schedule our visits to Portugal so that our first enormous supermarket shop is on the 10^th of the month. Of course, we also have to hope that the 10^th does not fall on Friday or Shabbat, when a supermarket shop is not feasible. The fact is that, even if the 10^th is halfway through our visit, and the supermarket shop is therefore only big and not enormous, we will still probably save over 100 shekels. In addition, the clerk assured me that there are ‘specials’ every day that are discounted for cardholders.

So we now have another card, this one declaring not, as I at first thought, that we are geriatrics, but, rather, that we belong to Generation +, which sounds rather good – almost as good as being mistaken for being under 65. I have added this card to the customer loyalty card we obtained when we bought the fixtures and materials for our bathroom renovation a couple of years ago. The fact is that these are the small increments by which I persuade myself that we are something a little more than ‘tourists’, if considerably less than ‘locals’, in Penamacor.

And that really is the end of this trip to Portugal. Next week, I suspect my attention will turn back to Israel, in some form or other. Until then, I wish those of you who are fasting today an easy and meaningful fast.

Until yesterday evening, I thought I knew what the main topic of today’s post was going to be…and then life, as it has a habit of doing, got in the way. The result is that this week’s offering is very different from what I had planned…or maybe not. I will leave it up to you to decide whether this results in a happy ending.

I had planned to talk about the domestic pleasures of our last days in Portugal. I particularly admired Tslil and Micha’el’s masterstroke – the decision to make Ollie’s birthday party a pizza party, and kill two birds with one oven stone. The morning of his birthday was dedicated to streamers, balloons, cards and presents, all of which proved very successful, both Ollie’s birthday presents and Tao’s un-birthday presents.

At Tslil’s suggestion, we gave Ollie a kitchen play set, comprising an ‘electric’ hob, frying pan, saucepan, a teapot, crockery and cutlery, as well as a selection of food items that makes for a limited and rather unbalanced restaurant menu: three different kinds of cracker, three different doughnuts, and one fried egg. This means that whoever Ollie, or Tao, is serving first is expected to eat their fried egg very quickly, so that the kitchen can fill the next order.

The hob requires batteries, to power the glowing light of the ‘element’ and to provide sound effects. Much to everyone’s relief, the sound is no more dramatic or intrusive than a convincing imitation of water boiling. I am the only one inconvenienced by this, or perhaps I should say ‘convenienced’, since it means I get the urge to go to the toilet even more frequently than usual.

Then, in the early evening, when the weather was a little cooler, the shaded backyard was a very pleasant pizza piazza. As always, the whole family got involved with the various stages of pizza preparation, and then we enjoyed a relaxed and delicious family supper, of which one of the highlights was a birthday greetings video Esther sent that Raphael had recorded for Ollie earlier. Ollie and Raphael blowing kisses to each other was enough to melt the cheese on the pizza, let alone all of the adults’ hearts.

After our last Shabbat together, which was, as always, very special, we all went to a reservoir beach on Sunday (yesterday, as I write). Only a 20-minute drive north from Penamacor, the site nestles among the tree-covered slopes of the foothills of the Sierra de Malcata national park. The reservoir itself is about 2 kilometres long and 500 metres across, and the beach occupies a triangular promontory that extends 200 metres into the reservoir. Most of the area is a grassy slope, with a stretch of sand at one point.

On one side of the promontory is a small children’s playground and a pizza café and bar, plus a jetty, at the end of which is a floating platform that features a very small infants’ paddling pool, a larger children’s pool and a small diving board. Off the jetty the water is several metres deep.

On the other side is a mooring for pedalos that are available for hire. Grandpa went out with Tao, who demonstrated a confident and capable hand on the tiller, managing to steer us away from crocodiles and marauding pirates. Micha’el then managed to persuade the delightful young man in charge to let him go out with Olly, who thoroughly enjoyed his short voyage, but very wisely held on to Abba’s hand and to the guard rail the whole time, while Nana hid her face in her hands and prayed very hard.

After both younger generations had worked up an appetite in the pools we all enjoyed a picnic tea with sandwiches made with the last of Grandpa’s rolls and rye bread. Then it was time for sandcastles, and burying Tao in the sand. Eventually, at around 7:45, we packed up and headed home, where I discovered that I was not wearing my wedding ring. I remembered taking it off to wash before the picnic, and I assumed I had put it in my trouser pocket. However, I soon established that it was in none of my pockets. It was then that I remembered that I had stupidly put it down on the picnic blanket, rather than in my pocket, and I had no recollection of putting it on again. It is, anyway, too tight a fit to slip off.

Even though I knew it was pointless, I searched the car. Bernice then searched the car, although I made her promise that if she found the ring there she would pretend that she had picked it up from the picnic blanket and not told me, as a practical joke. When I undressed last night, I searched all of my clothes thoroughly, then shook them all thoroughly, but with no success. I went to bed last night having decided that I would drive back to the beach this (Monday) morning, arriving as soon as it opened at 9AM, and search the area of the grass where we had picnicked.

So, this morning Lua and I had an earlier and rather shorter walk than usual, and I was indeed able to arrive at the beach just after 9 o’clock, feeling not very hopeful and not at all expectant of a good result. The whole area was completely deserted, and I started combing through the grass around where we had been sitting. Automatic sprinklers water the grass early every morning, so it was sodden, which didn’t make the search any easier.

After twenty minutes of searching in ever larger circles, I went down to the sand and combed through the area where I had dug a trench for Tao. I then worked my way down to where Tslil and Tao had run with the picnic blanket streaming out behind them. Finally, I returned to the area where we had sat. I made deals with bees: “The third flower you settle on will be where the ring is hiding in the grass.” I spun round with my eyes closed, walked four paces forward, turned left, walked another two paces, and looked down, hoping to see the ring gleaming in the grass.

I returned to the spot where I was fairly confident I had set the ring down on the blanket and scoured a circular area with a 30-centimetre radius as thoroughly as I could. I then walked to where we had parked the car the previous day and searched the unpaved area there. At this point, having spent in all 40 minutes searching, I accepted that I would not find the ring.

I walked back to my car and started the engine, feeling rather despondent. It’s not that my ring is particularly valuable. It is a thin, plain band of 9-carat gold that Bernice paid ₤3.50 for in 1972. Even allowing for inflation, the equivalent today is only about ₤35, or 165 shekels. While that was about all we could afford back then, I do accept that it is a modest sum. However, the sentimental value is of course very great.

And yet…As I drove, I started thinking, and, by the time I arrived back in Penamacor, I realised that this band of gold represented how precious is the life Bernice and I have made together over the last (very nearly) 52 years, but it was not in itself the preciousness of that life. What is truly valuable is the bond between us and the life and family that we have built together. Having spent the last month with the Portugal branch of the family, I don’t really need reminding about what is truly valuable. In the same way, returning tomorrow to Israel and to the other branch, I again won’t need any reminder.

As we steel ourselves for the inevitable downsizing that will have to accompany any move that we make to Zichron, the loss of my ring is a useful reminder that what we will be parting with does not measure up to what we will be gaining by being able to spend more time with Esther, Maayan and Raphael.

So, don’t you think that’s really a happy, 24-carat ending?

In addition to all of the expected pleasures, our life in Penamacor sometimes brings completely unexpected satisfactions, one of which I experienced last week.

Olly, in his taste for stories and songs, is very much a creature of habit. Most days, at some point, he asks, or agrees, to sit on my lap for songs. There are six or seven songs that I sing to him, all of them including various actions. However, the decisions as to the choice of songs and their running order are firmly in Olly’s hands. This can be quite challenging, since his vocabulary is still limited, However, he usually finds a way to make himself understood.

“Wheel”, for example is a word Olly only acquired last week but already drops casually into his conversation as if he had mastered it months ago. When he asked for “Wheel’ today, I initially, understandably, but mistakenly, assumed he was asking for “The wheels on the bus”, which is actually more often one of Bernice’s songs than one of mine. However, when I launched into that, and was met by a firm rejection in the form of a dismissive shake of the head, I thought again and eventually realised Olly wanted “Horsey, horsey, don’t you stop”, which includes a particularly extravagant rotating of my knees, on which he is precariously balanced, to accompany the line “And your wheels go round”.

When we are not working through those English songs, Olly often wants to thumb through the Israeli children’s classic “מאה שירים ראשונים” (100 First Songs) a collection of nursery songs and Israeli folk songs that our children’s missed out on in their own (English-language) first years. This is, for Bernice and myself, a doubly evocative book. First, it is illustrated by Dosh, who was, for the first decades of Israel’s existence, the national daily caricaturist, capturing the national spirit very accurately over the years.

For anyone who came of age in a Zionist movement in the 60s, Srulik (Dosh’s Israeli version of Uncle Sam or John Bull) is a very familiar figure.

Equally familiar are many of the songs in the book, because a lot of them are ones we sang and danced to in Hanoar Hatzioni in the 60s. In those halcyon days – now 60 years ago – we sang with considerably more enthusiasm than accuracy. It was in these years that I first developed the technique of fudging the words of songs I did not know the words of. This was a technique that I perfected when I was required, as a resident of Wales and a teacher in a comprehensive school, to join in the singing of the Welsh national anthem. I was fairly confident about the first three words, but from there on I was more or less completely at sea. If I show you the first two lines, you will understand that I was in a scarcely better position on those rare occasions when I had the words in front of me.

Mae hen wlad fy nhadau yn annwyl i mi,
Gwlad beirdd a chantorion, enwogion o fri.

Fortunately, in Wales, the national anthem is always sung with tremendous gusto, and so the gibberish of my tuneful rendition always went unnoticed.

The other day, while he was thumbing through the songbook, Olly stopped at Zemer, Zemer Lach: a very familiar song from the movement days. As I sang it to him,. I was amazed to discover that the remembered gibberish of 60 years ago was actually a coherent and fully comprehensible verse. In an instant, the mystery was solved. It is fair to say that this mystery had not kept me awake many nights in the intervening years, but nevertheless I felt a very satisfying sense of closure.

The same experience happened later with Al Sfat Yam Kinneret. I plan to flick through the entire book before we leave. Who knows what other secrets my own personal Rosetta Stone will reveal?

Incidentally, if the early 1970s British cultural reference in this week’s title escapes you, you can listen here. I won’t pretend it’s up there with Schubert lieder; indeed, part of me regards it now (and regarded it then, to be honest) as a waste of Georgie Fame and Alan Price’s not inconsiderable talents, but it does, for some of us, evoke a moment in time.

Back to 2024 and Portugal. On Sunday this week, Bernice and I took the boys out for the day. We went to Castelo Branco, to a gymboree. Tslil had kindly phoned ahead, to ensure that they would be open on Sunday, and established that they were open from 10:00 till 12:30, at which time they had a private block booking. Thanks to Bernice’s magnificent powers of organisation and shepherding, we drove off at 9:17, only two minutes behind schedule, having negotiated the morning preparations with no voice raised (by child or adult), no tear shed (by child or adult), everyone having visited the bathroom and performed successfully (you get the picture). Bernice, I need hardly explain, has no idea where the humour lies in Michael McIntyre’s Leaving the House routine.

It was an uneventful journey, punctuated only by a couple of small savoury treats to keep the boys going, and by Tao’s repeated: “Are we nearly there yet?” It is a mystery to me how this exact wording is passed down from one cohort of children to the next, through the generations. Who teaches them these things?

When we arrived at the industrial estate where the gymboree was located in a huge warehouse, we took a little time to find the place, since it was singularly under-signed, but, once we did, we were very impressed. More accurately, I was very impressed, largely because I had very deliberately tempered my expectations in advance. To achieve that, I had simply imagined what the experience would be like if we were going to a gymboree in Israel.

How did the reality outshine my expectations? Let me count the ways. First, rather than 437 children fighting over the equipment, there were about 15 children, all well behaved and quietly spoken. Then, the equipment looked not only very sturdily built and thoroughly cushioned, but also almost brand new. In addition, three young and very alert staff constantly patrolled the play area, anticipating problems and ensuring safety and order. There was also a complete absence of vending machines offering junk food and drinks for sale. Instead, there was a constantly refilled jug of water and beakers on offer, with the staff suggesting to children that they stop for a drink. Finally, and most welcome of all, the inevitable background music was played at a volume that still allowed conversation in a normal speaking voice.

As for the equipment, it was aimed ideally at children a year or two older than Tao, but he managed to handle almost everything, and had a thoroughly enjoyable time for all of two hours. He repeatedly came down the vertiginous tube-slide that caused Nana almost to pass out when she first saw it; He mastered the climbing walls. He repeatedly ‘swam’ around the foam cube pit and bounced on the trampolines.

After a little while, Olly ventured in and, although he could not be tempted onto any of the equipment, unsurprisingly, he enjoyed running around on the squelchy foam mattresses and having his feel tickled on the artificial grass floor. After expending prodigious amounts of energy, the boys retired together to the playhouse where they cooked up a magnificent meal in the play kitchen.

One more pleasant surprise awaited us. Tslil had been quoted a price of EUR7.50 per child per hour, which we thought was a little expensive. In the event, we were charged nothing for Olly, and for Tao we paid EUR10.00 in total, for just under two hours of unmitigated fun.

Our plan was to drive from there to a vegan café we have eaten in before, that offers simple fare that the boys would enjoy. However, when I checked online I found they were closed on Sunday. Fortunately, belt and braces Bernice had brought enough food for a modest picnic, and so we decided to go to the City Park, which we know well. It offers shade under trees, an excellent adventure playground, and, we also knew, a café, that might offer something for the boys.

In the event, despite considerable language challenges, we were able to procure cheese toasties and strawberry juice for the boys, and a couple of excellent chilled beers for Bernice and myself, and to spend a little time playing in the playground.

On the drive home, both boys, unsurprisingly, fell asleep very quickly, while I, very surprisingly, didn’t. This was as well since I was driving. 45 minutes later, we arrived home, after an action-packed day, throughout which both children and adults behaved impeccably, and a thoroughly good time was had by all.

By the time you read this, we will have, at most, seven more days to enjoy with the family here. Highlights to come include Olly’s birthday celebrations and – if Micha’el, Tslil and Tao can be persuaded to strut their stuff – a home-made pizza evening. I can hardly wait.