One can’t help feeling sorry for civil rights campaigner, human and animal rights activist and feminist writer Rita Mae Brown. In her 1983 book Sudden Death, she attributed to a fictional ‘Jane Fulton’ a very memorable saying that has become something of a cliché and has been immortalised on countless mugs and posters. “Insanity,” she wrote, “is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

How galling it must be for her to see this memorable pensée misattributed, almost universally, to Albert Einstein, who, let’s face it, doesn’t really need the publicity. His reputation, after all, rests on rather more substantial foundations.

Speaking personally, I feel rather more comfortable going head-to-head with Rita Mae Brown than I would with Einstein. For my intention today is to demonstrate that, contrary to what Einstein didn’t say, doing the same thing twice and expecting different results may be eminently sensible.

Some months ago, Micha’el, Tslil, Tao and Ollie embarked on an expedition to Lisbon with two objectives. The first was to obtain an apostille of the translation from Portuguese to Hebrew of all of their relevant documentation. I should explain, for the benefit of those of my readers whose nationality issues are rather more straightforward, that an apostille is a document used in international law that is issued by a government in accordance with the Hague Convention and that certifies that another document has been signed by a notary public.

Armed with the apostille, which sported a suitably impressive embossed stamp on the last page, they then made the short journey to the Israeli embassy, in the hope of registering Ollie’s birth and establishing his Israeli citizenship.

Their experience at the embassy was horrendous. Security was understandably strict; however, it seemed excessive for the strictness to stretch to refusing to allow them to take in any personal items whatsoever, including any equipment for their then infant son, and any book or game for their older son. Having been assured that the waiting-room was equipped with items to occupy a child, they found it boasted a couple of sheets of plain paper and some dried-up felt-tip pens.

When they finally saw an official, they were told that the apostille should have been stamped and signed on every page, and could not be accepted, and, at the end of a long, fraught, unpleasant and wasted couple of hours, they left. Bear in mind that this entire waste of energy required a stay of two nights in Lisbon.

Having taken a considerable time to recover from this experience, they finally felt ready to try once again, and so we included a city break in Lisbon for the whole family in our visit this time. We arrived in Lisbon on Monday. On Tuesday morning, Bernice and I took the boys back to the experiential science museum that we had visited on our previous break, while Micha’el and Tslil attempted to obtain an apostille stamped and signed on every page. The museum was even more fun than last time, both because Ollie was now old enough to enjoy a lot of the hands-on exhibits, and because of a temporary exhibit demonstrating and explaining the various animation techniques employed by Pixar studios in making Toy Story, Wall-E and other films. The entire museum is hands-on, and both boys had a wonderful time.

Towards the end of our long morning there, Tslil and Micha’el joined us, with good news and bad news. The bad news was that the apostille required by the embassy could not be obtained. The office had refused to sign and stamp every page of the documentation, stating that several months ago the procedure had changed in Portugal, and now only one signature was required. The good news was that, when, from the office, Micha’el phoned the embassy, the clerk there assured him that, indeed, only one signature was necessary.

When, the following day, all four of them walked from our hotel to the embassy, in bright sunshine, Tslil was optimistic, while Micha’el was resigned to failure. On this occasion, they were attempting to register Ollie’s birth with the Israeli authorities, obtain recognition of their Portuguese civil marriage, renew their own Israeli passports and obtain Israeli passports for the two boys.

Anticipating that their stay at the embassy might be a drawn-out affair, we had agreed that Bernice and I would have a grown-up day of sightseeing in Lisbon, and we would make our separate ways back from Lisbon to Penamacor.

Imagine our shock when, after a ridiculously short time, Micha’el contacted us to say that: the reception at the embassy had been civilised rather than, as previously, surly; that they had been allowed to go back to reception a couple of times to retrieve a couple of items they needed to keep the boys entertained; that, as promised, the single signature was all the embassy required; and, finally, that they were now in possession of a marriage certificate, an identity number for Ollie, and four brand-new passports.

Our best guess is that, at the time of their previous visit, the Portuguese authorities had just changed the law, and the Israeli authorities had not yet caught up with the change. As Einstein might not have said, on the continuum of life’s roller-coaster, they had been in the right space at just the wrong time.

Faced with the delights of Lisbon and an entire day to enjoy them, Bernice and I planned to take a 25-minute tram ride to Belém, site of a tower that offers good views of the city and location of the Monument to the Discoveries, celebrating Portugal’s glory days as a maritime explorational super-power. Having stood waiting for a tram for 15 minutes or so, we discovered a notice posted on the tram shelter explaining that, owing to road subsidence, the service was to be diverted on that day.

At that point, together with a motley crew of French and Japanese tourists, we walked a couple of hundred metres to a bus-stop. A few minutes later, our bus arrived, but we were too far back in the queue to get a seat. For the next 20 minutes, we stood, while the bus edged about 200 metres along the road. At this point, we decided to cut our losses and rejig our day’s plans. Hopping off the bus, we headed away from the river estuary. Moovit showed our walk as about a kilometre, but failed to mention that about 750 metres of that was uphill.

You may well not have paid sufficient heed to the fact that ‘uphill’ is a fairly vague term, covering everything from: “You know, when you’re driving along this road, you don’t actually notice that it’s uphill; it’s only when you walk it that you realise” to “There must be a station where they provide oxygen masks some time soon”. ‘Uphill’ in Lisbon is considerably closer to the second than the first experience. However, having enjoyed a decent hotel and excellent vegan meals for a day and a half, Bernice and I were easily up to the ascent, and, while the view from the top was nothing special, the archaeological museum nearby was fascinating.

Housed in a desanctified 14^th-Century church that was severely damaged in the 1755 Lisbon earthquake that devastated the city, the museum displays many findings from paleolithic times, excavated from a site near Lisbon, and also an impressive collection of pieces from all periods of Portuguese history.

The roofless nave has a series of tombs, fountains, windows and other architectural relics from different places and styles. The one shown here, the gravestone of Yehudah ben Rimok, from the 19^th Century, particularly interested us. As did a second stone, marking the founding of the Porto Jewish community in the 14^th Century.

The museum also offered an interesting video, explaining how, in 1995, a plan to flood the valley in which the recently uncovered paleolithic settlement lies was thwarted by a group of schoolchildren who led sit-down protests and eventually persuaded António Guterres, then prime minister, to reverse the government’s plan and build a museum on the site.

Finally, we watched a well-produced audio-visual display, projected onto, and incorporating the features of, an original vaulted wall. This traced the history of the church, including an account of the earthquake and the story of the establishment of the museum.

From there, it was a short walk to a much better vantage point, affording a panoramic view of the city, and then to a vegan restaurant offering an all-you-can-eat buffet that was not only a bargain but also very tasty. We walked off lunch by making our way to a bizarre street-art comic-strip mural of the history of Lisbon, painted on an underpass and boasting, at its centre, a public lavatory that was, by Portuguese standards, less than salubrious. (Public facilities in Portugal are, in our experience, spotlessly clean and well-appointed.)

This was followed by a long walk that was, finally, downhill, and that took us past a pizza parlour with an eye-catching placard.

We ended up where we had started, at the large square on the front, from where we caught a bus back to the Edward VII Park opposite our hotel.

This park was renamed to commemorate the visit to Lisbon by the King of England in 1903 to reinforce the ancient Portuguese-English alliance. Unfortunately, the bus dropped us at the far end of the park, which was, naturally, downhill from our hotel. A further long walk led us to a huge greenhouse, where we spent a magical hour or so forgetting that we were in the centre of a bustling city.

By the time we boarded the coach back to Castelo Branco, we were very glad to sit down, and by the time we parked outside the house, at 10:30, we were more than ready for bed. However, the whole family agreed that it had been an enjoyable and productive break. Next stop, we all agree, should be Porto, possibly at a sunnier time of year.

This week’s post was almost fully mapped out in my mind. I planned to tell you about the kids’ experience at the Israeli embassy in Lisbon, and about our family city break.

That I can’t devote this week’s post to that story is something that, I imagine, needs no explanation. I hope, and pray, that next week I will be able to cover those topics. However, since I cannot know what new depths of obscenity will have been plumbed by then, I cannot, sadly, be certain.

What I do know is that there is – there can be – only one topic to address this week, although how to cover it I have no idea.

As the events of last Thursday unfolded, we were given the opportunity to better understand our own, and others’, humanity. Was there a point at which you stood speechless in horror, or broke down in tears, at the barbarism that was revealed in stages?

Was it perhaps the sight of masked, armed Hamas monsters ‘ceremoniously’ carrying the coffins of the Bibas’ children? Or when forensic investigation revealed, as the Hamas barbarians knew it would, that the body in the third coffin was not that of the children’s mother, Shiri, but that of an anonymous Palestinian woman? Or when, having claimed that the chaos of the destruction left by the Israeli bombing that, they alleged, killed the Bibas family had led to the ‘confusion’ over bodies, the savages effortlessly handed over Shiri’s body? Or perhaps when the Israeli authorities announced that the autopsies had further revealed that the children, and their mother, were all killed by the animals’ bare hands, many months ago?

I find myself wondering whether there was such a moment for the Hamas apologists who have been marching in Western capitals, tearing down posters of hostages and terrorising Jewish students on campus. Or whether their antisemitism has removed them, like the Hamas beasts they extol, from the human race. Because killing a baby with your bare hands is not the act of a political activist; it is not an anti-Zionist act; it is pure antisemitism. And failing to be horrified by that act, but rather applauding it, is, equally, antisemitism. More than that: the act, and its celebration, place the perpetrator, and the celebrator, beyond the pale of humanity.

I urge you all to keep track of the reactions, and lack of reactions, of the world’s leaders. Last Thursday, Hamas removed the last traces of any fence that any thinking human being might have believed it was possible to sit on. Those who don’t come down with a statement on one side or the other must have their silence interpreted as consent for the actions of Hamas. They will, of course, not be held accountable for the consequences of their silence and inaction, but you, dear reader, we, dear reader, must make a mental note.

One more set of questions: Was your mounting horror matched by mounting disbelief or incomprehension? To put it more bluntly, did anything in this entire horrible story surprise you? If so, I’m afraid you haven’t been paying attention over the last 16 months, 75 years, 96 years. Our enemies have rarely felt the need to conceal their true beliefs and colours.

To believe that Hamas would negotiate any agreement honestly and honourably shows astonishing naiveté. I have maintained since the very beginning of the war that there is no sense in which Hamas’s interests are served by returning all the hostages. The hostages represent a lever with which Hamas can hope to tear Israeli society apart. This has not changed.

The Israeli Government announced two war aims: the complete destruction of Hamas as a military force and the return of all the captives. It must by now be clear to everyone that neither of those two aims is achievable. Hamas could only be destroyed as a military force if every man woman and child in the West Bank and Gaza were killed. There is no way in which all the captives can be returned, other than the cutting off of all humanitarian aid to Gaza, leading to the collapse of the lighting, heating and ventilation systems of the tunnels, followed by the reoccupation of Gaza and the retrieval of what would, by then, be the bodies of the hostages.

Hamas’s trump card is the knowledge they gained in the agricultural fields of the kibbutzim of the Gaza envelope where the Hamas spies worked for decades, in the cars of Israeli Jewish volunteers who ferried Gazan cancer victims to Israeli hospitals for treatment, in the prisons of Israel where Hamas leaders served long sentences. This is the knowledge that Israel will never act with the institutional inhumanity that Hamas and the Gazans have demonstrated. This conflict is being played out on a very uneven playing field. Existentially hard as this makes it for Israel, there is surely no way in which we would have it any different. If Israel were to act with the inhumanity of Hamas, it would have no more right to continue to have a state in Eretz Yisrael than Hamas has to demand one.

It’s now only Sunday afternoon, but (for reasons that will become clear later) I don’t expect to have another chance to write this post before Tuesday, so I’m seizing the opportunity while both boys watch their videos.

I left you last week as we were anticipating the “ungodly hour” at which the boys would come bursting in to greet us on Tuesday morning. In fact, 6:30 is a pretty godly hour, particularly if your body actually thinks the time is 8:30. So, no real complaints there. In fact, no complaints at all anywhere. We’re now at the end of a first wonderful, if, as usual, routinely mundane, week.

Perhaps the first thing to say is, when you are only two-and-a-half, or, to be honest, even when you are very nearly six, ten-and-a-half weeks is a long time. We had only been away from Penamacor for less than eleven weeks, but neither Ollie, not even Tao, had wasted that time. Tao seems more socially engaged than when we were last here; conversations with him are that little bit more adult, and, most noticeably, he now seems much more comfortable speaking Hebrew to Tslil than when we left. He was quite capable of speaking to her in Hebrew, but, in the past, usually preferred to answer her in English, which is still definitely his first language, even though she always speaks to him in Hebrew.

Micha’el has, in the last few months, begun speaking to the boys in Hebrew one day a week, and perhaps that has helped to tip Tao over. Tao now goes to his Portuguese-speaking gan two days a week. On the second day, there is a different mix of children, and his friends include an Israeli girl who speaks no English and English friends who speak no Hebrew. Tao, according to Micha’el, feels very comfortable translating both ways for these friends.

As for Ollie, we left him speaking fairly freely, and we have returned to find him incapable of stopping speaking. He seems equally comfortable in English with Micha’el and in Hebrew with Tslil, and, when not conversing with them or us, he is still always speaking. In these situations, if you ask him what he said, he informs you in no uncertain terms: “I’m talking to my friend”, who is none the worse for being imaginary.

Whereas last time Ollie wanted us to read his book of nursery rhymes and songs incessantly, he has not asked for it once since we arrived this time. This may be because he has now committed many of the songs to memory, and so has effectively cut out the middle man. Instead, our first full day here consisted of Ollie “doing my puzzles”, a half-a-dozen jigsaw puzzles of increasing difficulty which he has fully mastered, and reading “Little Blue Truck”, a charming and heartwarming story about the importance of friendship, even if it does lose a little of its charm on the fifteenth reading.

Ollie also enjoys playing doctor, with the kids’ doctor’s bag (a really nice set of wooden props) and his doctor’s hat. This requires a volunteer patient lying down on the couch – this is the kind of role play I can really get into – and telling the doctor what is wrong. Whatever the complaint, the treatment often turns out to be trimming the patient’s fingernails, which proves to be a remarkably effective cure.

The highlight of the doctor’s visit, as far as I am concerned, comes just before he arrives. He goes to the entrance hall and waits for a phone call from the patient asking him to pay a house call. Then, as he walks across the salon, bag in hand, he doo-dee-doo’s a cheery doctor’s tune That is utterly convincing and, I imagine, was picked up from his father (possibly via his big brother).

If Ollie’s make-believe play is often limited to playing doctor, and is within fairly narrow constraints of flexibility, Tao’s imaginative play knows no bounds. As requested, two of the gifts we brought this time were Purim (and Halloween) costumes for the boys: for Ollie, a dinosaur (which, if he persists in calling it a crocodile, I may consider taking back), and for Tao, an impressive Batman costume. We gave them these costumes on Friday lunchtime, as Shabbat gifts, and, since then, they have barely taken them off.

While Ollie is capable of wearing his costume but still remaining Ollie, Tao has actually been Batman since Friday lunchtime. He was invited to a birthday party today, and the guests were asked to come in costume. I suggested to Tao that he should really wear everyday clothes, since Batman was no longer a costume for him, but rather what he wears normally. He was, unsurprisingly, not amused. He has, by now, got used to the fact that “Grandpa is being silly”.

We have also had a chance, in this first week, to catch up with Micha’el and Tslil’s plans to launch their bodyweight training gym. Everything seems to be going well as they get ever closer to launch. Micha’el is currently wrestling with the challenges of setting up an interactive website that will offer a very positive and supportive customer experience. In addition, they have bought the modest equipment that a bodyweight gym requires, and, last week, they took all of the equipment to their initial premises, for a video-shoot, to provide video and stills for the website. You may remember that I mentioned that the local municipality is offering them premises rent-free for a three-month initial period. All went well with the shoot, and, of course, Nana and Grandpa got the boys all to ourselves for a few hours.

This week will be a big change from routine. In the ongoing struggle to register Ollie’s birth with the Israeli authorities, and to renew their passports, the kids have made another appointment with the Israeli embassy in Lisbon, scheduled for Wednesday morning. Since the boys both need to attend in person, we all agreed that this sounded like an excellent excuse for a city break. So, tomorrow (Monday) morning, Tslil, the boys, Bernice and myself are driving the 40 minutes to Castelo Branco, to catch the bus for a two-hour-and-twenty-minute trip to Lisbon. Micha’el, who has to teach several lessons, will come by train from Castelo in the evening.

We are booked into a hotel in the centre of Lisbon for Monday and Tuesday night. This will give us a whole day free in Lisbon on Tuesday. Micha’el and Tslil plan to visit a gym, to enjoy its facilities and to carry out research. This, of course, means they can claim the entrance fee as a business expense. Bernice and I will be able to have fun, meanwhile, with our grandsons.

On Wednesday, Bernice and I will have the city to ourselves for an unspecified time. Whenever the kids and grandkids finish at the embassy, we will meet up again and have, we hope, a few hours before we make our way back to Castelo, pick up the car and truck, and make our weary way home. I think we are all very much looking forward to the adventure.

Well, I can hear that the video time has finished, and we need to start thinking about what we are going to pack for our mini-break, so I will stop there and wish us all that we hear good news. (Being away from the pressure cooker that is life in Israel is, in some senses, a welcome relief, and, in others, not easy.)

Once again, I write to you with my knees jammed against my chest, from the comfort of El Al Economy, as Bernice and I make our way across the Mediterranean to Lisbon.

Actually, we’re quite relieved that Bernice is sitting in her window seat, because, for a brief period yesterday, it was touch and go whether she would be sitting there, or, indeed, anywhere on the plane. At 1:45 yesterday afternoon, an email from El Al dropped into my inbox, informing me that I could now check in online for today’s flight. All went smoothly until it came to filling in Bernice’s passport details, when I noticed – goodness knows how, but how fortunate that I did – that I had made the booking for a Mrs Bernice Browmnstein, with a rogue interloper ‘m’.

Pausing only to panic fleetingly, I attempted to amend the spelling. However, this proved impossible. I realised that I had to get the ticket reissued under Bernice’s correct name, as it appears on her passport. A link on the check-in page opened a WhatsApp dialog for me, allowing me to bang my head against a brick bot, who offered me a generous menu to choose from. Unfortunately, ‘Correct a Misspelled Name’ was not one of the options.

When I attempted to explain to the bot what I needed, it chastised me for an unrecognisable response, and gaily repeated its list of options. Eventually, I accepted defeat, and chose the closest option to what I wanted: ‘Cancel your booking’. I must admit that I chose this with a certain amount of trepidation, fearing that the bot might take me at my word and blithely cancel our booking and then ask whether there was anything else it could help me with today.

Fortunately, it chose instead to inform me that cancellation was, as it were, above its payscale, and it was transferring me to a human agent. A follow-up message informed me that my request was being queued and the agent would strike up a conversation as soon as possible.

I decided that it was worth opening an assault on a second front, since the clock was ticking, so I phoned El Al’s customer support service. After I had made a ‘fairly close’ selection from another menu that didn’t offer me what I wanted, I heard the usual three rings, followed by muzak, followed by a message informing me that I was 40^th in the queue, and the waiting time was estimated to be 30 minutes. A minute later, I was offered the option to request a callback and hang up. I accepted the offer, only to be informed, after my acceptance was accepted, that my call would be returned within 24 hours. Since that window potentially took us beyond our departure time, I decided that call back was not such an attractive option, and immediately called again, to discover bad and good news: I was now 44^th in the queue, but the waiting time was still only 30 minutes. Clearly, I thought, a new shift of agents had started, who were some 10% more efficient than the workers they had replaced.

Over the next 20 minutes, I received repeated updates, as my place in the queue progressed healthily from 44 to 40, then 36, then 32. However, slightly less healthily, the expected waiting time remained constant at 30 minutes, and I began to realise that this was not quite as sophisticated an algorithm as I had at first imagined.

It was, therefore, a very pleasant surprise when, 20 minutes in, a very pleasant gentleman answered the phone, immediately understood my problem, saw the error online, asked me to email him a photo of Bernice’s passport, and confirmed that he had requested a reissuing of the ticket. 50 minutes later, he called me again, to inform me that the ticket had been reissued with the spelling corrected, and I could now check in, which I did, with much relief. It would have been such a pain to have to unpack the suitcases just to take out the two items Bernice was taking with for herself.

I am taking this whole experience as an indication that I have become a little too blasé about international travel, and I need to be rather more in the moment when making arrangements in future.

Needless to say, all of this excitement got the adrenaline flowing, and helped us through the last stages of working through our checklist for Portugal. Since we were flying on a Monday, we had many last-minute things to do on Sunday. This was even truer than usual, since this last Shabbat was my brother-in-law David’s 80^th birthday, and the family celebrations had stretched from 11AM on Friday till after Shabbat. By the time we arrived home we were all partied out and not really up to confronting the checklist.

So, Sunday was quite a busy day! However, we managed to get everything done. We found ourselves left with little enough excess fruit to make the bag we hung on our neighbour’s front door not embarrassingly large. All the other leftovers fitted comfortably in the freezer. This morning, virtually all we had left to do was to wash up the breakfast dishes BY HAND(!), empty all the bins, remember to transfer the 2 kilo of cheese from the freezer to the suitcases (a mantra we had been chanting for over a day) and close all the doors.

Our taxi driver arrived five minutes early, as always, and, since he had allowed a generous amount of time to get to the airport, and we had allowed our usual ludicrous amount of time at the airport before boarding, Bernice remained perfectly calm throughout the drive, which was through fairly heavy traffic. This trip, for the first time, we decided to take a taxi from home to the airport, rather than to Jerusalem train station. We have eventually accepted the fact that struggling to lift two cases, two carry-ons and two backpacks onto the security scanner at the railway station and then down an escalator and a lift to the platform is not a dignified way for people our age to behave.

The airport was uncannily quiet when we arrived at 10AM. (For those of you who don’t know, Ben Gurion is usually a buzzing hive of activity at almost any time of day or night.) Our driver dropped us off at 9:57, and we were through security, baggage drop off, hand luggage check and passport control by 10:27. The longest queue was, unsurprisingly, at duty free, where we picked up our usual four bottles of wine, one for each of the next four Shabbatot. Fortunately, the usual 1+1 offer meant that we paid no more than we would have done in our local supermarket or vintner’s.)

Finally, time for a confession. I led you to believe that I was writing this post on the plane. This was because I fully expected to be writing the bulk of it there. However, as mentioned above, we were through all of the various stages of reaching the departure lounge unusually quickly, only to discover that the café Aroma has indeed closed at the airport. This left me with enough time to write this entire post before our flight is even called. In fact, it has just been called now, so….see you in Penamacor.

Hello from Penamacor. It’s now 10:45 on Monday evening (or 12:45 in real money), and we arrived at the house half an hour ago after a very easy and smooth passage through the airport at Lisbon, a very swift car pick-up, and an easy drive through a clear and dry evening. As always, the last 35 kilometres, on winding back-roads, was tiring, but we arrived in good shape and better spirits to a warm welcome from Tslil, Micha’el and Lua. Now it’s straight to bed, ready to face the onslaught from the boys at some ungodly hour tomorrow morning. Can’t wait!!

When looking for a petri dish in which to develop philosophical arguments, I don’t automatically turn to the annual media awards season, but this year these awards are proving to be a fertile breeding ground. I thought we might ponder a few questions together.

Is it theoretically possible for an actor to win the award for best actor and best actress for the same film? As you probably know, unless you have been on a space station for the last couple of months, the musical (if that’s the word I’m looking for) Emilia Pérez has been taking the movie world by storm. It has so far garnered 87 wins and 225 nominations.

(There is an entire blog to be written exploring the reasons why it has attracted this almost record-equalling amount of recognition. It is difficult to escape the suspicion that no small part of this is the motion picture industry raising its collective middle finger to the 47^th president of the United States.)

The 87 awards include the following wins: Cannes Jury Prize; European Film award for best actress and best director; Satellite award for best original score; Cannes Film Festival award for best actress (won jointly by four people – in what universe does that make sense?); Golden Globe award for best foreign language film. The film has also been nominated for 13 Oscars, including best picture, best director and best actress.

It has also garnered more outraged attention than any other film this season. It raises questions about the ‘appropriation’ by outsiders of another culture’s concerns and issues. The French director Jaques Audiard freely admits that he had no interest in making the film ‘realistic’ in its cultural depictions. Many Mexicans are apparently up in arms about the perceived ‘shallowness’ of the film’s handling of the problems of drug cartel violence and the mass disappearance of citizens, as well as about the Mexican accents.

My personal outrage is reserved more for the staggering and laughable inanity of one of the non-Spanish language songs in the film. (Thanks to my good friend for pointing me towards this song.) If you haven’t yet seen the clip featuring the song Vaginoplasty, I recommend you pour yourself a stiff drink, sit down, and watch this excerpt. Before you do, let me give you the plot background. The female singer is a lawyer who has been hired by a Mexican drug cartel lord to discreetly arrange for him to transition to a woman, which will enable him both to ‘disappear’ and to finally become his (her) true self. Now you are as ready as I can make you for the song. Off you go. I’ll wait here for you.

It’s difficult to single out one element for particular attention here, given that the tune sounds like something my five-year-old grandson just improvised and the staging makes no sense at all. But I think, after watching it, you will agree that the lyric deserves a special mention, being both fatuous and repetitive, in addition to not answering the ostensible dramatic trigger for the song (the lawyer learns neither the risks involved in the transition surgery process nor the time needed) and neither scanning nor rhyming.

Blogger’s Note: For reasons that will become clear, in the following paragraphs, I follow the practice that became common in the 2000s, of using ‘actor’ as a gender-neutral term applicable to thespians of both sexes.

But I didn’t bring you here to weep at what musicals have come to, but rather to reflect on the fact that the film’s Oscar nominee for best actress is Karla Sofía Gascón, a Spanish actor. I invite you to watch Karla’s acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, here. Karla was previously Carlos Gascon, a Spanish actor. I’m including a photo of Carlos from 2015.

So, our first philosophical question is this. Suppose there is a remake of Emilia Pérez whose pre-transition scenes are filmed with a male actor playing the part of the drug lord, and whose post-transition scenes are filmed with the same actor, after the actor has, in real life, transitioned to a female. Is it theoretically possible for this actor to be nominated for both the best actor and the best actress awards? If the actor wins both awards, is the best actor Oscar considered to have been awarded posthumously, or can the actor themself collect it? (Asking for a friend.)

Speaking of raising the dead, the Grammy award ceremony just took place, and featured another interesting philosophical question. Winner of the Best Rock Performance was Now and Then, a song written by John Lennon and featuring The Beatles. Our philosophical question is: What constitutes a performance in the arts?

Again, for those who’ve been on the space station, here’s the back story. John Lennon wrote Now and Then, and recorded it as a solo home demo, in 1977. After his death in 1980, the song was considered as a ‘reunion’ single for the 1995-6 retrospective project The Beatles Anthology. George Harrison added some guitar tracks and overdubs as part of this. However, production difficulties proved too great, and the idea was shelved. In 2021 (20 years after George Harrison died), Peter Jackson commissioned machine-learning-assisted audio restoration technology for his documentary The Beatles: Get Back. This technology enabled extraction of Lennon’s voice from the 1977 demo, with a result that was of sufficiently high quality to make it possible to build a recording of Now and Then around it, with additional lyrics by Paul McCartney, featuring contributions on guitar, drum and vocals by Ringo Starr and a beautiful(?) creepy(?) eerie(?) evocative(?) video. You can watch and hear it here.

This ‘assemblage’ has now been awarded Performance of the Year by the Grammys. If one of the performers recorded his contribution over 47 years ago, another added his contribution 30 years ago, and only the other two were performing while hearing, and, in some sense, feeding off, the contributions of John and George, is that, technically, a ‘performance, by The Beatles’? Is the voice of John that we hear on the recording actually John’s voice? Is it less John’s voice than any recording of a singer is that singer’s voice? Does any of this matter?

Which brings us neatly back to this year’s Oscars. Another contender for best film is The Brutalist, a biopic of a fictional Hungarian Jewish architect who emigrates to the USA after the Shoah. It was recently revealed that, for sequences in which the film’s leading actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones speak Hungarian, the film’s editor (himself Hungarian-born) used AI software produced by a company called Respeecher to tweak the actors’ vowel sounds, making them sound convincingly Hungarian.

The outrage this has generated appears to be because the filmmakers were not up-front about this tweak. In films in which similar techniques have been used openly, no such outrage has resulted. In the case of The Brutalist, there has been debate about whether the leading actors should now be eligible for acting Oscars. (Brody and Jones have been nominated for best actor and best supporting actress, respectively. [Blogger’s note: I was going to write “respectively, obviously”, but, in the light of this week’s first story, not as much can be taken foir granted as used to be the case.)

There is a philosophical debate to be had here about the particular point, if any, at which such tweaking of a performance makes the actor ineligible. Suppose Hugh Grant’s voice were to be digitally manipulated to simulate a perfect Lower East Side accent for a role. Suppose 5’ 6” (168 cm) -tall Alan Ladd were given an orange crate to stand on for close-up scenes with his leading lady, or a trench were dug for her to stand in (as, apparently, happened). Suppose all of Matt Damon’s stunts in the Bourne films were performed by a double. Suppose each of an actor’s scenes in a particular film were spliced together in the editing room from hundreds of different takes of each scene. Suppose an actor’s physical appearance on screen were digitally manipulated, to express emotion or to convey complexity through body-language. Is there a point at which such manipulation renders it meaningless to talk about the actor’s performance, or, at every point in the development of cinema, does whatever is technically possible become acceptable?

At this point, I should probably make it clear that, this week at least, I offer questions rather than answers. I’m really not sure where I stand on any of this, but I strongly suspect that these are discussions we will increasingly be having, as technology develops.

All I know for sure is that, based on Karla Sofía Gascón’s appearance and demeanour at the Golden Globes, I found excellent her/his/their portrayal of a woman in the brief clips I have seen from Emilia Pérez after the drug lord undergoes surgery. But that’s really another story.

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.