I am writing this on Sunday morning. Since Tuesday is chag again, the plan is to publish this post on Monday (again). This will be the third week running that I have published on a Monday. There is a strong Jewish tradition that, if something is repeated three times (or, more accurately, for the pedants among you – and I promise you I know who you are – if something is done once and then repeated twice), then it acquires the status of a custom and should be observed in perpetuity.

I am very tempted to follow the tradition in this case, for a couple of reasons. First, provided that nothing untoward happens between now and then, next Tuesday morning at 9AM (standard posting time) will find me in Portugal, where it will be Tuesday morning at 7AM. I expect to be in one of two conditions at that time.

I might be sleeping off the effects of my (estimated) 22-hour Monday that will, I hope, start with a 45-minute walk in Maale Adumim at 6AM and end with a three-and-a-quarter hour drive from Lisbon airport, arriving in Penamacor around 1:45AM local time on Tuesday. Or I just might be downstairs playing with, or more likely reading to, Tao. Either way, a post will not be the first thing on my mind. It is therefore almost certainly safer to post on Monday morning, before all the big events of the day, and the coming month, begin.

An additional reason for publishing on Mondays is that every week, just before I post, I check how many people read my previous blog. Until now, I have done this by adding the number of visitors each day in the previous Tuesday–Monday period. However, since the software I use to write and publish my blog starts its week on Monday, if I switch to publishing on Monday I will be able to switch to view the visitor stats in a weekly display rather than a daily display, and avoid the need to do all those sums. Or, if I feel that I ought to keep doing the mental arithmetic to stave off Alzheimer’s, I will at least be able to check the accuracy of my calculations.

All of which is merely a preamble to the official announcement that:

Henceforward (if we don’t dig these words out every now and again from the dusty recesses of our thesauruses, they will go rusty on us), Penamacorrespondent publication day will be Monday, and not, as heretofore, Tuesday.

By the way, the morning synagogue service on Monday (which is Hoshana Raba) is particularly long. By dint of having led prayers three times on Hoshana Raba – see my opening paragraph above – I appear to have become the traditional leader of prayer on Hoshana Raba in my shul. Since I am not noted as one of the speedier leaders of prayer, we will be finishing fairly late on Monday morning, and so I doubt that I will publish on the dot of 9AM. I’m aiming for 10AM.

Unsurprisingly, at a time of year in the Hebrew calendar that is packed full of traditions, my thoughts have been turning, over the last few weeks, to the power of tradition. I have just reread what I wrote on this subject two weeks ago, and, if you will indulge me, I wanted, this week, to reflect further on the power of tradition.

In my previous reflection on this subject, I spoke about the mechanical act of executing a mitzvah, and the conscious intent in fulfilling it. On the surface, tradition seems to be much more about the first than the second. This seems particularly true if, over the generations, understanding and explanation fade, and only the rote tradition remains. It is easy to find both common and exceptional examples of this, sometimes within the very same mitzvah.

Take, for example, the practice of lighting candles on Friday night. Today, throughout the world, millions of Jewish families do not observe the bulk of the commandments, nor even most of the commandments relating to Shabbat. Nevertheless, in many of these same families, the mother will light candles every Friday evening. After their meal, family members may then watch television, or go out to the club with friends. They may not even eat a meal together first. But the mother will still light candles.

There are even, as I mentioned in a previous post, some families in Portugal in which the mother, completely unaware of her Jewish heritage, has maintained the tradition of lighting candles in the basement every Friday night, a tradition handed down from mother to daughter from the time in the late 15^th Century when those Portuguese Jews who were not prepared to leave either their home or their religion became anusim – clandestine Jews.

I find myself unwilling to accept that even this kind of candle-lighting is merely mechanical, a rote action devoid of any deeper meaning. It seems to me that traditions absorb something of the conscious intentionality of the originators of the tradition. Tradition takes on a resonance of its own, reflecting the originally fully understood significance of the tradition. This resonance remains, even after the significance is forgotten.

Traditions, I feel, exist, in Jewish religious life, both to reinforce the understander’s conviction and to act as a substitute for understanding in the ignorant. Whenever a Jewish man recites a prayer, even if he is only parroting it without any understanding, or a Jewish woman chooses to hear the shofar, even if she knows nothing of its symbolic significance, the performance of the tradition allows the performer to feel deep within herself the echo of that resonance.

At first sight, tradition looks very much like blind execution, but its resonance, I believe, can sometimes add something that sounds, looks and feels more like fulfilment. Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, in his theologian’s analysis of execution and fulfilment, made a very clear distinction between the two. However, in the heart of the follower of the tradition, this distinction may be less clear.

Traditions, then, may be the strongest remaining point of contact a particular Jew has with his religious heritage. They may also be one of the aids an observant Jew uses to move from ‘mere’ execution to more meaningful fulfilment. Either way, if you are looking  for a way to explain to an interested non-Jew the relationship between Jews and their religion, buying them a ticket to Fiddler on the Roof remains a pretty painless, but not inaccurate, introduction.

Meanwhile, under the guidance of Tao, Bernice and I seem to be creating our very own traditions. Our weekly WhatsApp video calls have now reached the point where Tao shoos Micha’el away, and we and he enjoy up to an hour of story-time and action songs. We are normally sitting in the salon, but last week, since it was sukkot and since the weather was cooler when we called, we were in our sukkah. As soon as Tao saw us, his face dropped. ‘Outside?’ he declared. ‘Salon! Books!’

We were eventually able to reassure him that reading need not be exclusively an indoor activity, and, as this screenshot from the story-time shows, he was soon, as always, completely absorbed in, and delighted by, what we were reading.

The experience demonstrated that, even at this young age, he clearly has a healthy respect for tradition. I couldn’t be more thrilled, speaking as someone who revels in a variety of British traditions, even those I have never actually particpated in. I bring you, as a parting shot (across the bows, in all probability) that extraordinary celebration of perhaps the most jingoistic extolling of all that we used to know was great and good (but now that we have been ‘woked’ up we are required to realise was despicable and bad) about the British Empire.

Ladies and gentleman, you are invited to wallow in (or, alternatively, stagger in shocked amazement at) the 2009 version of the closing concert of the BBC Promenade Concerts (The Last Night of the Proms): more specifically, Land of Hope and Glory, containing the immortal sentiment: ‘God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet’. If you’ve got it, flaunt it (or, in England’s case, flaunt it even when you no longer have it). If you are a snowflake, consider yourself to have been trigger-warned.