There must be something about this time of year that affects me strangely. Looking back, I see that at the end of October, almost three years ago, I offered you a pot-pourri post entitled A Healthy Portion of Salmagundi. 51 weeks later, I proferred A Modest Helping of Gallimaufry. I find myself having to resort to the same cheap trick today. I thought the least I could do is find a different dish this time, and so I offer you an olla podrida.

In the 16th century, while Middle-French speaking cooks were cooking up a gallimaufry, which is a meat stew, a hash of various kinds of meat, Bartolomeo Scappi, the cook of Pope Pius V, was preparing a Spanish stew, usually made with chickpeas or beans, assorted meats like pork, beef, bacon, partridge, chicken, ham, and sausage, and vegetables such as carrots, leeks, cabbage, potatoes, and onions. The recipe can be found in Scappi’s Opera dell’arte del cucinare (A Work on the Art of Cooking), published in 1570. This week’s dish is called olla podrida. The literal translation of this is apparently “rotten pot”, but podrida is probably a version of the original word poderida, so it could be translated as “powerful pot”. What this post threatens to be is a similar collection of a number of stray thoughts that, after a strange last couple of days, are all that I can manage to dredge up. I apologise in advance for the lack of internal cohesion – and possibly interest – but the fact remains that some weeks this blog virtually writes itself, and other times it….doesn’t. I leave it to you to decide whether the result is rotten, or powerful. I know that I can expect from at least some readers rather less obsequiousness than the curate displayed, and a good job too, on balance.

Well, there we are. Over 300 words already (of which about 100 are copy-pasted from the post two years ago) and I still haven’t said anything. So, let’s get to it.

I’m planning to avoid talking about current affairs as far as possible, but I hope you will allow me two observations. The first is that many of the Hassan Nasrallah obituaries offered in the mainstream media beggar belief. For the Washington Post, Nasrallah was “a moral compass” (always pointing due South, presumably) and “father figure”. (Not everybody, clearly, had an idyllic childhood). The New York Times noted that he “created a state within a state that provided social services”, without drawing attention to the extent to which he was personally responsible for creating the conditions within Lebanon that made such provision necessary.

My second observation concerns another terrorist, killed in another airstrike in Lebanon on Monday. This was Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, the co-ordinator of Hamas activities in Lebanon. He was also, according to Arab media reports, the principal of the UNRWA-run Deir Yassin Secondary School in El-Buss, and, additionally, head of the UNRWA teachers’ union in Lebanon, overseeing 39,000 students in 65 schools.

You may think that UNRWA could be accused of turning a blind eye to a potential conflict of interests here. However, UN Watch highlighted early in the year his involvement with UNRWA. According to UNRWA, Abu el-Amin was suspended without pay in March for three months for violating regulations and was investigated over his political activities. I infer from this that in June he was reinstated. For my money, UNRWA ignoring the facts that UN Watch highlighted early in the year would have been less outrageous than them suspending and then reinstating him.

Enough of these world affairs. You’re all doubtless wondering what was strange about my last couple of days. The fact is that I woke up on Shabbat morning to discover that I could not put my right foot down without suffering excruciating pain in metatarsals 4 and 5. It’s fair to say that I’ve got through 74½ years giving not a thought to metatarsals 4 and 5 (nor, to be honest, to 1, 2 or 3). I vow never to take them for granted again. I spent Shabbat and early Sunday morning with my feet up, keeping walking to a strict minimum, armed with my late mother-in-law’s trusty walking stick, and very tentative.

On Sunday morning, Bernice had to abandon the first two assaults of her planned military campaign to conquer the preparations for the Rosh Hashana-Shabbat three-day festival of eating that awaits us starting Wednesday night, in order to, first, drive me to the doctor’s surgery, then pick me up and go to the pharmacy to pick up the prescribed meds. The doctor suspected gout (as my friend and gout-sufferer had diagnosed on Shabbat), but was also not prepared to rule out an infection. After consultation with the Health Fund’s chief pharmacologist over potential contra-indications, the doctor contacted me later in the day with a different pain-killer prescription, and Bernice had to make yet another expedition to the pharmacy. In addition, of course, I was completely helpless when it came to setting up or clearing away from meals, and so everything fell on Bernice. She always says she has no patience with patients, but you probably believe her no more than I do.

By this morning, the excruciating pain had diminished to a very dull ache, so I was able to drive myself to the surgery for a bank of blood tests. By this afternoon, the results were in, and, in a brief WhatsApp exchange, the doctor was able to confirm our analysis that it is, apparently, gout and an infection. (As I wrote to him: “That’s how we read it, but it’s very good to have it confirmed by someone who knows what they’re talking about.”) All of the prescribed medication is working its magic, and I am, once again, full of praise for our excellent health system, our efficient health fund, and, best of all, our tireless family doctor, who, having asked me, yesterday, to WhatsApp him today (Monday) to let him know how I felt, ended up beating me to it and WhatsApping me as soon as he saw the results..

All of this means that I will be on antibiotics on first day Rosh Hashana, and therefore possibly prohibited from drinking wine. I still have to pluck up the courage to ask my doctor. Or perhaps, having just asked Dr Google about “antibiotics and alcohol”, I won’t ask any kitbag questions, as they are referred to in Hebrew.

Which brings us to beer. As you may know, I brew my own, buying my supplies from an establishment in downtown Jerusalem that has an excellent range of craft beers and has always provided a very good service in providing supplies for home brewing. A couple of years ago, they stopped offering a drop-in service, and instead required customers to email their order a day before they came to pick it up. This worked fine, until it didn’t. A month or so ago, I decided to brew a batch so that it would be ready to drink for the chagim. I emailed in my order, and, although I was mildly surprised not to receive an acknowledgement, I wasn’t worried. The next day, we were in central Jerusalem, and swung by the supplier to pick up the order.

When we arrived, the bar looked to be in the middle of renovations, and a rather surprised manager casually told me that they no longer supply raw materials for home-brewing. I pointed out that their website made no mention of this, and still offered the email address. He was completely unmoved by this. He told me they had stopped several months ago, and asked when I last placed an order. I told him it had been several months, and he said: “Well, there you are. That’s why we stopped the business. What did you expect?” I felt it was a little unfair to lay the failure of the business at my feet; I can’t believe that a man in his seventies drinking largely alone ever represented their core business. However, I wasn’t in the mood for what would anyway be a pointless argument, so I just left.

A couple of hours scanning the internet revealed no suppliers closer than Tel Aviv or Rishon Lezion, and, annoyingly, nowhere on the way to, or fairly close to, Zichron Yaakov. However, there were online suppliers, and it was very easy to place an order online, which duly arrived two days later. When I unpacked the order, I found all the ingredients I had ordered, plus a bag of dry malt grain which was not part of the recipe…but no yeast. Although this is a small bag with only 10 grams of yeast, it’s the yeast that works a lot of the magic. Without it, my 19 gallons of wort would basically be grain and malt cordial.

I emailed the supplier, explaining my problem, and, the following day, I received, by courier, a 10-gram bag of yeast, wrapped lovingly in a cushioned bag. I duly made my wort, sealed it in the vat, with the water-vent inserted for the air released by the yeast (which is basically the yeast breaking wind after it has consumed the sugars in the malt extract). Then comes the waiting, sometimes for just 12 hours, more often for 24-36 hours, until the bubbling starts. It then increases in frequency, from one burp every four minutes to virtually continuously, until, after a week or two, a hydrometer reading shows that the specific gravity of the wort has reduced from around 1.048 to 1.012, (1.0 is the specific gravity of water.) This means that three quarters of the sugar has been converted to alcohol, yielding a beer of about 4.5% strength, which is plenty for me.

Only this time it didn’t. I caught an occasional break of wind, but it never increased in frequency; it was always 4 or 5 minutes between each incident. I waited a week, two weeks, three weeks. Eventually today I decided to take a hydrometer reading, and discovered that the specific gravity had dropped from 1.047 to 1.013, which represents about 4% alcohol. All I can imagine is that an imperfection has developed in the hermetic seal of the plastic vat, and air has been escaping under the lid. So, I somehow have to find time to bottle the beer (a 3-hour process).

I would ideally like to do this tonight, so that the beer will be ready for me to enjoy and offer guests on Sukkot. However, it is already almost 9pm and I still haven’t finished this blog. Tomorrow we are in Zichron all day, and by the time we get home we will not really be ready for a full-scale bottling exercise. Wednesday is Erev Rosh Hashana, so I’m not even going to consider suggesting to Bernice that we bottle then.

It begins to look as though next Sunday will be B-Day. If the beer matures in the bottle fairly quickly, it will probably be drinkable by Shabbat Hol Hamoed. Nine days after that, we fly to Portugal, where I will spend a month praying that none of the bottles explodes in our absence. (As part of the bottling process, I add a mild sugar syrup to the wort, to encourage a little more conversion to alcohol in the bottle, so as to create effervescence when pouring. If the sugar syrup is not distributed evenly between the bottles, it can cause one to explode. If you have 57 bottles of beer stacked close together on a shelf, and one explodes (the technical term is a bottle bomb)…I leave the rest to your imagination. I have never had it happen, but I have had a bottle fall on the floor as I was stacking them after bottling, and even that is not a pretty sight.

On which note, I will wish you Shana Tova uMetuka – a sweet and happy new year: tova mikodmata – happier than the last one.

The “3D test” of antisemitism is a set of criteria formulated in 2003 by Natan Sharansky in order to distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from antisemitism. The three Ds stand for delegitimization, demonization, and double standards, each of which, according to the test, indicates antisemitism.

Applying this test to what is happening in Britain, it seems clear to me that large sections of the mainstream media, some backbench and some frontbench MPs from the governing Labour Party, and many voices on the street, while attacking Israel, are in fact revealing their antisemitism. To what extent this antisemitism is a consequence of the rise of the far right, the far left, or militant Islamism, is debatable, but that it is the reality today in Britain is, I would argue, an undeniable fact. This is a situation that I see only deteriorating in the future.

At the same time, militant Islamism in Britain is occupied not only with Israel and the Middle East, but also with the political and cultural future of Britain. I fear for the future of British society and, indeed, of Western civilisation.

This was the warning voice that I hoped to capture with my blog today. From the feedback I have received, and some I haven’t, it would appear that I failed in my mission. My fable was presumably insufficiently accurate a parallel of the reality I was seeking to reflect, not a tight enough fit. I was also, as Bernice feared, too caught up in my own apprehension of reality to feel the need to make the metaphor clearer for anyone who was not already consumed by the same fears as I am.

Rest assured that I’ve learnt my lesson. From now on, I will either be explicit or confine myself to trivia. Having established that I’m not Eric Blair, I’ll leave literary allegorical fables to the big boys.

Here’s a story I’ve been hearing and reading versions of repeatedly recently. To be honest, it makes no sense to me, but perhaps you’ll be able to make sense of it.

Once upon a time there was a mine-owner. The coalmine that he owned was a profitable mine, with rich seams that ran not too deep underground and that were wide enough for a man to be able to work them without having to lie down. Not, of course, that the mine-owner worked the mine himself. No: he paid men from the neighbouring village to work for him, and it was they who went underground every day.

The work itself was, naturally, physically demanding, but there were always plenty of men willing to take the job, because the mine brought in a handsome income for the owner, and he, being a fair man, ploughed much of that income back into the business. He paid the miners a more than fair wage. He also took good care of them, providing them with hot-water showering facilities, clothing allowances and subsidised healthcare.

In the long term, the mine was, of course, a killer, with the miners suffering from, and many dying from, lung disease. However, life expectancy in that region was not high anyway, and the miners stoically accepted the risk they took.

A more dramatic risk was of drilling into a pocket of carbon monoxide trapped in the seam; the gas would then escape and asphyxiate the miners. To detect such potential disasters early, the mine-owner kept a community of young boy and girl choristers. He provided each team of miners with one of these young children in a cage, who would descend into the mine with them. All of these children had beautiful singing voices, and they would happily sing all day in their cages. In the event of the release of the odourless gas, the child would succumb to the gas before the adult miners were aware of it. When they heard the child’s singing stop, they would know that they needed to escape from the seam immediately.

When the boys reached the age where their voices broke, and when the girls reached child-bearing age, the mine-owner would ‘retire’ them, and they would then breed a new generation of choristers.

Initially, the miners were grateful for the children, whom they recognised as lifesavers. They grew attached to them and found that their cheerful singing made the long hours of each underground shift pass a little more quickly and lightly.

However, as time went on, the miners’ attitude changed. The choristers’ ceaseless joyful singing, apparently ignoring the fate that they might face at any moment, began to aggravate some of the miners. Others, recognising that the singers were a signal of misfortune, started to blame the children themselves for bringing this misfortune. Some miners started refusing to take the children down into the mine with them, or to have anything to do with them.

Over the years, some of the choristers being taken down seemed to develop extraordinary abilities to avoid their fate. Seemingly unaware that their whole purpose was to succumb to the gas, some of them evolved, over several generations, respiratory systems that mitigated the effect of the poison, and they took much longer to die. There were even some cases where choristers were able to carry on singing after the weaker of the miners had started to be affected by the gas. Needless to say, the miners resented such stubborn resistance on the part of the children, and insisted that the mine-owner start a genetic programme to breed a strain of children that would offer no resistance to the carbon monoxide.

In other cases, choristers started constructing rudimentary face masks, which they then slipped over their head in the darkness of the mine. These masks appeared to give them some protection against the carbon monoxide. When the miners discovered this was happening, they insisted the mine-owner keep the children locked up twenty-four hours a day, with no access to any construction materials. They were determined that the choristers accept their role as helpless victims.

Eventually, all of the children in the mine-owner’s stock were weakened. As luck would have it, this coincided with a period when the miners were working a seam that was riddled with pockets of carbon monoxide. Every day a pocket was hit. Every day, more and more children died.

In a relatively short time, the entire community of choristers was wiped out. The very next day, the miners, now unprotected, started to be killed in increasing numbers by the gas. A few months later, there was not a single miner left alive. The mine-owner was forced to close his mine, and the families of the miners, with no financial support, slowly but inexorably starved to death.

It was only at this point that it occurred to the mine-owner that, if he had invested money in developing the gas masks that the children had invented, he could have equipped all his miners with them, and nobody, miner or chorister, would have had to die. But by then it was too late. Nobody should wait until it’s too late.

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.