What seems like a lifetime ago, but was, so the calendar tells me, less than two weeks ago, Bernice and I went to see Golda. One of the most powerful moments in the film occurs during a telephone conversation between Golda Meir and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. To understand today’s post, you must first watch this clip.

In the cinema, at that moment, the feeling among the audience of national pride was visceral. You could taste it in your mouth.

I don’t intend to analyse in detail what made the events of Shabbat/Simchat Torah ten days ago possible, but it looks increasingly like a combination of a whole kitbag-ful of elements: a level of planning, training, and secrecy from Hamas that far exceeded anything they had previously displayed; a disproportionate deployment of troops to the West Bank leaving the border with Gaza woefully under-protected; an over-reliance on technology and an accompanying decline in the level of training and discipline of the troops on the ground. Underlying all of these was a mistaken confidence on the part of Israel – its political leadership, its military and security leadership, many of its people.

Ten days ago, the national pride we had tasted in the cinema was exposed as hubris, and the confidence we had felt was revealed to have been complacency.

We have been heartened by the many, many messages of support we have received from family and friends abroad. One such message expressed the hope that “this unrest ends very soon”. I hope that, by now, nobody abroad mistakenly believes that what Israel underwent in the first half of last week was “unrest”. I am not going to post any links to videos from those first days: messages from families trapped in their houses for more than a day and begging for soldiers to come and rescue them; videos of acts of unspeakable atrocity committed by Hamas terrorists and filmed by them on their victims’ phones then uploaded to those victims’ families via social media.

The residents of the towns, kibbutzim and moshavim in Otef Aza – the area inside Israel bordering the Gaza Strip to the North and East – and the thousands attending a music festival in the same area were subjected to a pogrom, or, perhaps even more accurately, an Einsatzgruppen attack. As the details of the full extent and the exact nature of that massacre emerged over Sunday, Israel sank into a mood that it has not known since 1948, and possibly has never known.

As always happens during a war in Israel, the mainstream Israeli broadcaster switched all of its programming to news, analysis and background stories around the situation. For the first two days, these programs all focussed almost exclusively on interviews with survivors of the massacres, or with the families of those either known to be dead or declared missing presumed dead or abducted across the border into Gaza. From Day Two, added to these were interviews with soldiers and civilians who had gone into the towns and settlements that had been massacred, speaking about what they had found. There was an almost exclusive focus on the loss, the deaths, the carnage, the suffering, the anguish.

It is true that the family that is Israel always embraces those grieving, and encourages them to speak of the loved ones they have lost. However, this time the media experience was qualitatively different in two ways. First, the focus was exclusively on the way in which the victims had suffered and died, or been abducted, rather than the usual focus on celebrating the life that had been lived rather than the murder that had been inflicted. Second, the radio station I listen to (Reshet Bet) devoted virtually no time to any story other than those of individual suffering.

Let me offer two statistical comparisons to attempt to put the ‘size’ of the suffering into perspective.

Every day last week, the numbers of total dead announced rose by at least 100. Only a handful of that number were ‘new’ deaths; the remaining 90 or more were bodies that had been discovered over the previous 24 hours, bodies from the carnage of one day, Shabbat/Simchat Torah. On that day, I estimate (at the time of writing) that 1000 or more civilians were murdered. (By the time you read this, that horrendous number may even seem optimistic.) By comparison, in the entire Yom Kippur War, which, until 9 days ago was Israel’s greatest security failure, not a single civilian died.

1000 civilians murdered in a single Einsatzgruppen Hamas action constitute just over 0.001% of the total population of Israel. An equivalent percentage of the population of the UK is 6,750 people; of the US: 33,500. (2,600 died in 9/11.)

Two levels of remove: there cannot be a single family in Israel that does not have a relative, a friend, a work colleague, a fellow-congregant or a near neighbour who does not have a relative who was murdered or abducted or who experienced first hand the terror of the pogrom and survived deeply scarred emotionally, even if physically unharmed.

On a personal note: Bernice and I belong to a shul that has some 50 member-families. Two of those families have, between them, five cousins who are missing (presumed abducted), and our own daughter-in-law narrowly survived, thankfully physically unharmed, the massacre at the music festival. Every shul, every school, every social club in the country could tell the same story.

And even if you don’t know a particular victim personally… Here’s a piece that has been doing the rounds on social media that captures my point eloquently.

Someone asked me if I know anyone who was killed in Israel. I was puzzled by his question.
“I know all of them,” I answered. He was puzzled by my response.
So I wrote this to explain it.
——————————–
I don’t know you, but I saw you at that bar.
I don’t know you, but you took my parking spot.
I don’t know you, but our parents are friends.
I don’t know you, but I can hear you playing matkot on the beach.
I don’t know you, but your smile made me smile.
I don’t know you, but we argued in a WhatsApp group.
I don’t know you, but we ate together at Chabad.
I don’t know you, but you almost ran me over with your korkinet.
I don’t know you, but you were once my waitress.
I don’t know you, but you gave me your seat on the bus.
I don’t know you, but I saved your place in line at the bank, at the post office, and at the grocery store.
I don’t know you, but we loved the same music.
I don’t know you, but we learned Torah together.
I don’t know you, but we shared a joint in Sinai.
I don’t know you, but we stood next to each other at Mount Sinai.
I don’t know you, but we stood next to each other on Kaplan.
I don’t know you, but I know you.
I don’t know you, but I love you.
I don’t know you, but I will always remember you.

The mood in the radio studios was unnaturally subdued over those first few days; radio and TV presenters were sometimes close to tears, and even, occasionally, more than close. There was no sense, as there usually is during a war, of needing, of being able to attempt, to rally national morale. For a couple of days, until Tzahal was seen to be taking control in Otef Aza, the whole country felt powerless. The Prime Minister and the other political (and military) leaders seemed to be missing in action; there were no rousing addresses to the nation. A cartoon depicting all of the Government ministers cowering under the Cabinet table, some clutching their draft sectarian legislation, some wetting themselves, required no caption.

For over two days, we were that little girl hiding in the cellar, and those were the most chilling two days the country has ever experienced.

-o0o-

In the second half of last week, as Otef Aza was gradually cleared of all terrorists, and as 300,000 reservists were called up, some to the Gaza front, and some to the Northern border, there was a distinct and significant change of mood.

However, I want to leave writing about that change of mood until next week. (At this moment, I feel I want to switch back to publishing every week in the current situation.)

For today, I want to leave you with two last thoughts.

As I came downstairs to ask Bernice to read this post (as she always does, and offers her wise advice), I saw that she had lit a yahrzeit light – a memorial candle. She told me that we had all been invited to light a candle at 6PM as a mark of solidarity with Kibbutz Be’eri, a kibbutz less than five kilometres from the Gaza border. At that exact time, on Kibbutz Be’eri, the funerals were being held of 100 members of the kibbutz.

If what happened in Israel last week moved you, if your heart and your mind are with Israel at this dreadful time, please remember what this massacre is really about.

Some people will tell you it’s about removing Israeli control of Gaza. They don’t understand. Some people will tell you it’s about removing Israel from the map. They don’t understand. Some people will tell you it’s about removing Jews from the face of the earth. They don’t understand.

To understand what it’s really about, read and internalise the words of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Zahar, as reported last year by MEMRI: “The entire planet will be under our law, there will be no more Jews or Christian traitors.”

And please read this week’s post as a dispatch from the world’s canary cage.

As soon as I have published this post, Bernice and I will be setting off for Zichron to visit Raphael. The grandparents of these children are, at this moment, unable to do the same.

I had a nice little piece of trivia all ready to be written up for this week’s post, a light-hearted look at dental flossing and the vagaries of Google searches. But then, of course, life intervened, as it sometimes does, and calls of ‘Hold the front page!’ were heard in the editorial room of my head. So, personal hygiene will have to wait for another time, while we contemplate, instead, events in Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur eve.

For the last three years, Rosh Yehudi, an orthodox religious group, in a conscious act of outreach, has held two prayer services, at the start and the end of Yom Kippur, in Dizengoff Square in Tel Aviv. These services have become very well attended by a range of congregants, from orthodox to secular (albeit a breed of secular that seems characteristically Israeli – secular but with a sense of respect for the traditions). The services have, in the past, accommodated both separate seating areas for men and women, with a dividing mechitza of wood or metal, and, further back, an area of mixed seating. The services have been largely celebrated as an inspiring example of mutual tolerance and of across-the-board identification with the Jewish nature of the state.

This year, in the build-up to Yom Kippur, the following happened.

1. Rosh Yehudi applied for a licence to hold its traditional services.
2. The Tel Aviv – Yafo municipality, under mayor Ron Huldai, refused to license gender-separated prayers in Dizengoff Square, arguing that gender separation is not permitted in the public space in the city.
3. Rosh Yehudi appealed the decision, and both a local court and, subsequently, the Supreme Court, upheld the municipality’s decision.
4. Rosh Yehudi decided to proceed with gender-separated prayer, as in previous years, albeit with Israeli flags replacing the solid mechitza of previous years.
5. On Yom Kippur eve itself, police made no attempt to enforce the municipality’s ban as upheld by the Supreme Court.
6. Demonstrators, finding the square impassable, then prevented the erection of the ‘mechitza’ of Israeli flags; some disrupted the prayers by shouting, sitting on seats designated for the other sex, and, in some cases, eating in front of congregants.
7. There were angry scenes between congregants and protestors. Many congregants appeared deeply upset by the anger. One protestor who dismantled a flag was detained and questioned by police.
8. Rosh Yehudi eventually decided to withdraw to a nearby synagogue and hold the service there.

Let me start with a couple of observations on the ruling of Ron Huldai and his municipality. Presumably, in the public swimming baths and in the beachfront facilities in Tel Aviv, there are separate changing rooms for men and women. Similarly, public toilet facilities in Tel Aviv are gender-separated, In other words, it is accepted by everyone that there are exceptions to the general rule that there is no gender separation in the public space. The municipality has therefore made a conscious decision that the halachic requirement to segregate the genders during prayer services should not be supported as an option at a prayer service in the public space. This is a decision that the municipality needs to explain, rather than hiding behind the general rule, to which it recognises that there are exceptions.

While it is at it, the municipality could also explain why it did not, at the end of June this year, similarly refuse a permit for the gender-segregated Muslim prayer on Tel Aviv beach marking Eid-al-Adha.

Let’s turn now to the leaders of Rosh Yehudi. Having, quite legitimately, taken their protest at the municipality’s ruling all the way to the Supreme Court, and had their appeal rejected, did the organisers genuinely think that creating a mechitza out of Israeli flags was not in contravention of the court’s ruling? Even if they did, did they honestly imagine that opponents of this plan would let it pass in peace? Are they really so tone-deaf to the discord that has been sounding on the streets of Tel Aviv and elsewhere for nine months now? Did they truly believe that their action would further their declared aim of creating a space for inclusivity, of attracting secular and non-religious traditional Tel Avivians. Or did they rather feel that to back down would look like weakness and would reward victory to ‘the other side’?

Next, consider the demonstrators. Their concern that the public space not be blocked or closed off and that the law be upheld does not appear to extend to every Saturday evening, when parts of central Tel Aviv become impassable, and when breakaway groups of demonstrators repeatedly, and illegally, block the major artery of the Ayalon, frustrating hundreds, if not thousands, of drivers and passengers. Equally, their outrage at Rosh Yehudi taking the law into their own hands and defying a municipal order led to them taking the law into their own hands, rather than allowing the legal authorities such as the police to decide on the appropriate action.

Following the events of Erev Yom Kippur, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister of National Security and head of the far right-wing Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, announced that he would hold a gender-segregated prayer service on Thursday evening in Dizengoff Square. After many other politicians publicly condemned this idea, Ben-Gvir backed down. In displaying what seemed suspiciously like restraint (but mat simply have been political expedience), Ben-Gvir ended up looking like the closest thing to a mature adult in the room. This in itself gives some indication of just where we are as a country. As I may have remarked in an earlier post, we are never going to be able to begin our essential journey back to a feeling of national unity until key players start caring less about who is right and more about what is right.

Meanwhile, on a lighter note, supermarket shopping in Portugal is clearly a more enjoyable experience than it has been recently in holiday-season Israel, and, in Zichron, the first rains arrived this Sunday, bringing Raphael toe-to-toe with his first rain puddle. Does life get any better than this?

Blogger’s Note: Apologies if you received notification that this post was published last Thursday, and were then unable to open it. I had an issue last week with the post not displaying in paragraphs, and I was trying to troubleshoot it when I accidentally published this post in draft form.

Blogger’s Second Note: According to my Excel tracking sheet, this is the 200th post that I have published, since I started the blog in November 2019. This means that, at an average of 1500 words a post, for the same investment of effort I could have written a 300,000-word novel and made my fortune. And there’s my life in a nutshell, really.

Let me start by wishing you all a happy and healthy 5784. In this post, in a rather roundabout way, I celebrate the everyday miracle that is the passage of the year.

From the mid-1960s until, in its second resurrection, a one-off special in 2011, BBC television featured, on and off, a celebrity panel game show entitled Call My Bluff. Two teams of three competed to earn points by identifying the correct definitions of obscure words. The teams took turns to give three definitions, one true and two bluffs. If the opposing team correctly identified the true definition, they earned a point; if not, the bluffing team earned a point.

Examples of words used in the show include queach, strongle, ablewhacket, hickboo, jargoon, zurf, morepork, and jirble (which clearly indicates that the show was designed to be a place where people who loved words could meet to share their enjoyment of the idiosyncrasies of the English language). The show also had an inbuilt upper-class pomposity, the original teams being led by Robert Morley (noted for his numerous film portrayals of archetypal pompous upper-class establishment characters) and Frank Muir. The latter was a wordsmith best known for his partnership with Denis Nordern, writing comedy for radio – Take It From Here, Whacko, Brothers in Law (no hyphens, since it was a sit com about a law firm). However, he was also characterised by his upper-class accent (particularly his slightly weak, unrolled ‘r’ sound) and his pink, spotted bow tie. Later team leaders included a genuine lord (Patrick Campbell, 3rd Baron Glenavy) and the very upper-crust actress Joanna Lumley.

You will doubtless not be too shocked to discover that I, or rather my even more pretentious late-teen to early-adult self, loved the game.

I mention it only as an introduction to the Call-My-Bluff-type challenge I set you today. I am going to offer you no fewer than four explanations of the origin of a well-known phrase or saying, and ask you to guess which, if any, is the correct one. (I am already picking out in my mind a select group of potential readers who will actually know the correct answer.) Full disclosure: until a couple of weeks ago I laboured under the delusion that one of the bluffs was, in fact, the correct explanation. Further full disclosure: Just because an explanation is not the correct basis for the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’ does not necessarily mean that the facts stated in the explanation are false.

A couple of weeks ago, on 31 August, we had the rare occurrence of a super blue moon. You can see it here, as it appeared over Darwin. The ‘super’ refers to the fact that it was a full moon occurring at the point in the moon’s orbit around the earth when it is closest to the earth, resulting in the moon appearing to us as larger than it does at any other time. The ‘blue’ refers to…what, exactly? We assume that it is something rare, because it has given rise to the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’. However, it is far from clear exactly what that rare occurrence is. So, which of the four explanations below do you buy?

Just before we dive into the explanations, some background in simple astronomical arithmetic is probably a good idea. About halfway through the next six paragraphs, you may, however, start to disagree that it is a good idea. It’s not in the test, so feel free to skip it.

We need to understand the relation between the lunar and the solar cycle. The Gregorian calendar is a solar calendar, whose two basic units are the day (the length of time it takes the earth to spin on its axis one complete revolution) and the year (the length of time it takes the earth to orbit the sun once).

• A solar (or tropical) year is approximately 365.24 days long (which explains why we add a leap day every four years – and why we also don’t add a leap day when the year is divisible by 100 but not divisible by 400, because 0.24 is just a bit less than a quarter).
• A lunation (one lunar cycle – a lunar ‘month’, if you will) is 29.53 days.

This means that, if we want to have a calendar based on lunar months, but also want it to align with the solar calendar, we have a problem, because 365.24 divided by 29.53 is 12.37.

In other words, if we had 12 lunar months in a year, the year would be about 11 days shorter than the solar year. If we had 13 lunar months, it would be about 19 days longer than the solar year.

For this reason, several civilisations developed a calendar based on a cycle of 19 years (known as a Metonic cycle, after the Greek astronomer Meton who ‘discovered’ it). 11 days is about 7/19 of a solar month. So, if we add a lunar month 7 times in every cycle of 19 years, then every 19 years our calendar will realign with the solar calendar.

This is how the Jewish calendar works (by adding – or intercalating – an extra month every two or three years during the 19-year cycle). It is also the way the Babylonians, the early Romans, the Bahais, and probably the Iron Age Celts and Polynesians, among others, constructed their calendars, some of them at least 1500 years before Meton.

And so to the explanations of the origin of the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’:

Explanation A

Explanation B

The term ‘blue moon’ originated in an anti-clerical pamphlet (attacking the Roman clergy, and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in particular) by two converted Greenwich friars, William Roy and Jerome Barlow, published in 1528 under the title Rede me and be not wrothe, for I say no thynge but trothe (Read Me and Don’t Get Angry for I Say Nothing but the Truth), . The relevant passage reads:

O churche men are wyly foxes […] Yf they say the mone is blewe / We must beleve that it is true / Admittynge their interpretacion.] (O, churchmen are wily foxes…If they say the moon is blue, we must believe that it is true, accepting their interpretation.)

The context of the passage is a dialogue between two priest’s servants, spoken by the character “Jeffrey” . The intention may simply be that Jeffrey makes an absurd statement, “The moon is blue”, to make the point that priests require laymen to believe in statements even if they are patently false.

From here, it is a short step to saying that something happens only when the moon is blue: in other words, never.

Explanation C

Because there are 12 solar months in a year and, in some years, 13 lunar months, there are occasions when two full moons occur in the same solar month. (This cannot happen in February, because even in a leap year February has too few days to fit in two full moons). For example, in 2023, there was a full moon on 1 August and again on 31 August. When this happens, printed calendars traditionally print the second full moon in blue; hence it is known as a blue moon.

Explanation D

The phrase ‘blue moon’ derives from ‘belewe’, which is an Old English word meaning ‘betray’, because the extra full moon betrays the usual perception of one full moon per solar month.

Now we come to what I believe is known in the trade as ‘the big reveal’. The answer is that, in fact, none of the answers is correct. If you feel cheated, I would point out that, in the fourth paragraph of this post I invited you: “to guess which, if any, is the correct one.”

I always believed it was Explanation C, but, in fact, this is based on an incomplete piece of research by a writer on astronomy. Which leads us to Explanation E, the genuine explanation.

Explanation E

The Maine Farmers Almanac, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, divided the year into four ‘average’ seasons, each three solar months long. Normally, a season would include 3 full moons. Each of these full moons had a specific name, as follows:

• January: Wolf Moon
• February: Snow Moon
• March: Worm Moon
• April: Pink Moon
• May: Flower Moon
• June: Strawberry Moon
• July: Buck Moon
• August: Sturgeon Moon
• September: Full Corn Moon
• October: Hunter’s Moon
• November: Beaver Moon
• December: Cold Moon

As you can see, these names very much reflect the agricultural and natural world of North America.

In a season that included a fourth full moon, the third full moon of the season was designated a Blue Moon, and the first, second and fourth full moons of the season used the normal full moon names. In other words, a blue moon is not necessarily the second full moon in a month (although it often happens to be that as well); it is, rather, the third full moon of a season with four full moons..

Which is probably more than you wanted or needed to know on the subject, but I hope at least some of you enjoyed Explanations A and B, which are factually correct, but do not account for the use of ‘blue moon’ in the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’, and Explanation D, which is spurious speculation.

Fortunately, I can usually bank on getting at least one picture of each grandson having a good time far more frequently than once in a blue moon!

When I was growing up, I would, from time to time, feel that life had dealt me some injustice or other. Not that it often did, you understand, and I am prepared to concede that some of what I perceived as injustices might, objectively, have actually been ‘justices’, as it were. Be that as it may, in my eyes injustices they were. On such occasions, I would usually turn to my mother, complaining to her that ”It’s not fair!”. To which she would inevitably reply: “No, it’s dark.” When you’re eight, or ten, or twelve, there’s no response to that. I ended up feeling that one further example of the world’s unfairness was that my mother was clearly on the side of injustice. Sadly, my mother died 20 years ago, and so I can no longer apologise to her for the injustice that I did to her in my childhood and, in all honesty, for many years afterwards, in resenting the unwavering nature of her reply to us. I hope that this week’s post can serve as an apology to her memory, for the fact is that “No, it’s dark” is one of the best of the many lessons that she strove to teach us. This childhood memory has come back to me this week as I have been reflecting on, and attempting to digest, a story from the British press. Come with me, if you will, into the fantasy world that is woke Britain in the 2020s. In 2021, Carl Borg-Neal, a manager in Lloyds Bank, was attending an internal race education training session, held remotely, because of COVID. At the time, Borg-Neal was a mentor to three workers from varying backgrounds. At the beginning of the session, participants were encouraged to “speak freely” and to “learn and be clumsy”. During a discussion of “intent vs effect”, Borg-Neal “asked how he should handle a situation where he heard someone from an ethnic minority use a word that might be considered offensive if used by someone not within that minority. He was thinking partly about rap music.” The trainer did not immediately respond, and so Borg-Neal, seeking to clarify his question, added that the most common example was black people using the n-word. (For the benefit of anyone who has spent the last 50 years in Antarctica, the n-word rhymes with the name of Christopher Robin’s young big cat friend.) However, the problem wasn’t that Borg-Neal said “the n-word”; it was that he actually said the n-word. (And there are those who say punctuation isn’t really important.) At this point, the story becomes unreal. The trainer immediately attacked Borg-Neal verbally. A witness stated: “After saying at the beginning this would be a safe environment and it is acknowledged we may make mistakes, she launched into a vitriolic attack.”. Borg-Neal then immediately apologised for using the term. At this point, the story becomes surreal. Lloyds Bank conducted a racism investigation and ultimately dismissed Borg-Neal, who had been with the bank for 26 years, for gross misconduct. Borg-Neal sued Lloyds for unfair dismissal and disability discrimination. (He suffers from dyslexia, which, he claimed at the subsequent tribunal hearing, meant that he sometimes blurted things out without being able to monitor them beforehand.) Last week, the tribunal hearing ruled that the bank’s bosses unfairly sacked Borg-Neal, as while his use of the word had been “ill-judged”, there had been “no intention to cause hurt”. In its ruling, the tribunal also noted that the bank manager’s comment had involved a “well-intentioned relevant question”. At this point, you might be observing that, with the tribunal hearing’s ruling, good sense has prevailed. However, I have one more fact to add to this account: the fact that leaves the unreal and the surreal gasping in its wake. Come with me into the world of the mind-bogglingly can’t possibly be real. The trainer conducting the session was so distressed after Borg-Neal said the n-word that she went on five days’ leave to recover. Let me say that again, lest you think you misheard: The trainer conducting the session was so distressed after Borg-Neal said the n-word that she went on five days’ leave to recover. I know! I had to read it twice, as well. I’m really not sure where to start. The trainer was, presumably, deemed qualified to give this training, which, you will remember, encouraged participants to “speak freely and to “learn and be clumsy”, an environment in which it was accepted that participants might “make mistakes”. What are we to make of the fact that such a qualified trainer was so affected by the use, in a theoretical, illustrative, abstract, academic, unthreatening context and in a virtual medium, of the n-word, that it was five full days before she was sufficiently recovered to return to work? What kind of an upbringing and education has someone had if, as an adult professional, they take five days to recover from hearing a word spoken online? Any word? The answer to that question, I would suggest, is an upbringing in which nobody ever pointed out that the world isn’t (always) fair; it’s (at least sometimes) dark. There is no guarantee never to be surprised, disappointed, made to feel uneasy. Life, unavoidably, means risking exposure to ideas that you may not agree with, situations you may not be comfortable with. The world does not revolve around you, nor should it. Any upbringing that seeks to ‘protect’ you from exposure to the challenges that life poses ends up ensuring that, when you are eventually exposed to them, as you inevitably will be, you will be unable to cope. You will, rather, need to take five days off work to recover from hearing the n-word spoken online. (No: it doesn’t matter how many times I write that; it still makes no sense.) Of course, there is a balance to be struck here between leaving a newborn child to survive the elements unaided and smothering a child in cotton wool. It is possible to argue about the appropriate age for a child to start learning the meaning of the word “No”; it is not, I would suggest, possible to argue about whether it is a parent’s responsibility to ensure that a child does learn the meaning of the word. These days one hears very little about the ‘school of hard knocks’. It is hard to imagine a modern popular song recommending that you ‘pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and start all over again.’ Things were different when I was a boy, and things were very, very different for my parents’ generation. I have, for the last couple of years, been transcribing and annotating my father’s many letters to my mother during the Second World War. They met and became friends immediately before the War. After my father was called up in October 1939, and until several months after his evacuation from France as part of the British Expeditionary Force, there was, it seems, no contact between them. (In fairness, he had other things occupying his time and his mind.) As soon as my father, now stationed in the UK, did renew contact with my mother in July 1940, their relationship grew closer, fed over the next 18 months by very regular correspondence, occasional phone calls, and even more occasional leaves spent by my father in London. In December 1941 they decided to become engaged. However, they did not announce their engagement then and, in early January 1942, Dad was shipped with his regiment to India. It was exactly a year before they ‘went public’ with their engagement. The next time Dad saw Mum was a few days before their wedding, after he had disembarked in Britain after the voyage back from India, in August 1945. During the war years, Mum had been living through the blitz in London and then serving in the ATS (the Auxilliary Territorial Service, a branch of the armed forces for women) as a secretary. At the start of the war, Mum was 19 and Dad was a few months short of 21. By the time they were able to marry, Mum was 25 and Dad was a few months short of 27. The phrase ‘the best years of their lives’ comes to mind. Those years were basically stolen by the war. I am not making any special pleading for my parents; their experience was, I suspect, stereotypical of their entire generation. My point is that, having lived through those years, they were wonderfully well equipped both to embrace the opportunities, even relatively modest ones, that later life gave them; they cherished the opportunity they were given to share over 50 years of married life together; and they were well able to deal uncomplainingly with both the grind of daily routine and the challenges and hardships that life from time to time threw at them. Bernice and I recognised long ago that that entire generation in Britain acquired, through their wartime experiences, a resilience and inner strength that equipped them to face whatever life threw at them later. Judged objectively, Bernice’s mother had a very tough life, but nobody ever saw her without a smile on her face and a concern for everybody else. And now, almost 70 years later, people need five days off work to recover from hearing the n-word in an unthreatening environment, online. In Israel, I am happy to say, this lunacy has, as yet, not taken hold as it seems to have done in the UK and the US. I suspect that the very real threat of the existential and internal challenges facing the country helps us all to keep a better sense of perspective. Yet another good reason to live here. Meanwhile, here are three young men  who seem to be coping well with life’s challenges. Raphael is settling in to his new life in gan. Tao thoroughly enjoyed the puppet theatre at his summer activity, and he and Ollie are learning all about brothers sharing. (Of course, it’s not difficult if you’re the one whose big brother agrees to share his sunglasses with you!)

Sartorial elegance: that’s just one of the many things for which I was not known among my circle of friends growing up. It’s fair to say that, in my teens, I had an under-developed dress sense. Bernice managed to drag me into the 1970s, when I sported a denim suit (from Burton’s, I believe, which rather undermines the image I’m going for here), and a velvet jacket (but not simultaneously). Beyond that, my wardrobe was markedly unnoteworthy. I did buy a brown corduroy cap – at Lake Bala in mid-Wales – which I flattered myself made me look like Tom Paxton. Mind you, since I thought around the same time that I played guitar and sang like Tom Paxton, my judgement was possibly not entirely to be trusted.

However, some fifteen years ago, having largely relied over the preceding 35 years on Bernice’s impeccable judgement in matters concerning my wardrobe, I started buying my own clothes, sometimes even unaccompanied by her. This more or less coincided with my discovery of Zip, a mid-market clothing chain where I could almost always find what I hadn’t realised I was looking for until I walked in and saw it.

Fortunately, Zip opened a store in our local mall, and over the next few years I basically replaced my rather tired wardrobe. The store recently closed, leaving me very relieved that I now have enough teeshirts, collared shirts, polos and sweaters, jeans and what my brother and I are probably the only two remaining men to call slacks, to see me out. However, not long after, it reopened, so if I ever do need to buy clothes again, I shall be alright.

All of which is a prelude to something that happened a couple of weeks ago. We were in Zichron when Bernice received a WhatsApp from a very close friend of ours that her mother-in-law had just passed away. This was a not unexpected event: since her 100^th birthday a few months previously, she had grown steadily weaker. The funeral was to be that evening, at 9PM, in Jerusalem.

We decided immediately that we would attend the funeral. However, with the temperature in the high 30s, I had travelled to Zichron in shorts, and I told Bernice that I wasn’t comfortable attending a funeral in shorts. We therefore considered driving home, where I could change into long trousers before we left to go to the funeral. The expected flaw in this plan was confirmed when we checked on Waze: we discovered that, in order to arrive home in time to change and leave home again in time to get to the cemetery at 8:50, we would have to leave Zichron at 5PM.

We also knew that even that might not be early enough. For any journey home around the evening rush hour, Waze tends to start off with an optimistic estimate, which it then adjusts upwards as the journey continues, so that, at some point, you begin to feel like Achilles in Zeno’s paradox: you don’t think you will ever get home.

At this point we decided that, rather than risking being late, we would cut our travel time by over two hours, and drive straight to the cemetery. This meant that we did not need to leave Zichron until 7:20. Esther then brilliantly suggested a solution to my sartorial problem. Esther frequents a wonderful second-hand charity shop in Zichron that offers clothes (and other goods) of excellent quality at ridiculously low prices: adult clothes are 5 shekels an item and children’s clothes are 1 shekel an item. I felt sure I would be able to find something suitable there.

So we all set off for the second-hand store. This proved to be a big tactical mistake on my part, as will become clear. Once there, I discovered that the selection of menswear was severely limited. Of the trousers on offer, only one pair fitted me around the waist. Unfortunately, these were a pair of drainpipe (skintight) jeans. Fortunately, they were in a stretch cotton which made them easy to put on and comfortable to wear, but I was concerned that they might be – how shall I put this – a little young for me. Or even – which sounds even worse – that I was a little old for them.

Esther was kind enough to say – although she confessed that this was not a sentence that she had ever imagined saying to her father – that I had the legs to carry it off. When Bernice also gave her guarded approval, I decided that, given the straits I was in, I was prepared to be in the straights, particularly since, for 5 shekels, I would not feel bad about donating them back to the second-hand shop immediately after they had done their funereal duties.

I was also comforted by the fact that I would be perhaps the most peripheral participant in the funeral, and being concerned about the impression I would make on other people was unhealthily self-centred. Finally, I reminded myself that a 9PM funeral in the main Jerusalem cemetery is conducted in pitch blackness, so nobody would actually be able to see what I was wearing.

Of course, in the time it had taken me to find and try on the jeans, Esther and Bernice had both found multiple items, and we then sorted out some plastic fruits and vegetables for Raphael’s play kitchen. So, in the end, my 5-shekel trousers cost me 40 shekels. In fairness, even that was a bargain.

Our journey to the cemetery was very smooth, and we arrived at exactly the right time. I felt a little self-conscious in my jeans, but, of course, even though some lighting was provided by everyone’s smartphone torch, nobody gave me a second glance. The jeans were very comfortable to wear, and, as I peeled them off at the end of the evening, I even contemplated, for a fleeting moment, holding on to them, and adding them to my permanent wardrobe. On reflection, perhaps not. I certainly ought to get rid of them before any of my grandsons are old enough to laugh at me for wearing them.

I leave you today with a rare treat: a single picture featuring all 5 of our direct descendants. We were in two different countries at the time, but Tao and Micha’el thought it would be nice to call us while we were with Esther and Raphael. As Micha’el pointed out, you need to use your imagination a little, since not one face is full, but I hope you feel it’s worth the effort. Anyway, it is a kind of prelude to the autumn, when, bli neder, Tslil and Micha’el, Tao and Ollie will be coming to Israel for a month, and we will all be physically, and not just virtually, together. Something to look forward to!

Bloggers Note: I wanted to give you all a heads-up. I’ve decided that, for at least the next few weeks, and possibly permanently, I’m going to switch to publishing a post every two weeks, rather than every week. I don’t kid myself that this will mean I have the post ready to publish days before publication date, but at least my Mondays will be stressful only every other week. I realise this probably will make no difference to your life, but I wanted to avoid Bernice having to field a lot of questions next Tuesday about rumours of my demise.

For the benefit of the two or three people who may not know about it, I offer this week the ultimate in binge watching.

When the TV series I am about to recommend to you first came out, viewers were not able to binge watch; they had to wait patiently for the next episode. Normal practice, in these situations, was for the episodes to be screened a week apart. Whether it was Quatermass and the Pit in 1958, The Forsyte Saga in 1967 or Dallas in 1978, that week-long wait was an undeniable part of the enjoyment of the series.

However, in the series I am suggesting to you, you originally had to wait 365 times as long as seven days – a full seven years.

I am referring (as some of you may have guessed) to the Up series. This was originally conceived as a one-off programme – Seven Up! – looking at the individual lives of a number of seven-year-old English children in 1964 and interviewing each of them about their interests, ambitions, hopes and fears. The original director intended a programme about the beauty of childhood, but a researcher and interviewer on the programme, Michael Apted, had a much more aggressive social agenda: he ‘hijacked’ the project to demonstrate how entrenched the class system still was in English society. To quote from the original programme: “Why did we bring these children together? Because we wanted a glimpse of England in the year 2000. The union leader and the business executive of the year 2000 are now seven years old.”

At some point, someone had the brilliant idea of revisiting these children seven years later. Michael Apted was appointed the director… and the rest is history – a history that now spans 56 years and may not yet be finished (although Apted’s death in 2021 may actually mark the demise of the series). We will have to wait until 2026 to see.

If, by some chance, you do not know the series, then you have the ultimate 9-hour binge watch waiting for you. Three warnings. First, the original programme is a product of its time, and features ten boys and only four girls. Once they had started with that mix, the makers had it baked in, and this is a great pity. Having said that, the four girls/women punch way above their weight, in each episode.

Second: each episode, quite reasonably, reprises a lot of archive material from earlier episodes. I say ‘quite reasonably’, because without ‘the story so far’ you would have had to retain a detailed memory of the last episode for a period of seven years. So, if you are binge watching, you may find yourself fast-forwarding quite a bit.

The third warning is that I don’t advise you to follow this link to the Wikipaedia entry on the series. You will find there lots of spoilers which will significantly impact your enjoyment of a story which, in many cases, has all the unpredictability of real life (literally).

All of the above is actually just an aside. I was musing this week on our different experience of our grandsons in Portugal and our grandson in Israel. A month at a time three times a year – the binge watch – as opposed to one episode a week. One effect of the weekly visit to Zichron, in the last couple of months, has been the chance to see, on each visit, Raphael’s progress in language acquisition: both his comprehension and his speaking. Esther speaks to him exclusively in English, and Maayan exclusively in Hebrew, but it is noticeable that his choice of language (in what are still, at the moment, one-word utterances) is marked. In almost all cases, although he understands the word in both languages, he only uses one language for any given concept.

So, for example, ‘bath’ is always in English. Of course, I am tempted to say, ‘bath’ is much easier to pronounce than ‘ambatya’, However, he favours ‘kadur’ over the English equivalent ‘ball’. It doesn’t seem reasonable to claim that ‘kadur’ is easier to pronounce than ‘ball’, so I don’t think that explains his choice. It is possible that Maayan plays more ball with him than Esther. However, it is usually Maayan who baths Raphael, so I suspect it is best to avoid simplistic explanations.

Then, of course, there are the occasions when Raphael gives us a glimpse of his, and almost every other child’s, formidable intelligence, in fashioning his own use of language. So, for example, ‘doovdoov’, which is his word for cherry (properly ‘doovdoovan’), is also his generic word for fruit, despite his knowing very well the words for about a dozen fruits. (This is a child who, left to his own devices, could easily exist exclusively on a diet of fruit, despite thoroughly enjoying all of the wonderful meals his mother and nana cook for him, and also enjoying grandpa’s chopped herring and rye bread.)

An even more striking ‘coining’ is in the world of food preparation, which Raphael is really into. He loves helping Esther make bread, or muffins, and is particularly good at mixing dough or batter. (Tao, by now, is virtually a competent independent cook, since he has been eagerly helping his parents in the kitchen for all of the last three years.) As well as wanting to help in the grown-up kitchen, Raphael also enjoys toy kitchen play. He has his own whisk and is always asking for a ‘bowl’, and also pressing any vaguely concave object into service as a ‘bowl’. A box, a cup from his stacking tower, a plastic mug with a handle, a saucer: all can be a ‘bowl’. If, as they say, all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all you have is a whisk…

Also remarkable, to me, is the way children near the beginning of their language journey discover how to use language not just to comment on, or categorise, the world, but also to make requests. Raphael now understands that he does not have to push away a spoon, or scatter food from his tray onto the floor. ‘Down’ is a more effective way of explaining that he has had enough to eat and would like to carry on playing. It is wonderful to see the civilising effects of language in action.

I find it impossible to remember when Tao was at this stage, despite it being such a relatively short time ago. The differences we hear in his language every time we fly to Portugal are, of course, still very striking. At this stage, this expresses itself in an ever-expanding vocabulary and an increasing complexity of sentence structure. Even though we speak every week, our calls tend to be more of a storytime and puppet show; chatting on a WhatsApp video call does not come all that easily to Tao, or, indeed, to me.

Tao and Olly are exposed to much more English than Hebrew, and Tslil knows that she has her work cut out to ensure that their Hebrew keeps up with their English. Raphael is in the opposite situation (and will be even more so when he starts going to gan every day next year – a situation I suspect he will adapt to more painlessly than his mother). Esther knows that she will have to work equally hard to maintain his English, and I suppose we will just have to resign ourselves to continuing selflessly dragging ourselves up to Zichron every week, just to point out the difference between a cup, a mug, a saucer and a bowl. It’s a miserable job, but someone has to do it.

Meanwhile, everybody is still enjoying the summer!

Blogger’s Note: I apologise to those of my readers who also follow another blog of a mutual friend who has, in recent weeks, been giving a blow-by-blow account of his middle-heavyweight bout with the Israel real estate market. I am not setting up in competition, but this week’s topic reflects how certain issues seem to be dominating my waking life at the moment.

It is now over two months since I casually dropped into the conversation that Bernice and I had taken the decision to move to Zichron Yaakov to be close to Esther and family, and one or two of you have been tentatively inquiring how our plans are going. So I thought this week I would bring you up to date.

There are two ways of doing this. The first is a one-sentence summary, which is, as it happens, fairly easy.

No progress has been made.

The second is rather more fraught, and complex, and, I hope, interesting, and will bring me closer to my magic 1500-word target, so why don’t I throw that in as a freebie?

Moving is, like everything in life, a process. It involves two distinct sub-processes: selling and buying. Or should that be buying and selling? Or perhaps we should be aiming for buyselling as a complex process that occupies a single moment in time.

We moved to our current home in Maale Adumim in the autumn of 1996, which the calendar tells me will imminently be 28 years ago. The fact that, for Bernice and myself, it seems like the day before yesterday apparently counts for nothing. However, the fact that it is so long ago means that I can no longer actually remember the emotions I assume I experienced throughout what is commonly described as a domestic experience more traumatic than any other except divorce. What I find myself asking every day is: Supposing we find the home we are looking for? How can we commit to buying before we have signed a contract to sell our home? At the same time, how can we accept an offer for our home before we have found our next home? It all seems very daunting.

As the spoiler a couple of paragraphs back already hinted, we are managing to live with this conundrum by, as of yet, failing to find either a prospective buyer or a prospective new home. Bernice and I have a couple of theories as to why this is.

Regarding our own home, the price we are asking reflects to some extent, and quite legitimately, the money we have invested in our three renovations over the years. As far as we are concerned, we have now brought the house to the point where we feel we have done everything that we need and want to do. However, Bernice’s theory, which seems to be backed up by what we see whenever a new family moves into a house in the area, is that Israelis don’t care what state a home is in, when they buy it they want, they need, to stamp their personality on it immediately: in other words, to gut it.

So, we have had viewers come in and discuss moving the front door a metre and half to one side (thereby gaining nothing, as far as I can see). Our estate agent (realtor) points out to prospective buyers that they can easily turn our snug (the extension back room that leads into the backyard) into a master bedroom and the adjacent utility room into an ensuite bathroom. So far, Bernice and I have resisted the temptation to scream: “But then, access to the backyard will be through the master bedroom! Unless you plan to knock an exit through the kitchen wall, and lose all of the impact of the design of the kitchen!”

In addition, Bernice is convinced that most viewers want a completely open-plan kitchen, dining and living area, whereas there is, chez nous, a load-bearing wall that partly divides the area in two.

Whatever the reason, we haven’t yet been made an offer that we can accept. However, as I (the Polyanna in this particular married situation) keep pointing out, selling a house is not a gradual process, where you make incremental gains that eventually reach a critical mass and topple into a sale. It is, rather, a light-switch situation: 19 people see the house and nobody makes an offer, then one day a couple walk in and half an hour later you have a buyer.

Which brings us to the other end of this tango for two. Until two months ago, Bernice and I had a home-buying record of which we were fiercely proud. When we got engaged, in 1971, we originally planned to live in London, where I was at college and Bernice was working. A few weeks’ research revealed that we could just about afford half a derelict house in the rundown area where my college was situated. We couldn’t actually bring ourselves to view any of these slum houses.

During this period, we spent a weekend visiting a friend in South Wales, where Bernice had spent her childhood. Out of curiosity, we looked in estate agents’ windows, and discovered that in the market town she had grown up in, we could afford to buy a semi-detached bungalow on a brand-new estate. The following weekend we travelled down again, saw three properties, and bought one.

I don’t want to ruin anyone’s day, especially anyone who is just starting out and trying to get on the property ladder, but that two-bedroom bungalow cost us ₤5800, which was the equivalent of just under ₤96,000 (NLS 470,000) today. Just to twist the knife in the wound: we were able to secure a mortgage for over 90% of the value, and were required to pay a deposit of only ₤500, about ₤8,260 or NLS 40,300 today.

Seven years later, on a whim, we saw two large houses in villages up the valley from our home, and bought one of them. This was not a sound economic move, but we spent seven happy years there before deciding to come on aliya.

After 15 months on an absorption centre in Gilo, we felt ready to buy a flat in Jerusalem., Friends from the absorption centre had recently bought in East Talpiot, and when the flat across the hall from them went on the market, they told us about it. We viewed it the same day, and bought it.

Nine years later, when we felt Esther and Micha’el really deserved separate bedrooms, and 55 square metres wasn’t enough for four people and a dog, even a small one, we started looking around Jerusalem. We didn’t actually view any properties, because we could tell from the advertisements that, within our price-range, no reasonable-sized flat was in an area we would consider living in, and no flat in an area that we would consider living in was significantly larger than our existing home.

At this time, Bernice went to a house-warming for friends who had just moved from East Talpiot to Maale Adumim. I didn’t accompany her, because I was in mourning for my late father. She came home and could not stop enthusing about the house our friends had bought…and the price they had bought for. Shortly afterwards, we viewed two houses, and bought one of them.

So, our record, until a couple of months ago, was: Viewed: 8. Bought: 4.

The last two months have, sadly, destroyed that outstanding record. We have to date viewed 9 properties, and we are not going to buy any of them. It was only yesterday that I realised why this is so. Until now, every move we have made has been to a bigger, better property. That has made us much easier to please. In addition, we have never, previously, had any pre-conditions, other than wanting to upgrade. We were not really tied in terms of location or specific requirements.

This time, we are being considerably more fussy. We want to be in Zichron Yaakov, and, ideally, within walking distance of Esther and Maayan’s new flat, which they are due to move into on 1 September. We also want to be within walking distance of an Ashkenazi shul that we will be looking to to provide us with a ready-made community (as happened so handsomely both in East Talpiot and Maale Adumim).

We also require to be no more than two floors above (or indeed, below) street level, or, alternatively, to be in a building with a shabbat lift. Zichron, we have discovered, is not packed with buildings with shabbat lifts.

We also require either a garden apartment or an apartment with a sukkah balcony. (I have been astonished to discover that there are estate agents in Israel who are not sufficiently versed in the laws of sukkah to understand what actually constitutes a sukkah balcony.)

We spent a week flirting with a 14^th-floor mini-penthouse in Pardes Hanna. The 1-metre strip of the long balcony nearest the railing was not under the balcony of the penthouse on the floor above, and so we would have been able to set a long table and seat all the guests on one side, with everyone being in a kosher sukkah. However, the effect would have been less Sukkot, and more Seder night (as in da Vinci’s The Last Supper), which we eventually decided against. This was, I must say, to the great relief of almost everyone we spoke to – including family, and friends who lived for decades in Pardes Hanna – who were all convinced that we would not be able to make friends there. Indeed, just about the only person who thought the location and flat were ideal for us was the Pardes Hanna estate agent.

We are by no means certain that our family and friends are right, and we also have no unrealistic expectations of being able, at this stage in our life, to make friends anywhere as close as the friends we have in Maale Adumim. (This, of course, applies primarily to Bernice, who is the partner in this marriage principally responsible for HR. I handle things like working out whether Micha’el’s wardrobes will fit in the third bedroom, and largely leave people to her. This arrangement works for us.)

I don’t want you to think that viewing these nine properties has been a waste of time. We have a number of valuable takeaways. First is a much better understanding of the internal geography and neighbourhood variations within Zichron. This is particularly true since, these days, with Israel’s security agencies jamming GPS, Waze is liable to tell us at any moment that we are in downtown Beirut.

In addition, every place that we see that is not right makes it clearer to us what our requirements, and our priorities within those requirements, are.

Finally, if we hadn’t viewed properties this week, I wouldn’t have spotted, in one of the flats, the following box, packed ready for moving. Just one month exactly after the 30^th anniversary of the release of Forrest Gump, I couldn’t not include it here.

Somewhere out there, I am sure, is an almond praline of an apartment with our name on it. Perhaps we will, at some point, bite into it, and spend happy years in Zichron with the family, liberally sprinkled with month-long excursions to the other family in Portugal. Perhaps we won’t, and we’ll continue to enjoy the home and the friends that have, by now, had all the rough edges rubbed off them, and we will make do with a weekly trip to Zichron and still have Penamacor. We happen to believe this qualifies as a win-win situation, and we really do know just how lucky we are.

In my first year at teacher training college, in a piece of cutting-edge technology, one of our literature lecturers arranged the filming of a panel discussion of a poem, the panel consisting of three students. When we viewed and analysed the discussion afterwards, several of my fellow-students told me that I was a natural in front of the camera and should consider a career in television. I knew then that I lacked the particular kind of fluency, of quickness of response, that the camera loves, and so I begged to differ.

When, several years later, the GPO (General Post Office) was searching for a new voice for its speaking clock, the headmistress of the school where Bernice worked was convinced that I would be perfect for the job. While this certainly avoided the problem of constant spontaneity, I found the thought of spending twenty-four hours a day standing in front of a microphone, saying: ‘At the third stroke, it will be eight, forty-two, and thirty seconds’, and so on, less than appealing. (Yes, I know that’s not how they really do it!) So, in the end, it was Brian Cobby who took over in 1985. Incidentally, for those of you from Britain, and of a certain age (ten years younger than me), Brian Cobby had, in a previous life, been the voice that announced: ‘5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – 1… Thunderbirds are go!’

Incidentally, if you have spent the last minute or two wondering why the Post Office, of all institutions, should want a speaking clock, let me enlighten you. Before the beginning of the railway age in Britain, many towns still operated on local time. A village would set its clocks and watches by, usually, the church clock. Because of the limited accuracy of most mechanical clocks, over the years all of these local times started drifting apart. When it was midday in London it might have been only 11:49 a.m. in Bristol.

The introduction of rail travel, and of timetables, made it essential for everywhere to be operated on a standardised Greenwich Mean Time. To ensure this standardisation, when the mail train arrived and the villagers gathered around the postman to get the news from London, he would announce what the time was according to his timepiece, which had been set in London. This custom is thought to be where the phrase ‘passing the time of day’ originated.

(If you want to have a look at the various generations of technology used for the speaking clock in Britain (‘Just dial T-I-M!’), check it out here.)

Probably because I lack the inventive spontaneity needed for the job, I have great admiration for those who can carry off the job of TV presenter successfully…and even more, I think, the job of radio presenter, where no body language or facial expressions can fill the gaps; radio presenters have only their voices to rely on. I often listen to interview and discussion programmes on Israel’s Reshet Bet, and have found myself, in recent months, reflecting on the contrasting styles and talents of the various presenters.

For me, one of the pleasures of the best of these programmes is that they demonstrate that, even in an Israel that is very conflicted and divided internally, it is still possible for two people to argue and disagree in a civilised way, and to remain respectful of each other. I first heard this in action on a weekly program of the early 2000s, called ‘על ימין ועל שמאל‘, ‘On the Right and the Left’, in which two national figures sat down to discuss current affairs. The figures were: on my right (on almost everyone’s right) Geula Cohen and on my left (on many people’s left) Eli Amir.

Geula Cohen had been a member of Etzel (a mainly revisionist breakaway from the mainstream pre-State underground defence force Hagana, Etzel followed a stronger line of response to Arab terror) and Lechi (which acted principally against the British Mandate forces). Cohen was Lechi’s underground radio broadcaster. After the establishment of the State, she became a politician, eventually cofounding the right-wing political party Techiya in 1979, in opposition to Camp David. She supported Jewish settlement of all parts of Eretz Yisrael, and herself briefly moved to Kiryat Arba, which is about as deep in cowboy country as you can get. She was in later life a recipient of the Israel Prize.

Eli Amir is an author and social activist. Having served as Advisor on Arab Affairs to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, he was later appointed Director General of the Youth and Aliya Department of the Jewish Agency. He repeatedly met with literary and other figures in the Arab world and advocated for co-existence, campaigning for more Israeli books to be published in the Arab world, and asking: ‘How can there be peace without us knowing each other?’

Each week, these two, whose world views and the arcs of whose lives were so different, sat in a radio studio and discussed the events of the preceding week. They never, to the best of my memory, found any significant island of agreement between them, but they always listened to each other respectfully, responded to each other’s points seriously, and parted, every week, as adversaries who recognized the right of each to disagree with the other, and who also each recognised that the other cared deeply about the country they both loved.

Something of the same spirit lives on, with, it must be said, a little less gravitas (but then we live in a very different age from the early 2000s, and certainly from the 1930s and 40s, Geula Cohen’s formative years, and even the 1950s and 60s, Eli Amir’s formative years). Currently on Reshet Bet, on Friday mornings, Emily Amrousi and Professor Yuval Elbashan jointly present a programme (‘Emily and the Professor’), in which they both discuss the week’s events and interview people in the news.

‘Emily’, a children’s author, journalist, and ex-spokesperson of the Yehuda and Shomron Council, lived for many years in Talmon, a yishuv close to Ramallah, and now lives in Jerusalem. In her childhood, her family became religious, and she grew up in a modern-orthodox, Bnei Akiva atmosphere. ‘The Professor’ is indeed a professor, of Law, and has been closely involved for 25 years with a non-profit organization advocating community and social rights for the weaker sectors in Israeli society.

Again, as with Geula Cohen and Eli Amir, Amrousi and Elbashan are (almost always) respectful of each other’s arguments, although it has to be said that the events of this year so far have put that tolerance to the test on more than one occasion. They are clearly friends, not only in the studio, and they welcome the opportunity to debate real issues in a civilized manner.

When I listen to programmes such as these, I find myself able to sustain some hope that Israeli society may be able to heal the fractures that threaten us.

This hope is nurtured in other ways as well. On Friday mornings, Omer Ben-Rubi presents a programme looking at the cultural news of the week. Ben-Rubi is not only a presenter; he is also an experienced administrator. He served as the founding manager of Reshet Bet, having previously run Galei Tzahal, the army radio station.

His culture programme is, I suspect, a uniquely Israeli phenomenon. In his introduction every week, he always gives the Hebrew calendar date, and mentions the Bible portion of the week. Last week, an unusual item could be found nestling between the segment where he invites three other observers of culture to give their recommendations for events of the forthcoming week (among them Barbie) and his playing of a recent pop release. On the day before the Shabbat when we begin reading the Book of Devarim (Deutoronomy), with Moses’ farewell speech to the nation, Ben-Rubi interviewed Micah Goodman, Israeli philosopher and a leading voice on Judaism, Zionism, the Bible, and the challenges and opportunities facing Israel and world Jewry. The subject of the interview was the message of that speech for our time, and what it teaches us about Moses as a political leader.

What is remarkable is not only that Ben-Rubi chose to include this item, but also that he gave no indication that he regarded it as anything other than a perfectly normal choice for a popular culture programme on a general public radio station in Israel.

Unfortunately, not every presenter on Reshet Bet has the same sensitivity, understanding, or knowledge. There is one particular presenter whose programme I am going to have to stop listening to, because she always makes my blood boil, and I end up shouting at the radio.

Rina Matzliach is, so I understand, a serious Israeli journalist, and presented ‘Meet the Press’ for 10 years. She has lived in Israel for over 65 years, since she was a year old. She has a BA in Israeli Literature and a Masters in Communications. She has been a broadcast journalist for 40 years. And yet…and yet.

In the last century, John Cleese made a series of management training videos which worked by demonstrating how not to do it. They are still very funny to watch, not least because they star John Cleese as the incompetent manager (in the days before he started taking himself too seriously). Every time I listen to Rina Matzliach, I find myself hoping that schools of radio journalism are recording her, so that lecturers can demonstrate to their students how not to do it.

Let me give a brief list of some of her most flagrant errors. When interviewing a guest, she constantly interrupts the guest’s answer to her last question, and frequently interrupts her co-presenter’s question with another question of her own. When interviewing a guest she knows personally, she always makes more than one personal reference, always of no relevance to the topic on which the interviewee has been invited to be interviewed. She appears never to filter her thoughts before expressing them out loud.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, she interviewed an Israeli who, with his wife, had been trapped by floods in a remote part of Nepal. They had walked a considerable distance to an area from where they were able to arrange transport back to civilization. This was so that they could return to their young children in Israel. They had, however, been forced to leave all but their essential possessions behind. He was on air to assure the listening public that the dozens of (mostly post-army) Israelis who were also trapped in the same area were well, had food and drink, and were in no danger. This must have been a tremendous comfort for parents who had lost contact with their children trapped in an area without mobile reception. Matzliach wasted a minute or two of this important interview ‘joking’ that, in their place, she would have stayed out of contact and enjoyed a longer holiday away from her children.

Matzliach frequently appears to forget that there is a radio audience of at least tens of thousands listening, and behaves as if she is at home alone. So, for example, she always sings along with the record chosen to break up the programme, despite her having, at best, a mediocre singing voice. To give another example, in a recent interview with someone she knew personally, she urged her co-presenter, on air, to ask the interviewee to send him a complimentary copy of the interviewee’s recent book (a book on a topic irrelevant to the interview).

However, what amazed me two weeks ago, was that, when her co-presenter, who is religious, mentioned that he would not be in the studio last Thursday because it was Tisha b’Av, she said: ‘Oh! Isn’t Tisha b’Av always in August?’ Maybe it is me that is being unreasonable, but it seems to me that an educated woman, with a BA in Israeli Literature, who has lived in Israel for over 60 years, should know that the Jewish religious calendar is not the same as the Gregorian solar calendar, that it includes leap-years in which an entire month is added, and that, in consequence, the timing of festivals and fast-days can vary from year to year by as much as 30 days, according to the Gregorian calendar. How can she not have noticed that Rosh Hashana is sometimes in early September and other times in early October?

It is difficult for me to escape the feeling that it is not that she does not know so much as that she has gone out of her way not to know, because she has convinced herself that there is nothing in the entirety of the Jewish religion that is worthy of her attention. She certainly makes a point of displaying her contempt for religion at every opportunity.

On the other hand, I find it very moving that this year a number of people who have never observed Tisha b’Av, and who, indeed, do not identify as religious, feel the threat of the country splitting apart is so strong that they decided to fast last Thursday.

Well, thank you for letting me get that off my chest.

All the kids and grandkids are back from their hols, but I can squeeze another week’s worth of pictures out of it. For Raphael, Storm the octopus seems to have overtaken Tiger as his constant companion, Ollie clearly loves his dad, and Tao has just been not-very-white-water rafting, taking all due precautions.

Clearly, there is only one topic to write about this week. As more and more of my friends line up on one or other side of the road with their Israeli flags and placards; as folk on the down escalators at Jerusalem railway station on their way to the pro-judicial-reform demonstration in Tel Aviv exchange friendly greetings (I kid you not) with folk on the up escalator on their way to the anti-judicial-revolution demonstration outside the Knesset in Jerusalem; as, inside the Knesset, legislators begin the day that will probably (possibly) end with the passing into law of the (Thin end of the wedge? First slice of salami? Or, just possibly, Only meagre scrap thrown by Bibi to placate his coalition lapdogs?); as eleven-and-three-quarterth-hour behind-the-scenes talks between representatives of the Prime Minister and the opposition possibly lead to a compromise; as said Prime Minister rushes from hospital, after a dizzy spell, a minor coronary event and the fitting of a pacemaker, to his office; as….

Enough, already. The chances that anything I write now, on Monday morning, will be at all relevant when you read it, at best at 9:01AM on Tuesday, are considerably less than the size of the majority of the voting public that voted for the bloc of parties identified as supporting Bibi as Prime Minister. Incidentally, if you want those figures, here they are, in a not-untimely reminder.

(If you don’t want the numbers, just be aware that the vote for and against the coalition parties was virtually split down the middle at the last general election. Much less than one per cent of the vote (under 30,000 votes) separated the two blocs. Now you can skip the next paragraph.)

Voter turnout was 70.6%. To put it another way, 29.4% of the electorate couldn’t get worked up enough to exercise their democratic right.
Of that 70.6% turnout, 1.49% voted either for parties that did not identify either with ‘Bibi’s’ bloc or with the ‘opposition’ bloc, or for parties that did not pass the electoral threshold and are, therefore, not represented in the Knesset.
Of the remainder, 50.32% of the votes were cast for parties that identified with ‘Bibi’s’ bloc and 49.68% of the votes were cast for parties that identified with the ‘opposition’ bloc.
In other words: only 29,951 more votes were cast for ‘Bibi’s’ bloc than for the ‘opposition’ bloc, out of an electorate of over 6,748,000, and out of a total number of votes cast of 5,110,927.

Whatever else you say about these figures, you cannot say that, as one letter writer did in the Jerusalem Post this morning, “…the only way our prime minister can save democracy is to go ahead with putting into effect the policies for which he was elected by a very comfortable majority of the voting public” [my emphasis]. 0.59% is not ‘a very comfortable majority’.

By the same token, over 100,000 turning out on the streets every week for over half a year are certainly demonstrating their own conviction and dedication, but they are not necessarily demonstrating the will of the vast majority of the country. They ‘only’ managed to muster 48.94% of the vote at the last election.

My particular position is that what all of these numbers show is that there is no way forward without finding common ground on which a majority of the population of the country can comfortably stand. We have a start: both sides rally round the flag. What we have to find now is a definition of what that flag stands for that all sides can sufficiently identify with to ensure that this Zionist project can continue.

In truth, this has always been the monumental challenge facing the Zionist endeavour, from its earliest days, through the foundation of the State, and in the 75 years since. The task has been easier in those periods when the external challenges facing us made us focus on standing shoulder to shoulder and temporarily putting aside our differences. However, even at its inception, when Israel was fighting an existential war even before it existed as a state, as the drafters of the Declaration of Independence wrestled with its wording, they struggled to find a formula that all 37 signatories would be able, in all conscience, to sign off on.

Hence the delicately ambiguous metaphorical language of the Declaration. The two signatory rabbis wished to include the phrase: “and placing our trust in the Almighty”. The secularist Mapam signatory strongly opposed this. The eventual wording used the phrase “the Rock of Israel”. which could be interpreted as referring either to God, or to the land and concept of Eretz Israel. Ben-Gurion said: “Each of us, in his own way, believes in the ‘Rock of Israel’ as he conceives it. I should like to make one request: Don’t let me put this phrase to a vote.”

We could do with some Ben-Gurionic fudging pragmatism today. Today is not a day for laying down your life on the battlements, but for co-existing in the stronghold. It is a day for reaching out, finding the common ground and building on that. If either side in this current struggle ‘wins’, then the country loses, and loses about half of the population. That cannot be a result that anyone wants to see.

As I say, anything I write now will, by the time you read it, only be useful for wrapping virtual phish, so I have decided not to write about what is happening in Israel today. And yet, somehow, that appears to be what I have done. All that remains is for me to explain today’s title.

The ostrich was what I thought I was going to be, burying my head in the sand of something whimsical, in order to avoid having to look at the political reality, thereby enabling me to pretend it doesn’t exist. That didn’t exactly work, did it?

The anchorman is what I planned to write about. What that means, you will have to wait a week to find out.

The good news (for me at least) is that I now have a ready-made topic, already completely plotted out in my head, for next week. Which means that I am looking forward to a stress-free week. (I told you to stop laughing at the back!)

And then we really do still need to talk about the cricket.

Until next week, may I wish all of those who are planning to fast from Wednesday night that there will be no need, because, by then, the Messiah will have come and the Temple will have been rebuilt; failing that, I wish you an easy and a meaningful fast; and finally, my fervent wish is that all of the House of Israel, both those who are fasting and those who are not, may find, in the commemoration of the fall of the Temple and of the end of Jewish sovereignty over the land, meaningful lessons for our current troubled times.

Meanwhile, everybody else seems to have escaped from Israel (some permanently, some temporarily), and to be having a wonderful time.

Ed Note: The Declaration of Independence (both in its original Hebrew and in English translation) is a fascinating subject, which can teach us a great deal about, among other things, the history of Zionism, the vision of Israel’s founders, and Israel’s relationship with world Jewry. Since it, like the flag, is both being invoked by the protestors against the judicial reforms, and being counter-invoked by the protestors in favour, it is worth revisiting at this time.
You can read the full text in Hebrew here and in English here.
A comprehensive overview and analysis by an emeritus professor of political science at Hebrew University can be read here.
Daniel Gordis writes a brief but fascinating article on it here.
The authors of an exhaustive and authoritative book on the Declaration also wrote an extended article giving the ‘biography’ of the Declaration, which you can read here.

Let me first describe how we got down from the cliff I left us hanging from last week. In the event, our journey home from Portugal was uneventfully smooth. As I write that, I am struck by just how low our expectations of air travel have sunk. What ‘uneventfully smooth’ means, in 2023, is that our drive to Lisbon was easy, as was returning the car and transferring by shuttle bus to the airport. Because everything was so hitch-free, we actually arrived at the airport over four hours before our flight was scheduled. All of the waiting for the check-in to open, queuing and processing took about two hours, so we had another two hours to kill in the airport departure lounge.

We boarded on time and then sat on the tarmac. After 15 minutes, the pilot announced that we were not being given clearance to fly yet, because of ‘heavy air traffic over Europe’. (In Hebrew, he actually said: ‘…over France and Iran’, but I assumed, and very sincerely hoped, that was a slip of the tongue and he meant Italy. ‘Heavy air traffic over Europe’? If only they had asked me, I could have advised them that air traffic is, indeed, heavy over Europe in mid-July. It is slightly disconcerting that this appeared to come as a surprise to air traffic control at Lisbon airport.

We sat on the tarmac for an hour, and then, after taxiing to the runway, sat for another ten minutes while two other flights landed. Thankfully, the air conditioning was working throughout this time. The result, unsurprisingly, was that we landed almost an hour late. So, there you have your answer. Spending four hours in an airport, then experiencing a 70-minute delay in departure, resulting in an arrival time an hour later than scheduled, is what constitutes ‘uneventfully smooth’ air travel in 2023.

Our last few days in Penamacor were low-key, but very enjoyable, although we all spent most of the time wandering around saying: ‘I don’t know where these four weeks have gone?!! We only just arrived!!’ In our last week, Lua seemed to have recovered from her lack of discipline when walking off the lead with me. Bernice cleverly worked out what had caused it.

One morning, on our walk, we had encountered a woman with two dogs, one a very friendly and lively dalmatian. Lua, who was traumatised as a puppy by a very cruel owner, is very much of a nervous disposition; when this dalmatian, off the lead, came loping towards her, she fled; the dalmatian, thinking this was a game, gave chase. Eventually, Lua ran all the way home, and my troubles with her began there.

However, as I say, I tried to take her for a walk again during our last week, and she behaved as beautifully as she usually does. On the Sunday and Monday morning, Tao decided that he wanted to join us on our morning walk. This represented, for Lua and myself, a trade-off. We both enjoy a vigorous walk of several kilometres in the morning, which, obviously, wasn’t possible with Tao. However, what we did get was an endless string of adventures. First, I got to stand lookout on the stretch of lawn in front of the sports hall, which, I discovered, is actually Tao’s pirate ship in disguise, complete with main mast (flagpole) and crow’s nest (retaining wall) from which I was required to keep an eagle eye open for any passing giant octopus.

We were also required to run races (me, with my two artificial hips, took inspiration from Andy Murray) to the tree at the side of the sports hall. Lua, unsurprisingly, won these races convincingly. We were then able to cool off by swimming in the lagoon, which I had previously heedlessly walked over every day, labouring under the delusion that it was a concrete platform. We even managed to work in some nature study, discussing the variety of shape and colouration of different trees’ leaves, and the way lichen always favours the same side of the tree.

A good walk with Lua is a great way to start the day, but a good walk around Tao’s ever-bubbling mind is a large part of the reason why we continue to put ourselves through these ‘uneventfully smooth’ journeys two or three times a year.

And then, all too soon, it was Tuesday, which was Ollie’s first birthday. We had a family celebration that included music and bubbles and decorations and individual frozen yoghourt cupcakes and blessings and wishes. Ollie was largely unmoved, although he gave his absolutely undivided attention to everyone’s blessings to him. He spends a lot of his time focussing with intensity on what others, especially his big brother, are doing. He is definitely taking it all in.

Then, there we were, saying our goodbyes, and then it was Wednesday, and we were unpacking in Maale Adumim, and then it was Sunday, and we were off to Zichron to catch up with Raphael, Esther and Maayan. Initially, Raphael was just a little wary of us in the flesh, rather than on the phone, but very, very soon we were back to our usual relationship.

He, of course, has changed while we have been in Portugal. His progress in walking and talking over the month were very noticeable. These Portugal trips involve a curious kind of not-really-catch-up, where, over the course of our month abroad, we watch Ollie ostensibly closing the gap between Raphael and himself, and then, when we return, we discover that Raphael is not where he was when we last saw him.

So now we switch back to the more normal routine of weekly visits to Raphael in person and a weekly video chat and story-time and puppet-show with Tao and, we hope, increasingly with Ollie.

Micha’el and family are, God willing, planning to come to Israel in the late autumn. We then plan to go to Portugal next in February–March, where, because it is a Jewish leap year, we will be able to stay later into March and, for the first time ever, celebrate Tao’s birthday with him. That’s something very special to look forward to.

Here’s Tao, enjoying Ollie’s birthday frozen yoghourt and fruit,

Raphael, enjoying a walk,

and Ollie, rejecting Tao’s doctor’s scissors in favour of one of his best-loved dance tunes.