A friend in need (of a new car) is a friend indeed

“Thirteen years I have lived in this country,” I ranted to my new classmate as we trudged out of the Hebrew University a few hours ago, “and I still don’t get it . . . in fact, I will never get it!”

I was sharing with Ofer what had been bothering me all day, probably for the very reason that I was not quite sure why . . .

After informing a friend (“Friend”) in Tel Aviv, yesterday (Wednesday) evening, that I was going to be spending today looking for a new car, he mumbled something about waiting for him to speak to the Volkswagen dealership from which he had recently purchased his Polo.

Chaver mavi chaver, I assumed – literally “A friend brings a friend”, a cash incentive common in these parts – and suggested that we split it (as is also common) ”chetzi-chetzi” (fifty-fifty). “Yes,” came the reply, without really sounding meant.

Accompanying me on the short walk up Lincoln and onto Yitzhak Sadeh (where the dealership is based), this morning, Friend came clean, informing me that he had told the salesman that he was bringing me and had already negotiated a free service for himself if I, too, purchase a VW.

I ruminated over this combina (see here and here) –  some might call it chutzpah –  all the way up Highway 1, this afternoon . . .

First, there was the knowledge that nothing in this country comes free, and that Friend’s ‘free’ service will definitely be coming off my end of the deal.

Troubling me considerably more, however, was the vulture mentality: What is it about the natives, that they have to get in/have an angle on absolutely bloody everything . . . even a mate forking out 20-25 thousand quid on a new car?! The same friend in England would have negotiated a bigger discount for me, rather than instinctively thinking what he could get out of the deal for himself. And it is not as if he had introduced me to “This wonderful thing called Volkswagen!” The showroom had been top of my list.

Perhaps I am just a meany – indeed, that was Ofer’s take: “Lama ata lo rotzeh lefargen?” (effectively, “Why don’t you want Friend to receive his just reward?”) – though, more likely, it just wasn’t very comfortable having to gaze in the mirror.

[With the time constraints of being back at school, but still getting the occasional urge to write, posts from now on will be shorter . . . if, as above, not sweeter!]

You see what happens, Hamas . . .

“Don’t be silly,” I reassure Itzik, as we sip on our sachlabs on Rothschild, early last Thursday evening. “Nothing will happen in Tel Aviv.”

It might as well be the cue for the siren.

There are a surreal couple of seconds, during which the occupants of adjacent tables exchange puzzled, yet pregnant, glances: “Is it . . . ? What now . . . ?”

I jump up, as if stabbed with a shot of adrenaline. The dogs bark. We dart inside the café, my spanking new Galaxy S II abandoned alongside the sachlab. Clive Dunn has only been gone a week, and I have already forgotten his famous advice (though discovering that it is true, no one “like[s] it up ’em”). It is the first time I have experienced a siren not marking the commencement of Shabbat or a Holocaust/Remembrance Day.

We all huddle together at the rear of the café. A 60-something female hears my accent and, as if encouraging a boy to consummate his transition to manhood, asks me if it is my “first time”. I nod sheepishly. She imparts advice that I am in no state to listen to.

A distant boom. Perhaps two. And, within half an hour, I am home, packed, and on Highway 1 . . . on my way to the capital. I am ‘caught’ by my neighbours in the act of attempting to wheel my bag quietly out of the building. “I am not escaping,” I protest. “I have a fortieth birthday party in Jerusalem!” And it is true. But I don’t expect them to believe me. And I don’t think they do.

I tease Itzik – a Tel Aviv real estate agent who has continually belittled my second home in Jerusalem – from the car, telling him that he won’t be getting a key (‘forcing’ the coward into having to stay, instead, with his father in Petach Tikva).

And Itzik is the first to call me, gloating, the following early evening, within seconds of the siren sounding in the capital. I have darted into the stairwell, where the neighbours are quickly gathering, before shooting back in for my flatmates. My Orthodox neighbour overcomes her fear of Stuey and Dexxy, whom, until now, she has refused to even pass on the stairs. “Shit,” I exclaim, in an attempt to lighten the tension, “I left the back window open.” But the attempt at humour is lost.

I meet an American woman on Saturday who is considering taking refuge in London. Who am I to judge? I still do. And I delete an old law school friend from Facebook after he publishes this photo (right) with the caption: “Address this, Mark Regev . . .”

In fact, the next time I hear a Palestinian talk about ‘his’ olive tree, I will make it my job to find said plant, uproot it, and stick it up his . . . well, in a place that it will get no light. These people attach no value to human life, never mind olive trees.

Make no mistake, when Hamas talks about an “end to the Occupation” (which, in principle, I am also in favour of ending), it is talking about an end to Israel. And, if it was up to me, I would bring those fuckers [complaints, please, to John Fisher – he doesn’t approve of the asterisk] to their knees before even agreeing to listen to talk about a ceasefire.

There is a wonderful feeling of togetherness here at present. I had been putting the finishing touches to a blog critical of Israelis. But I can’t publish it now. These are special people. And they are giving their all for our People . . . and – if the world would only open its eyes – for the values that civilised people everywhere hold dear.

To the residents of the south, we should have empathised more fully with your sacrifice and suffering, and with the intolerable circumstances under which you have had to live this past decade. To former Defence Minister Amir Peretz, respect for promoting – when few believed in it (or you) – Iron Dome. And to the soldiers awaiting your orders on the edge of Gaza, though it looks unlikely now that you will receive them, chazak ve’ematz.

Once again, however, I leave the last words to the great – though oft misunderstood – Walter Sobchak . . .

CLICK HERE

Hamas would have done well to heed the lesson of Mr. Sobchak – as, from now on, would Iran and even Egypt (which, respectively, have supplied and allowed unhindered passage of the missiles used to attack us) – though I sincerely hope that the IDF has been picking its targets rather more calmly and prudently!

[See also Airstrike on Gaza: Israel’s Right of Self-Defence, F*ck you, too and Days of Awe, Heroes and Whores . . . sadly, all still as relevant today as they were nearly four years ago.]

Highlands and Holy Lands: Observations from Civilisation

While I find a ten-day getaway, each year, to some remote part or other of the British Isles to be conducive to my state of mental well-being, it can also leave me feeling rather worse than when I left, constituting a much-needed break from life in this mad little place, on the one hand, but also a painful reminder of the ‘small’ things that we can never enjoy here.

Pulling into passing spaces to give way to oncoming cars on single lane country roads in the Scottish Highlands in June – always accompanied, of course, with a courteous, if perfunctory, wave of the hand – it occurs to me that such an arrangement could never work back home . . .

With the British and Irish, there is instant, mutual understanding of which vehicle of the two should enter the space, based on an assessment of relative: proximity to it at the point of cognition, velocity, vehicle size, etc.

With Israelis, however, such mutual consideration, and respect for the unwritten rules of the road, would, instead, turn into a potentially lethal game of “chicken”, with the driver with the more chutzpah and chest, back and shoulder hair winning the day.

I also enjoy, on my trips, the endearing ability of the English (especially) to talk enthusiastically on any subject, however ostensibly mundane. In an Ardnamurchan Peninsula hotel bar, one evening, I sit spellbound through a half-hour discussion, between the English proprietor and a patron, of the establishment’s problematic central heating system. Until the Croatia vs. Spain Euro 2012 kick-off brings a premature end to the excitement, I learn that boiler “recoverability”, not capacity, is what really matters.

I attempt in vain to imagine a similar scenario – and without audience mutterings of “ya Allah” (dear God) and “me’anyen et hasavta sheli” (literally, it interests my grandmother) – back home, where Iran, high-level corruption, making a fast shekel and plastic media ‘personalities’ appear to be the only subjects which animate.

The realization that my all too brief reintroduction to civilisation is at an end is always harsh and sudden, upon arrival at the Departures check-in desk, with the invariable, tense standoff between incredulous gentile airline staff and my adopted compatriots, as well as Stamford Hill charedim, muttering of anti-Semitism and beseeching that:

• the 20 kilo hold allowance really allows up to 35 kilos;
• the one-piece-of-hand-luggage rule does not preclude it being stuffed with weights or being accompanied onboard with an unlimited number of plastic bags; and
• the airline’s hand luggage size frame is not really binding, but for guidance purposes only.

Just in case I hadn’t  noticed that I was back in the country, on arrival at work the following morning, I am pinned to the rear elevator wall as I attempt to exit on my floor. The natives exhibit quite curious elevator etiquette: when elevator doors open here, those on the outside, rather than letting people exit, immediately stampede in, as if they have been tipped off that a buffet of burekas – cheese, potato, and spinach – awaits them at the back.

And my mind drifts back to those dreamy passing spaces . . .

The Old Forge, Knoydart Peninsula: Britain’s remotest pub

Foot in Mouth Disease: The Shortest Date

I recently had my shortest ever date (excluding, of course, the lovely Odelia). It lasted a grand total of six minutes. And it was still too long.

I am not quite sure why I agreed to meet Irit. She was a nagger even on the phone. But there was something appealing about her JDate mugshot that led to me to grant her an audience.

We met on a sweltering Tuesday afternoon, the last day of July. And as Irit approached the agreed meeting point (the corner of Gordon and Shlomo Hamelech), a waddling breach of the Trade Descriptions Act, the cumulation of recent dating disappointments at once got the better of me.

“I just can’t do this anymore,” I wailed to myself, even as I was squeezing Irit’s chubby hand. “Yet another wasted hour and a half, with my brain switched off and my tongue on autopilot.”

Until that infamous afternoon, I had always been the perfect(ish) gentleman on blind dates, not budging until the ninety minutes were up (this had always seemed to me, for no good reason in particular, the minimum decent amount of time to give someone, however little interest I had in the contents of their cranial cavity and/or underwear).

On this occasion, however, as I slouched back in the moulded plastic café seat, I could not have made it any clearer to Irit, however unconsciously, that I just did not want to be there.

My initial faux pas was asking Irit to remind me where her father – estranged from her mother I seemed to recall, from our single telephone conversation the previous week – lived in the States.

“That must have been another woman,” came the reply, without so much as a smidgeon of amusement.

It had been. And while I managed to come up with some feeble, muttered excuse for that blunder, the daggers were clearly about to turn to tears – I was also, it would seem, the final straw in Irit’s dating disappointments – when, next question up, I mistook her folks’ Jerusalem-area moshav for the other’s mother’s Yavneh kibbutz.

“Look,” I said, with a completely unjustified air of defiance, “you are not the only woman I have spoken to . . .”

“It is just insulting,” Irit cut me off, clearly determined to twist the knife even further in my, now nearly fully flaked, veneer of decency. And she was, of course, entirely justified (why oh why hadn’t I heeded my own advice – see the final subheading in Dating Israeli Women: A Guide by the Perplexed – to keep notes?!)

85 minutes now seemed like a very long time indeed – an Israeli woman in revolt and one I had no interest in placating – and there was only one thing for it . . .

“Look, Irit, you don’t have to stay. I’ll get the drinks.”

And, while far from proud of my performance (even our Cilla would have had difficulty laughing it off), I was feeling more relief than guilt as Irit took me up on my offer, getting up and departing the scene. Indeed, I supped my iced coffee engrossed not in self-loathing but in Yediot’s air conditioner ads, and still with the presence of mind to get Irit’s untouched order removed from the bill!

But had I behaved any better (if less deceitfully) than the dread Odelia, who had blown me out (cf. off) with a babysitter-mayse before we had even taken our seats?

Rather than be driven to this, or nasty porkies à la Odelia, an instantaneous shake of the head and direct, Simon Cowell-style “I don’t think so (You Are Not Mike’s New Talent)” must surely be a better way, for all concerned, of terminating a date with about as much of a future as a certain chinless Syrian.

And we’re still fond of you, Moz!

I knew you were something different, Moz, as soon as I – not-so-sweet sixteen, in November 1983 – saw you for the first time, swinging those gladioli on Top of the Pops.

And I can still hear my mother mimicking the “uh-huh-hos” blaring from my bedroom after I had raced back from Our Price, Brent Cross, with my The Smiths cassette.

I was in your audience in Tel Aviv, yesterday evening.

And at a time that most of the world is kicking us in the nadgers – the IOC refusing a minute’s silence for the 11 Israelis murdered in Munich and spineless muppets like Marc Almond cancelling gigs here, for fear of offending Islamofascist anti-Semites and their Israel-only bashing apologists – I thank you, Moz, for standing by us.

Unlike Leonard Cohen (who felt he had to ‘justify’ his concert here by turning it into a peace circus) and Dylan (who couldn’t bring himself to share a single word with his audience), you were with us heart and soul.

And seeing you parade and drape yourself in kachol ve’lavan means more to us (or, at least, to me) than you can imagine . . . I mean, I know it doesn’t make you Theodor Herzl; but sadly, in these dark days, merely not being ashamed to be associated with Israel is, in itself, huge.

Indeed, I will even pardon you for not performing the greatest song of all time!

Todah, Moz . . . you are our light that never goes out.

Morrissey in Tel Aviv, yesterday evening

[For more photos and videos of yesterday's gig, click here.]

John McCarthy: Now where’s that radiator?

I forgot to turn off my Internet radio, last night. It’s a fantastic piece of gear, that can broadcast BBC Radio 5 Live to Jaffa . . . if you want to hear it, that is.

Having dozed off to debate about Roy Hodgson’s suitability as new England football manager (horrid that the media and ‘fans’ are already getting on his case), I half woke up, at 5 a.m., to a 30-minute conversation with former Lebanon hostage, John McCarthy, about his new book, You Can’t Hide the Sun: A Journey Through Israel and Palestine.

Now, McCarthy – held by Islamic Jihad for over 5 years, longer than any other Briton in Lebanon – comes across as a perfectly decent and reasonable bloke, without agenda or malice, the type of English ex-public schoolboy with whom you might strike up a pleasant conversation over tea and scones in the Kenwood House café. The journalist and BBC Radio 4 presenter is certainly not – on the face of it, at least – the type to “salute” Saddam, to make “concentration camp guard” jibes to Jewish reporters, or who “might just consider becoming [a suicide bomber].”

The pages in his Haileybury twentieth century history book referring to the 1948/49 Arab-Israeli War, however, must have been torn out by a previous student, because McCarthy, this morning, referred to it as a “civil war” – i.e., between civilians of the same country – when it was, of course, fought between a ragtag Jewish army and a military coalition of seven Arab states and foreign volunteers (of whom McCarthy made absolutely no mention), in addition to native Arabs.

Indeed, McCarthy’s ridiculously one-sided account of 1948/49 made Jewish soldiers sound more like Bosnian Serb and Croat ethnic cleansers than fighters against an alliance sworn to the destruction of their nascent state (mandated by the 1947 UN Partition Plan).

McCarthy’s interviewer, Up All Night presenter Rhod Sharp, didn’t once challenge his account. Perhaps he knows no better. But why couldn’t I imagine the same happening had his guest, instead, been Benjamin Netanyahu or even Shimon Peres?

As it turns out, the only tea I will be sharing with McCarthy is the contents of my pot, over his head . . .

Towards the end of the conversation, describing a card game that he stumbled across in the northern city of Acre (Acco) while interviewing Israeli Arabs for his book, McCarthy told of his surprise at discovering that an Iraqi-born Jew, keen to use his mother tongue, had been accepted into the group. This “common humanity,” McCarthy said, gives him some hope for the future.

“The trouble is,” the Arabs told him, “he takes our money from us every day.”

Indeed. Those clever Jews.

When his agent advises him that Michael Parkinson only interviews people who have actually done things, David Brent, referring to McCarthy, replies:

“He had that guy in Lebanon who spent years chained to a radiator. What did he do? Nothing! He was chained to a radiator!”

With all McCarthy’s shameful disinformation about Israel and Jews, we can only be sorry that he is not still there.

You can listen to the Up All Night interview with John McCarthy here (2:05.48-2:32.45).

Luzon my religion: Israel’s not-so-beautiful game

“No need for excuses,” quipped a fellow Anglo-Israeli on the phone, as I was attempting to explain why I was at Maccabi Tel Aviv vs. Rishon Le’tzion (and thus couldn’t hear him). And Ron had not missed the irony. There was, indeed, a need for excuses!

While going to football in England is an Update status-worthy event – “At the Emirates,” “the Lane,” etc (though less, it must be said, “Elland Road”) are oft seen on Facebook – only the most secure will own up to attending games in Israel, or even to watching them on telly.

All of which makes it all the more curious that everyone here is up in arms about the mass brawl at Hapoel Ramat Gan vs. Bnei Lod on Friday afternoon (Haaretz), surely the most entertainment ever witnessed on an Israeli football pitch . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIFz0uf2I-o

I had been trying to tell Ron that, as the (not-so-proud) owner of a Maccabi Tel Aviv season ticket, I had no choice but to go to games. If there is some way of measuring such things, however, I am confident that the ticket represents one of the worst ever returns on 1,200 shekels (around two hundred pounds).

The excuse for my moment of madness was that I had just moved to within a few hundred metres of Bloomfield Stadium, the home of Tel Aviv’s biggest clubs, Hapoel and Maccabi (I chose the latter because I am forbidden from wearing red). And it is a measure of the wretchedness of the Israeli soccer experience – the football is crap, the officials are worse, and the spectators are largely odious, knowing nothing about The Beautiful Game – that, when I am at Bloomfield, I find myself daydreaming about wet, blustery evenings at Hendon FC.

“There’s only one Itzik Zohar . . .
one too many.”

While it is not only Israeli footballers who are knobs, they don’t have the excuse of the Bests, Gascoignes and Cantonas, or even of the Collymores, Di Canios and Balotellis, i.e., that they can play. Strutting, play-acting tossers and prima donnas like the ars’s ars, Itzik Zohar (right, now a TV pundit) – widely considered by Crystal Palace fans (this one, for instance) to be one of the club’s worst ever signings (no mean feat, I can tell you!) – and my own personal bête noire (having had to suffer him all season), Maccabi captain Barak Itzhaki, don’t have any such excuse.

What I have, however, gained from my season ticket is an understanding of why Israeli football fans leave piles of garinim (sunflower seed) shells on terrace floors – it gives them something to do for 90 minutes (I, too, have now adopted the custom) – and familiarity with a wide variety of Hebrew songs, from Mi shelo kofetz adom (Whoever doesn’t jump is red [i.e., Hapoel]) to Ima shelachem zona (Your mother is a whore), nearly all sung to the identical tune. Indeed, 90 minutes at Bloomfield makes a visit to the nearby Ramat Gan Safari entirely unnecessary.

“If they were at all capable of reflection, the monkeys who booed [Ran] Ben Shimon out [of Maccabi Tel Aviv] – following Saturday’s home defeat to Kiryat Shmona, ironically his former charge that got him his position – will come to regret their mindlessness. A 38-year old coach who, last season, took the relative nobodies from the northern border to 3rd place, in their very first season in the top flight, will obviously go on to greater things. His successor, Avi Nimni – however great a player for Maccabi – probably won’t.”

I published the above – in Ran Ben Shimon: A Deeper Malaise – on November 3, 2008. Earlier this month, Kiryat Shmona clinched its first ever championship – the first to be won by a club outside Israel’s three major cities in nearly 30 years – under Ben Shimon (who rejoined the club as coach in April 2009). And, no, Avi Nimni didn’t.

While it is poor taste to say “I told you so” (but I’ve started so I’ll finish), the malaise to which I referred in that second post to melchett mike was not just of players and fans, but of Israeli football as a whole. It starts at the very top, with Israeli Football Association chairman Avi Luzon (and family) – more dodgy than Ken Bates after a little tamper with the wheels of his Zimmer frame – and is encouraged by media coverage of the most moronic kind, giving Zohar, Eyal Berkovic and Eli Ohana, the dickheads of the “double pass,” free rein to puff up their already over-inflated egos (see Moti, you ain’t no Motty!)

. . . and there is only one "Special One."

Ohana (right) was wonderfully lampooned in a recent Yediot Aharonot article – showing that it is not only snooty English olim who are fed up with the know-it-all local football coverage – for his studio criticism of the tactics of Real Madrid coach, José Mourinho:

“As the inhabitants of Blah-Blah Land, we have got used to the idiotic nonsense of blabbermouth commentators, but there is a limit even to chutzpah. Sitting there is [Ohana] the coach of the Israeli youth team, the big shot who succeeded, in his last examination in the league, in relegating Kfar Saba to the second division – of a calibre that, even in the Maccabiah (against Jewish teenagers who looked more likely to win a bible quiz), had to make to do with the bronze medal – and he is giving a lecture on football to the coach who has won the Champions League twice, taken six domestic championships in three different countries, with a seventh in a fourth on the way. It is almost like [Israeli singer] Avihu Shabat criticising John Lennon or [comedian] Shahar Hasson slagging off Jerry Seinfeld.”

The bottom line is that most Israelis (including TV and media pundits), however much they love the game, don’t – for a reason that I cannot quite fathom – truly understand it (or, at least, not in the same way that we do). This was most apparent, yesterday evening, watching Barcelona vs. Chelsea with half a dozen natives, who were constantly whingeing about the West Londoners playing “boonker” (i.e., defensively). How exactly did they expect them to play, protecting a lead against Lionel Messi and Co. at the Nou Camp, with a place in the Champions League final at stake? With expansive football?!

Needless to say, I won’t be renewing my season ticket.

And there isn’t any proper cricket here, either. Still, there are the women. There is the weather, too. And the food. And golden memories of footballers who could both “mix it” and play . . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8kxMnc5KUs

To all readers of melchett mike – whether Maccabi, Hapoel, or even Bnei Yehuda – happy barbecuing!

Buying in Bet Shemesh: Let the freier beware!

I had to laugh just now, perusing The Jerusalem Post’s Passover Real Estate supplement (passed down to me, JC-style, by my mother).

On page 10 of the magazine, Jerusalem and environs real estate agent Shelly Levine lists a 51-cottage project in Sheinfeld, Bet Shemesh (see Spitters and splitters: what have the charedim ever done for us?) as one of her “five best picks” in and around the capital, giving more than a little credence to my contention – in Be a wise buyer, not a foreign freier: a guide to the world of Israeli real estate – that agents “will sell their own mothers to do a deal.”

But the opinion of Levine, President of “savvy agency” Tivuch Shelly, is seemingly held in high regard. “Not a day passes,” she informs readers, “when real estate buyers or investors don’t ask me, ‘What’s THE best place to buy now in Jerusalem?’”

Bet Shemesh, December 2011: THE best place to buy now, Shelly?

And you will never guess who we discover, a mere 22 pages later, to be conducting “Exclusive sales” of the Bet Shemesh cottages . . . yes, it’s our Shelly!

In describing Sheinfeld as “the internationally acclaimed pace-setting community . . . with full spiritual facilities,” Levine must have had in mind “one-of-a-kind” scenes and neighbours – a mere stone’s throw/spitting distance away from her project – like these, these and these.

Even if you still believe, however, that in Bet Shemesh you will find “top quality of life in a value-driven environment,” I suggest that, when sitting down to talk money, you make the vendor watch one of the following reports: in Hebrew or English.

[In the Rosh Hashanah 5773 edition of Real Estate: Grad deals in Sderot! Only a few homes remaining.]

Brothers and sisters, stop yer wailing!

Tomorrow marks 50 days since young Ethiopians set up a protest tent at the top of my street.

I walk Stuey and Dexxy past the tent – situated outside the Prime Minister’s Residence, on the same spot that the Shalit tent stood for three and a half years – with its “Stop Racism” and “Apartheid 2012” signs, most mornings. And, if you ask me, there are just some people you can never please.

Admitted, Israel’s 120,000 Ethiopians suffer institutional racism and discrimination, and enormous economic, employment-related and educational hardship – unemployment is over double that in the Jewish population as a whole, nearly three-quarters of Ethiopian families live below the poverty line, and their children are forced to attend separate kindergartens and schools – but, hello-o, would Ethiopians prefer to still be living in Africa, with its famines, droughts, human rights abuses and civil wars, rather than in Israel, with Big Brother and The Voice?!

Many passers-by clearly also have difficulty understanding what it is exactly that that the tent-dwellers want . . .

“My parents and their 17 children walked here from Morocco in 1955,” one woman told me. “We lived on leaves and grass,” she continued, “but we didn’t complain.”

And an elderly gentleman, born in Yemen, said: “We are also black . . . I mean, lighter than them, but still black. And it wasn’t easy with those bastard Ashkenazim, I can tell you! But we succeeded. And we did it through hard work, not charity.”

And, while we are on the subject, my aliyah wasn’t easy either. I had to share the ulpan/absorption centre with at least two dozen French, and – with the exception of the half-wit who walked around screaming “You fuck my wife?” (the only sentence that he knew, having apparently spent all of his high school leçons d’anglais memorising the script of Raging Bull) – the swines refused to speak a word of English.

And not all the new olim came with cash in the bank. Indeed, one of the Russian lasses was even said to have run a knocking shop from her bedroom (tragically, I only tend to discover such things when it is too late).

So, Ethiopian brothers and sisters, in the prophetic words of (your) Bob, you’ve gotta be “iron like a lion in Zion”: see your Israeli cup as half full . . . and stop yer wailing!

From Raleigh C to Petach T: Musings on Shul

The theory of Primary Return-to-Womb Craving describes the infant’s resentment at his extrusion from the womb, and his longing to return to it. And while this infant has, thankfully, got over the loss of that particular sanctuary, he has experienced greater difficulty in overcoming that of another: his former home town shul. I just haven’t found anywhere to replace Raleigh Close (see When Kol Nidrei really was Kol Nidrei).

I can no longer, since making Aliyah, describe myself as a shul-goer. Indeed, the synagogue attendance line of my JDate profile reads “Sometimes” only because “For Kaddish” is not an option in the drop-down list (see A queer kaddish at the Melchett minyan). I suppose it might be different if I had kids, though definitely if the strength of my belief in “The Big G” (and I am not talking Gooch, Gatting or Gascoigne) – or, at least, in the Orthodox Jewish conception of Him (see Orthodox to Reform: Losing my neshama?) – could not fairly be compared (though by someone less reverent than me) to a middle-aged erection.

As a result, prayer, for me, has only ever really been about superstition, bet-hedging, and football: I admit, with no little shame, to having recited a particularly kavanadik Shemoneh Esrei in the car park of a South Yorkshire service station on the way to a Leeds v Glasgow Rangers Champions League tie. Needless to say, it didn’t help. And, a few months later, towards the conclusion of an FA Cup marathon against Arsenal – and having learned nothing from my earlier heresy – I vowed to the friend standing next to me, as Gary McAllister was lining up his free-kick, that I would attend shul more regularly if he scored. He did. But so, too, subsequently, did Ian Wright. Twice. And I felt justified to renege.

Otherwise, I recite the first paragraph of the Shema on take-off, during turbulence – at the point it starts inducing mutually empathetic looks between passengers (who, previously, hadn’t even noticed one another) – and when awaiting the results of medical tests. Indeed, when observing folk deep in prayer these days, they appear to me to be faintly ridiculous, and even, on extreme occasion, mentally ill. Anyway, repeating that He is the main man/real deal/bee’s knees in scores of different ways just doesn’t do it for me (and, more to the point, neither, I suspect, does it do it for Him).

But none of that seemed to matter in Hendon (see Hendon: Just Nostalgic Illusion?) And Raleigh Close still is, for me, Shul, both in terms of community and its many, quite indelible characters . . .

• legendary shammes Moshe Steinhart and his blundering, malapropism-littered announcements, awaited considerably more eagerly than the rabbi’s sermon [convey my apologies, please, Dan Gins];
• the gangling, mustachioed choirmaster – imagine the love child of Freddie Mercury and Russ Abbot – with equally deliberate, exaggerated (and ridiculous) conducting and leining styles;
• the young shockler who would sway so violently during prayer that one almost expected his head to fly off his shoulders, and who was once catalyst for a communal debate on Derech Eretz when the minister, wanting to commence his sermon, was ‘forced’ to wait for him to finish Shemoneh Esrei;
• the little man who would storm out in mid-sermon (“He’s off!” would be the excited whisper) if – or, more accurately, when – he disapproved of any of its contents;
• the large one who perceived it as a personal slight – and so many shul-goers (Jews?) love nothing more than to imagine these – whenever a hat or tallis bag was innocently placed on a sill of the stained glass windows endowed in memory of his parents: “Do you mind,” would come the familiar bellow, “that window belongs to my parents!”;
• the even larger one still who, for some reason known only to him, took it upon himself to be sole guardian of the Simchas Torah whisky supply;
• the pensioner who would openly fill her coat pockets from the Community Centre kiddush tables, as well as the various others who you just knew wouldn’t budge an inch to let you get at a piece of that herring;
• Angelo the caretaker, whose physique and bone-breaking handshakes made Goldfinger’s Oddjob look like a pansy in a bowler; and
• the seemingly permanently irate member whose tirades, raising awkward (and important) issues that no one else dared to, would get more bums on seats at AGMs than the right to vote for another tit in a topper.

With Yahrzeit for my late father falling on a recent Shabbos – not the quick, painless, weekday tefillah for me, this year – I ‘enjoyed’ two contrasting experiences that proved to me that there is nowhere quite like shul to study the excesses, idiosyncrasies and neuroses of my fellow Yeed . . .

On the Friday evening, before dinner at a friend’s in the area, I attend Mekor Chaim, a ‘Germanic’ establishment on Petach Tikva’s Rechov Frankfurter. Now, Yekkes are renowned for their near-obsessive timekeeping and attention to detail. And it is no myth: I arrive, five minutes early, to an empty synagogue; but, by the opening words of Ashrei, it is virtually full.

Standing at the back (always my favourite spot in shul), minding my own business, awaiting the arrival of my friend Henry, it becomes increasingly apparent that I am unsettling the shul’s gabbeh. He asks me to take a seat on at least three occasions, with increasing levels of assertiveness. I do so, but am then told to vacate the one I have chosen because it doesn’t have a little green sticker. These, I discover, have been painstakingly positioned on (the identical spot of carpentry of) every seat in the shul not belonging to someone. When I inform the gabbeh that I am waiting for Henry, he leads me to his seat and tells me to sit in it.

The problem when Henry arrives, however, is that the free seat next to his also doesn’t have a little green sticker. Henry directs a glance at the octogenarian on the other side of it as if to say “He is my guest, do you think it would be okay . . . ?”, but, met with a look of “Rules are rules”, thinks better of it and plants himself in the row in front.

In view of Mekor Chaim’s obvious puritanism, I am rather uncomfortable at being introduced to complete strangers, even ex-Hasmos, after the service as “melchett mike”. The last time I had been in a shul this strict – the Golders Green Beth Hamedrash, better known as Munk’s (Mekor Chaim, I later discover, is known to its expat members as “Munk’s Lite”) – was 32 years ago, for Johny Finn’s bar mitzvah. On that occasion, I received an unceremonious whack to the back of the head from a complete stranger – for talking during leining – so savage that my cousin still delights at the mere recollection.

Anyway, it is not Raleigh Close.

The unbending strictures of more Orthodox shuls can, when combined with the rather more flexible business ethics of certain of their members, result in seemingly glaring moral contradictions. At Brent Street’s Hendon Adass (consisting largely of refugees from central and eastern Europe), for example, a husband and wife partial to a post-service peck on the cheek were said to have received a letter from shul management warning them to refrain from such lewd acts. Several other congregants, on the other hand, returning from prison terms for offences of fraud and deception, were in receipt of no more than a “Boruch haboh!”

Such shuls can also be a vehicle for wonderful comedy. My favourite Hendon Adass story is of the brothers who, one Yom Kippur, informed their younger sibling, who wished to go home and eat, that the rabbi held the keys to congregants’ homes. They then watched the five-year old walk up the hushed aisle and repeatedly tug on the tallis covering the head of Rabbi Pinchos Roberts – severe at the best of times, never mind on the Day of Atonement – who, when he eventually peered down, was met with the now legendary words: “Goldberg. 1 Shirehall Lane.”

Shabbos morning at the Central Synagogue in Jaffa (yes, a long walk from Petach Tikva) is a different proposition altogether. Founded by Romanian olim, but now attended by a hotchpotch of 17 (I counted) males of predominantly Sephardic origin, its kaddish – unlike that in Petach Tikva, recited in mutually considerate unison from around the bimah – is an exercise in who can bawl the loudest.

Later in the day, attempting to slip off sharpish after Havdalah (to beautify myself for a date), I am accosted by the shul nutter – there is always one – who, refusing to accept my pleas that I am not an American, insists on getting my telephone number.

“I don’t know it by heart,” I reply, congratulating myself on my ingenuity, until Nutter insists, after locating a pen, on giving me every one of his four numbers, each of which he inscribes with the numeric dexterity of a 3-year old.

Most definitely not Raleigh Close. And I am relieved to get back to Stuey and Dexxy.

A week and a half ago, however, imbibing the spirit of Jerusalem and (with no kaddish commitment) just looking for a nice Friday evening shul experience, I receive a tip-off about HaNassi, an Anglo minyan on Rechov Ussishkin, a mere seven minutes’ walk from my new home. And, while hardly identifying with the overtly political nature of the rabbi’s Purim handout – not to mention his contention that one’s choice of fancy dress is “an expression of the real person . . . illustrat[ing] the innermost desire to really be what the costume represents” (I had dressed up, the previous evening, as a camp sailor) – it is lovely to be surrounded by familiar, ex-Raleigh Close faces.

“This is not for you,” opines another Henry, who, while seemingly pleased to see me, is certain that I am looking for a younger crowd.

But he is quite mistaken. This is exactly for me. See you on Friday!