Settling in


This sign is stencilled to walls all round my neighbourhood and I couldn't work out what it meant. First, I thought it was pointing the way to a bathroom as it was often on the wall of a synagogue and people like to wash their hands before praying. But then I looked it up and it turns out to be something more prosaic but no less significant.

It means "shelter" and it points the way to your nearest refuge should Ahmadinejad or someone send a missile this way. (I think we are out of range of Hezbollah or Hamas right now, but who knows?) I went and found the nearest one to my house but I couldn't see the way in and I don't really know if it's still in use. However there are quite a lot of old people in my area so presumabaly, in the event of an attack, I could follow the trail of slightly crabby women in wigs, zimmer-framing their way to safety and find out where to go.

When I looked up the word, I found that it was connected to the Hebrew root for "to take in, absorb, understand, comprehend". The word is more like "reception" than "shelter" and it was nice to imagine people welcoming you into this place of safety and making an effort to understand and comprehend where you came from. That was so much a value of the early days of Israel, with its waves of immigrants coming here to escape a dangerous life elsewhere and it is still an important Jewish value. Whether Israel as a society still holds those values dear is another discussion.

We are in our fourth week of Hebrew and it's going pretty well. We have all gained the confidence to talk in Hebrew, at least in class, and we are often to be found chattering merrily away with our present-tense verbs and phenomenally limited volcabulary. I think we are somewhere about the level of "I want to go to the shap to buyed the pencil" (infinitives turn out to be pretty tough in Hebrew) but we're happy and we seem to get our meaning across with each other. That said, the lure of English is always present, like some huge electromagnet under the floor, ready to pull us down from our Hebrew flights of creativity. The phrase, "In Hebrew [insert name here], in Hebrew..." (though in Hebrew, of course) is becoming a pretty regular request from our teacher.

I went to a concert last night with Zubin Mehta conducting the Israel Philharmonic. The programme was Bach (a cantata) and Bloch's 'Holy Service', which sets many of the synagogue prayers to some stirring music for orchestra, baritone and choir. You couldn't really imagine it in even the grandest of synagogues but it's a good piece nevertheless. I got the cheapest seat in the house, right up in the balcony, but as the concert hall was built in the 1950s or 1960s, the acoustic was great and I could see fine (though I still have no idea what you are meant to look at at a classical concert). When we came out it was still warm and there was a lovely full moon in the sky so I decided to walk home - until a cab came past and I flagged it down and jumped in.

Today I am saying goodbye to almost the last of my friends from the first half of the course, so it's a dinner out somewhere nice but cheap and some more fond farewells.

Oh, and Gordon Brown has been in town, but no one seems to have noticed. The traffic jams on the big intersection outside college were marginally longer than usual but that was about it. By contrast, Obama arrives today, which will be a very different kettle of fish. I mean, he might even say something anti-Israel...