Self fulfilling prophecy

The weekend rolled into a bit of a blur. I spent a rather lovely afternoon with Philippa on Friday, working first in a hotel bar in Shoreditch, before going back to her house to walk the dogs. Yes, the dogs. Philippa has acquired a pair of dogs! They are rescue hounds from Cyprus. I can’t tell you what make and model they are, largely because they’re something I can neither spell nor pronounce nor had ever heard of before, but they are black, and look a little like a cross between a King Charles Spaniel and a dachshund.

We took them for a walk in Haggerston Park and, despite having foul breath, they are incredibly good-natured animals. It strikes me what a wonderful cure for loneliness having a dog must be. Dog owners always talk to one another - often in quite a lot of depth - whilst their dogs tear about in the fields. Of course, the great tragedy is that the dog owners you want to talk to are often the ones with dogs your own creature snarls at or tries to tear apart! Treacle and Cocoa latched onto the dog of an incredibly boring, somewhat loquacious and slightly clingy woman who we were forced to hide from in the end.

I was up early and in shul on Saturday morning. We had a six-voice choir on account of it being Trevor Toube’s birthday. He’s a stalwart of the synagogue and a great lover of music. We stood in the middle of the space, and it turns out that this has a very positive effect on both the acoustic and our ability to watch the conductor and listen to each other. Possibly as a result, we sang rather beautifully. My own setting of Eitz Haim Hi had been programmed, which is always a treat, and it was good to see how well it went down. The Rabbi even made a point of coming up to me afterwards and telling me how beautiful he thinks the piece is. I am now determined to become the John Rutter of the orthodox Jewish music world!

On the way home, a massive gust of wind, caused by a train coming into the tube platform, lifted my kippah clean off my head and sent it spiralling onto the tracks like a frisbee.

There, of course, has been a lot of talk about anti-semitism in the Labour Party of late. It’s quite interesting: I chatted to Julie last week about the issue and she firmly believes that Jeremy Corbyn is not an anti-Semite. She feels that disillusioned people within the Labour Party, intent on discrediting their leader, have stirred up this particular hornets’ nest.

Personally speaking, I believe Corbyn IS an anti-Semite, not in a brutal, knowing way, but on a sort of subconscious level which has meant that his entrenched, and worthy desire to support the underdog has led him to see the Israel question in binary terms rather than as a very nuanced problem which certainly won’t be solved by viewing all Palestinians as inherently oppressed and all Israelis as aggressive colonialists. I shudder when this uniquely left-wing stance makes people say “I’m not anti Semitic, I’m just anti-Israel.” Be anti-Netanyahu by all means, but saying you’re anti-Israel is surely denying that Jewish people should have a homeland, and that, in my view, is profoundly anti-Semitic. Jewish people have been systematically chucked out of every Arab country (including Palestine, Israel, or whatever you want to call the ancient Kingdom of Judea). Deny them the relative safety of Israel, and there will surely be yet another pogrom. By simply being clumsy in the language we use to describe our feelings on the subject, we open ourselves up to cries of anti-Semitism. Just because it’s not meant, it doesn’t mean it’s not felt.

On a more subtle level, one of the reasons that I believe Corbyn is anti-Semitic is the way that he has handled this particular crisis and turned a molehill into a massive, unscaleable mountain. Better handling could have nipped this whole issue in the bud months ago, but for some reason he’s digging in, petulantly holding onto his principals to the point where I believe he’ll make himself entirely unelectable. If could well be that the anti-semitism row is the final nail in his coffin. I genuinely think his fear of Jewish people, and his dogged belief that the Jews are aggressors, is forcing him to subconsciously allow himself to be brought down by Jewish people in a sort of bizarre and ironic self-fulfilling prophecy.