Yorkshire Pudding:

An Elegy for England

(The Absinthe Drinker, by Viktor Oliva, 1901)

“You did not find our country beautiful?” The nazi officer asks as Clifford Bradshaw explains why he will not be returning to Germany at the end of Cabaret, a musical set in Berlin, almost exactly 100 years ago.

”Yes,” Bradshaw says, “very beautiful,” as he boards the train, horrified by what he has seen Germany become.

I had the same experience this morning as I tried to change my ticket to leave York six hours earlier than I had planned.

“Did you not enjoy your time in York,” the ticket agent asked me.

And, not wanting any more trouble, I told her that I was tired — and G-d knows I could not tell her how tired I truly was.

The saddest thing is that I actually had quite enjoyed my time in York.

Sitting in the Red Lion Tavern, the oldest pub in the city, drinking pints with the townsfolk — I had a grand old time.

Me and the lads next to me were getting on famously.

They were there for a stag party — what we Americans call a “Bachelor party” — and everything was going beautifully.

Until, of course, I made the mistake of telling one of my new friends that he had a beautiful name, a biblical name.

“Caleb,” I said, “that’s a beautiful name, it’s from the Bible.”

“Ay,” he said, smiling jovially, “although I’m more Free Palestine, innit,” and he began to laugh heartily…

“And I’m as anti-Jewish as the Bible!” He shouted with a flash and a flourish.

He said it without malice, obviously not knowing that I was Jewish, and he said it with the same joyous nonchalance as he said everything else he said that night.

Being anti-Jewish was as natural to him as ordering a pint at the bar or telling a joke about his dad.

So no, I wanted to tell the agent at the train station, I did not enjoy my time in York.

But, as I close in on the final leg of journey to the Holy Land, I didn’t think it was in my best interest to say anything to anyone about this.

I just wanted to leave York and never look back.

Of all of the different kinds of antisemitism I’ve experienced socializing in the past 15 months, this one disturbed me most.

Because of the smile.

The smile he wore was big and wide, grinning in my face, completely unaware of even the remotest possibility that his new friend might take issue with his anti-Jewishness.

Because, I have to imagine, being anti-Jewish was as natural to him as ordering a pint in a pub.

My friends who were with me were shocked by the blatant boldness of his hatred.

I suppose when one imagines an anti-Jew they must imagine a dour old German screaming at the top of his lungs, not a nice young English boy grinning from ear to ear.

But that is the face of antisemitism, the smiling bigot who takes pride and pleasure in his hatred of the Jewish people.

Of course, the bitter irony of a man named “Caleb” saying “Free Palestine, I’m as anti-Jewish as the Bible,” is not lost on me.

Caleb ben Yefuna, one of the twelve spies who go into the Land of Israel to inspect the land, might arguably have been the proudest and most boldly Zionist character in the Torah.

He and Joshua were the only two among the twelve spies who believed that the Jews could defeat the evil Canaanites who had illegally occupied the land in our enslaved absence.

(Return of the Spies, by Julius Schnorr von Karolsfeld, 1860)

“Caleb hushed the people before Moses and said, ‘Let us by all means go up, and we shall gain possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it.’”

”And Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh, of those who had scouted the land, rent their clothes and exhorted the whole Israelite community: ‘The land that we traversed and scouted is an exceedingly good land. If please with us, G-d will bring us into that land, a land that flows with milk and honey, and give it to us; only you must not rebel again G-d. Have no fear then of the people of the country, for they are our prey: their protection has departed from them, but G-d is with us. Have no fear of them!”

“As the whole community threatened to pelt them with stones, the Presence of G-d appeared in the Tent of Meeting to all Israelites.”

Later, G-d responds to Moses’ plea to save the Israelites even though they doubt His glory,

”None of those involved — who have seen My Presence and the signs that I have performed in Egypt and in the wilderness, and who have tried Me these many times and have disobeyed Me — shall see the land that I promised on oath to their fathers; none of those who spurn Me shall see it…”

“But My servant Caleb, because he was imbued with a different spirit and remained loyal to Me — him will I bring into the land and that he entered, and his offspring shall hold it as possession.”

Caleb was from the tribe of Judah, and he is known for his ferocious faith and commitment to G-d, His people, and His land.

For his great bravery, he was rewarded with the city of Hebron, where the Patriarchs are buried, and where King David would first establish his kingdom.

Hebron, as I’m sure this modern Caleb is not aware, was the site of the great anti-Jewish massacre of 1929 — a massacre whose brutality echoed through eternity and reappeared on October 7th.

Today, as I write this, we are awaiting the return of Emily Damari, the last British citizen still held in Hamas captivity.

She is a Tottenham Hotspur fan.

I cannot help but wonder what the great biblical Caleb would have to say about all of this, but I know this.

I know Caleb would never refer to Hebron as being in “the West Bank.”

No, Caleb would be outraged by such an offensive claim — Hebron was the seat of his tribe, the tribe of Judah, and, to see that city deprived of its Jews, would have him outraged.

I know Caleb would not have cowardly let this man off with his anti-Jewish remark as I did.

No, Caleb would have stood up and thrown his beer in his face and his head through the wall.

And I know Caleb would not have let the opinions of the anti-Jewish nations of the world dictate how he conducted this war.

No, Caleb would have put his faith in G-d and G-d alone and given the middle finger to the United Goyim and its selective moral outrage before he let one Jewish captive spend one more day in Gazan hell.

So no, I wish I had told the agent in the train station, I did not enjoy my time in York.

Which brings me great sadness.

In another life, at another time, I might have been an English Historian. There are few things I love to study as much as English history, and few parts of English history I am more interested in than the political machinations of the North.

The young Caleb, who was from Lancaster, shared my love of this English history.

Before he disclosed his anti-Jewishness to us, he and I had discussed the irony of a Lancasterian drinking in a Yorkshire pub — for anyone who knows the history of the War of the Roses knows how much blood was shed by those two great and ancient houses.

But I fear that the long and storied history of England may be drawing to a close, and so I feel obliged to write this elegy for this once great nation.

Can a nation which spurns its Jews, who casts them out like rubbish, survive in a world that’s is governed by the Hebrew G-d?

In 1066, William the Bastard of Normandy came and conquered England — he brought with him the first Jews to ever set foot on English soil.

In 1290, King Edward I banished them.

The history of England between 1290 and 1653 is a bloody and brutal one, a history that includes a Hundred Year War against France, an 80 Year civil war between the Lancaster and the Yorks, and a Black Plague that claimed almost 60% of the English population.

In 1653, Oliver Cromwell brought the Jews back to England.

Since then, the English conquered one quarter of the world, won three world wars (one against Napoleon and two against the Germans), and spread their language and culture from Calgary to Calcutta.

But now?

Now the British seem sad and dejected — there is no hope left in the eyes of the British youth.

Like an endless scene out of A Clockwork Orange, young Brits go from pub to pub, drinking away their days with no hope of ever having a better future.

Not one young person I’ve spoken to has any hope in their hearts.

Britain, they feel, is not what it used to be – and they have no will to change that.

As this train rolls past the English countryside, I cannot help but think, “If there is any hope, it lies among the proles.”

But even they are losing hope.

There is no great outrage about the grooming gang scandal, no anger about the death of British culture, no passion to change anything.

We are 41 years away from celebrating a millennium of English sovereignty, but no one seems to think they’ll make it there.

If you listen closely, you can hear the bones of all those brave English men and women rolling around, begging to be heard, but their pleas are drowned out by the clanking and clamoring of glasses in the pub.

I pray that England will wake up soon, but I cannot imagine anything short of a prohibition on public drinking could do something like that.

I have no faith in nations that tolerate Jew-hate, and I suppose I was unwilling to give up on England until I saw her degradation for myself.

But now I’ve seen it, plain as day.

I suppose the one thing I really wanted to do in York was try some traditional Yorkshire Pudding, but my run-in with such jovial anti-Jewish hatred left such a bad taste in my mouth, I didn’t think there’d be any way to enjoy it.

And so I come to write this Elegy for England, whose glorious light seems to be dwindling by the day, not with a bang, but a whimper.

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai