Parashat Yitro: Our Millennium Bridge

Thars Duijnstee is a Dutch publisher and ‘concept developer’ (as per his self-description on LinkedIn) who came up with an original and bestselling idea that has taken his homeland and neighbouring Belgium by storm.  He is the man behind TDM Publishing which has created a series of books called ‘My First 18 Years’.

Tapping into the lucrative ‘Nostalgia’ Market, each book in the series does ‘what it says on the tin’ and provides a fascinating and detailed illustrated journey through our formative years with books spanning every year from 1949 to 1984.

With more than half-a-million copies sold (if you believe the numbers he quotes), he’s branched out into the English-speaking world and adapted the volumes for the British market which is where I came across them when perusing social media.  They were on Amazon, my favourite go-to location when I feel like engaging in a little retail therapy and soon enough, my 1967 tome dropped onto our doormat.

In my case, the title is a touch misleading because although my ‘First 18 Years’ began in 1967, I only popped out in its twelfth month, which means that the events described didn’t really impact me.  To add insult to injury, when I celebrated my birthday on 1^st December 1984 (the last month in my book), I had just turned 17.

Notwithstanding a December birth, I do recall many of the news events, TV shows, films, sweets, chocolates, toys and songs described in the book particularly those that were so prevalent in the mid ‘70s to ‘80s when I was growing up.

I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience of trapsing down memory lane and remembering the times I spent with my parents, sharing experiences that cannot be recreated.  The TV programmes we used to watch together ‘en famille’, along with the toys I was given and how I enjoyed playing with them and creating imaginary worlds.  Being an only child wasn’t that hard!

I was brought up with my feet firmly rooted in two different worlds.  On the one hand, we engaged with the culture that surrounded us, although my parents’ continental background veered towards their Francophile Antwerp clique.  And on the other, we were Modern Orthodox with everything that it entailed, from being Shomer Shabbat to keeping kosher.

The crucible in which I was formed was therefore a mix of two very different cultures.  Jewish and British and in those days the two didn’t always complement each other smoothly.

The era in which I grew up was more innocent than today.  I used to be able to go out of my house and roller-skate repeatedly around the block until it was time to return home for dinner.  We would walk over to each other’s houses on the long summer Shabbat afternoons and return when it was dusk.  We weren’t frightened of being attacked.

The television presenters who graced our screens and the shows they fronted were beamed into our living rooms on a weekly basis.  These men were wholesome family men or so it seemed.  We could not have imagined that this was a façade and that they were anything but decent as we would discover once the twentieth century had passed into history.

Which is why reading ‘my book’ has impressed upon me the importance in my life of a very different tome.

I was fortunate enough to experience a high level of Jewish education particularly in my primary school.  Whilst I was creating worlds with my Action Men, I was being taught how to study Chumash accompanied by Rashi as well as Mishna.  In school, the TV shows I watched at home and the toys I played with had very little relevance.  They were part of my ‘other world’.  The news that we used to watch at night, unless it concerned Israel, was not a feature of what we discussed in the classroom (not that we talked too much about Israeli politics in school!) but it did occupy the debates we used to have around the dining room table.  As I have mentioned before, one of my earliest memories dates to watching the news during the Yom Kippur War.

Alongside my secular education, as detailed in my book, was a fascination I had in Torah study and very few stories held my interest as much as the one we see described in this week’s Parasha, namely Matan Torah, the giving of the Torah at Sinai.

Each year, when it came around in the winter and summer readings of Yitro and Va’Etchanan (and obviously at Shavuot), I was enraptured.  I tried to imagine what it must have been like to stand there at Mount Sinai and witness the spectacle of Moshe Rabbeinu reciting Gd’s words to the terrified Israelites.  The mountain was shaking, enveloped in smoke, thunder, lightning and shofars blasting.  It was a scene that almost felt as if it could be indescribable and yet, the Torah was doing just that.  It was relating exactly what happened.

As I grew older, I understood how wrong I had been with regard to the disconnect I had envisaged between both of these worlds.  I appreciated my secular life and all that it entailed whilst living in a ‘Jewish bubble’ in Golders Green, no less!

And here’s the rub.  Without one, I understood why the other falls apart.

Reading the ‘My First 18 Years’, I realise that from 1967 to 1984, the non-Jewish society in which I lived, may have experienced what seemed on the surface to be advancements in all spheres but deeper down, started a downward spiral from which it is yet to recover.

We were wealthier by the end of the decade, but were we happier?

Did we sit down and eat meals at the kitchen table or did we prefer to opt for the new-fangled TV dinners?

What had happened to the nuclear family that we treasured for so many years?

The Ten Commandments, or more accurately, ‘Pronouncements’ that we read about this week, instructs us to create a society that is anchored by laws such as ‘Do Not Kill’, Steal or Commit Adultery.

What happened to these values whilst I was growing up?

When Peter Sutcliffe or Dennis Nilson carried out their depraved murderous atrocities?

When the 1983 Brinks Matt robbery led to the theft of £26 million worth of gold bullion (estimated at £111 million in 2023 that has never been recovered?

Where nearly a third of marriages in the 1970s ended due to adultery? (source: https://www.co-operative.coop/media/news-releases/adultery-no-longer-top-reason-for-divorce#:~:text=The%20research%20revealed%2029%20percent,all%20divorces%20(47%20percent))

The Torah was there to remind me that although the world beyond the front door of 10, Portsdown Avenue, NW11 0NB was an exciting place to explore, it was the everyday mundane events that took place within its walls that would influence me more positively.

The Shabbat afternoons where I would sit and learn with my father before he went to have his ‘shluff’; the Chanukah candles we would light together as a family; the crazy Purim outfits that I would wear each year; the Sedarim which would take place in our front dining room which was one of the few times I remember eating at that table - and the weekly family get togethers that we would have after shul at my great-aunt’s house nearby.  She was the matriarch of the clan.

Without all the above, all the rest was unimportant.

I believe that this is what has kept our nation together across the millennia.  The Torah is our ‘Millenium Bridge’.  The structure that has, for thousands of years, enabled us to straddle both worlds – the one described in Thars Duijnstee’s marvellous little books (which are subtitled ‘Relive Your Youth’) and the one that exists ‘beyond our first 18 years’.

G-d was there when I was commencing my journey and he’ll be there when I end it.  His Torah, our Torah will also be present.  What happens in the next 18 years for the newbies will be down to how much they choose to learn from reading the ‘Jewish People’s Constitution’ as Rabbi Sacks ztl referred to it.

Without one, you cannot have the other because, had the generation in which I both followed and grew up in paid more attention to the Ten Commandments, perhaps that era might have been very different.  Society might have been better able to face the challenges it encountered once events that followed the end of my book took place.

As we know, the number 18 in our faith is extremely significant.  It represents, ‘Chai’ – ‘life’.

So, here’s to our next 18 years and may they be more peaceful and blessed than the last.  May our ‘Millenium Bridge’ lead the way forward.  From the past to the present, to the future, it is the surest way to build a healthier, happier and more resilient society.

Shavuah Tov.