It’s the 17^th of Tammuz and I’m fasting. That means that I can’t have my beloved cocoa with ice cubes until nightfall, which makes me grumpy and sad.

Booo!!!

When I was younger, fasts confused me.

Why call them “fast.”?

If you’ve ever experienced one you’ll know that a fast day is anything but fast. The hours drag on, nightfall looking as distant as the Messiah’s arrival date.

And then there are the side effects lethargy, headaches, bad breathe and all over malaise .Even so, there is something innately good about being forced, albeit kicking and screaming from one’s usual routine.

Yesterday, I must confess that I spent the better part of the morning schooling myself in the complex mechanics of blogging. In spite of all the claims –made mostly by blog hosting sites, that blogging is easy, I’m finding it about as simple as quantum physics—and I’m not a science person.

Along with feeling confused, blogging makes me feel like I’m back in high school because in the blogsosphere popularity is everything. Attracting traffic to your blog, they call it. You want to live in a jam. Right now, I’m the only car on the road. I need to write some snazzy tags and jazz up my graphics to improve my SEO (search engine optimization) but not today.

Today, I’m fasting. Hashem is telling me to slow down, look inside and think about what really counts

You could say that the 17^th of Tammuz is a day with bad juju. It was the day that Moses broke the tablets after he came down from Mount Sinai and saw the people worshipping the golden calf.

Several thousand years later, the siege of Jerusalem began which led to the destruction of the Temple ((9^th of Ab, the next fast) and every other Jewish disaster since.

So I’m trying to focus. I’ve got a copy of Rabbi Ephraim Oshry’s Responsa from the Holocaust. Rabbi Oshry was a Poseik, decisior of Halacha Jewish law who wrote his responsa a Lithuanian ghetto.

Here are a few of the questions he answered. Could a ghetto Jew could commit suicide—no. Could penniless widow extract the gold from her murdered husband’s teeth—no because it would be a desecration the dead . Could a Cesarean section could be performed on a dead woman—yes because it might involve the saving of a life.

Amazingly Rabbi Oshry hid his responsa in tin cans and retrieved them after the war. He believed that holding onto the Jewish faith was the highest form of spiritual resistance. When interviewed by the New York Times he said “One resists with a gun, another with his soul,” he told a New York Times interviewer in 1975. Today, I’m going to think about that but at nightfall my cocoa will be waiting.

In case you want to know the recipe—Here it is

2 heaping tablespoons of cocoa. Use the best quality you can get

2 tablespoons of sugar preferably brown or 3 tablets of sweetener (I use saccharine, not splenda which gives an unpleasant taste and isn’t healthy either)

In an oversized mug, or tall heatproof glass dissolve cocoa and sugar together in boiling water—about one third of a cup until they form a thick paste. Fill the mug with ice cubes. Pour milk on top or even better 2/3 milk to 1/3 half and half.

Make a brocha. Sip slowly and about how good Hashem has been to you.

END

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