You may not have heard, but the chief rabbi of Israel declared a fast day today, Thursday, January 21 2021, for the COVID pandemic. I don’t know if many people knew about it or heard about it. I found out from an article in one of the online English Israeli papers I read.
I was at work at the hospital today so i drank water, but i didn’t eat. It’s cool and weird and jewy and biblical that that’s what we do – that when times are dark we collectively turn our gaze upwards. Never mind how many people actually fasted. Just the fact that we called one is cool – like when queen Esther called on the people to fast before she approached the king.
This is not Yom Kippur or Tisha B’Av or even a minor fast day like Tzom Gedaliah. This is our fast day. We called this one. Yeah, we can still do that. And as much as it works by asking God for a miracle, it raises our own consciousness of the problem, orienting us to the problem and to each other. I mean when was the last time when times were tough that America proclaimed a day of national fasting? it’s unheard of, ridiculous, not even a thing. But here we still do that.
