While Israelis are still engaged in heavy fighting to root out the barbaric invaders from the neighboring Hamas terrorist-elected and run Gaza, incredible stories of Israeli heroism are beginning to emerge. For instance, a courageous middle-aged homemaker held off the monsters with her delicious freshly baked cookies. Yes, you read that correctly—a Jewish wife and mother, suddenly finding herself at the receiving end of a horrific siege, calmly latched on to the Jewish mother stereotype of “ess, ess mein kindt” (“eat, eat my child”), thus saving herself and her family. From an article at The Jerusalem Post:
When Hamas terrorists broke into her home early Saturday morning, Rachel Adari didn’t have any guns.
But she had another kind of weapon: cookies, which she offered to the men who held her and her husband captive for the next 15 hours, as her city of Ofakim and dozens of other towns in southern Israel faced a brutal invasion by Hamas from Gaza.
‘I could see they were angry,’ Adari told Israel’s Channel 12. ‘I asked them if they were hungry. I prepared them coffee and cookies.’
‘She drove them crazy,’ her husband David said. ‘She kept asking them if they wanted something.’
The snacks helped buy the couple enough time for their sons, both police officers, to join an operation that resulted in their liberation, a rare moment of rescue on a day marked primarily by loss.
Her insistence on snacks — archetypal Jewish mother behavior deployed at a dissonant moment — has also turned Rachel Adari into something of a national hero, one of several to emerge in the wake of the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust.
Here’s what Edri had to say about the experience: “I wrapped them around my little finger, those nasty monsters.”
Perhaps the terrorists’ mothers (and fathers) were so busy teaching their children to hate, they neglected to provide them with basic support and love—including cookies and other healthy sustenance.
Non-terrorists (like you!) will enjoy these delicacies even more, so here is the recipe. B’tayavon! Enjoy!