[The following is my sermon for Kol Nidre, the evening that begins Yom Kippur, at Temple Beth Am, Monessen, PA. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the community I am honored to serve this year.]
Catholics traditionally fast on Ash Wednesday, the first day of the season of Lent, a time to prepare spiritually for Easter. Raised Catholic, I fasted each year—not at the insistence of my parents or my teachers, but from my own desire to do my religion “right.”
I fainted each year, too.
As an adult convert to Judaism, I struggle with Yom Kippur and the fast. Why do I fast? How do I fast? Do I continue the same fast of my childhood, the one that inevitably leads to fainting? What does that fast teach me? Does it help me turn back to God? Fasting to the point of fainting treads dangerously into the territory of donating money just to get the recognition, into the territory of “I-am-more-observant-than-you.” I am not sure what I learned from these fasts, what I learned about God and my spiritual and ethical duties.
In some ways the opposite of the Lenten fast, which precedes what Christians call the renewal of Easter, the Yom Kippur fast comes after the renewal of our year. We have eaten the apples and the honey, and now we stand, shrouded in white as we will in our own graves, standing before an Ark empty and stark as a coffin (for this analogy, I am indebted to my teacher, Rabbi Dr. Lawrence A. Hoffman). Our tradition calls us to know, in our minds and our hearts and our bodies, that we are mortal and fragile. That this life is temporary. We become more aware of our bodies.
Yet many people assert just the opposite: fasting takes us out of the physical, and into the spiritual. Relying on a stark divide between body and soul, religious leaders (not only in Judaism but in other spiritual traditions as well) claim that we can pay better attention to the “spiritual” when we “overcome” the physical. In an online forum, Orthodox rabbi Mendy Hecht calls Yom Kippur “G-d’s designated annual day of total spirituality,” a day on which we do things “that make us like the angels the most” instead of things “that make us like animals the most.” Yom Kippur makes us less human, some people say, and that’s a good thing; humans are bogged down in the physical, in necessity and desire. We should strive to be more spiritual, more like the angels.
It’s a big fad: spiritual fasting. A few weeks ago, I browsed the bookstore at the Pittsburgh Airport and found dozens of Christian evangelical books and journals on fasting for spiritual insight. You can buy fasting kits online, complete with promises that days of consuming just vegetable broth will give you a “natural high,” that it will rid your body of otherwise unspecified toxins, that it will bring you closer to God. Fasting websites abound with language of “discipline,” “submission,” and “control”: fasts are supposed to make you a “servant” or a “soldier” for God; no longer dependent on food, you can focus instead on serving the spiritual.
Yet today, we stand, shrouded in the color of burial and death, very likely aware of our bodies—as we will likely be even more so tomorrow, as Ne’ilah approaches. We come here tonight in the spirit of teshuva, turning, repenting. We reflect on our actions over the past year, all the things we have sown, and we come face to face with what we will reap. We come with the sound of the shofar still ringing in our ears, a clarion call for us to live Jewishly, a plea for God to remember the covenant.
In Leviticus, we read “In the seventh month, on the tenth of the month, you shall afflict yourselves and do no work […]. For this day will atone for you, to purify you from all your sins; before God you will be purified. It is a Sabbath of Sabbaths for you, and you shall afflict yourselves” (16:29-31). Is all our fasting about affliction?
In the Book of Samuel, King David fasts in an attempt to effect change. The prophet Nathan has just confronted David with the grievous sin he committed with Bathsheba, who was another man’s wife. David not only violated the marriage, but arranged for the husband to be killed in battle. God vows to punish David’s household. The guilty David suffers, watching his innocent son, born to Bathsheba, fall critically ill. “David entreated God for the boy; David fasted, and he went in and spent the night lying on the ground” (2 Samuel 12: 16). David’s servants try to get him to eat, but he refuses. After seven days, the child dies, and David’s servants fear what he will do when he learns of this tragedy. But David does not continue his fasting; instead, he bathes, puts on fresh clothes, and bows down in the Temple. He returns home and breaks his fast. His servants are confused: “[N]ow that the child is dead, you rise and take food!” they wonder aloud. David answers, “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept because I thought: ‘Who knows? The Eternal may have pity on me, and they child may live.’ But now that he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again?’” (2 Samuel 12:22-23).
Perhaps David’s fast is like ours: we plead, we afflict ourselves, we wonder whether God is paying attention to our suffering, and we hope that God will forgive us before the Gates close at Ne’ilah. Rabbi Michael Strassfeld writes of our Yom Kippur fast, “We are meant to feel that the natural course of our existence is suspended on this day while our lives, or at least the quality of our lives, hang in the balance. We are to face what a permanent suspension of existence—death—would be like, and thus to learn how to better embrace life” (Strassfeld, The Jewish Holidays, 111). This fast is not a self-absorbed attempt to have spiritual visions or a pointless test of our self-control. At the end of our fast, like David, we return to the rhythm of our lives, hopefully more aware of not only our capacity to miss the mark, but our capacity to make things right.
Why do we fast? Not to prove to ourselves that we can. Not to prove to others how observant we are. While the discipline of a fast can remind us viscerally of the discipline required for teshuva, turning or repentance, our fast cannot end there. We spend a day in self-assessment and public confession, as individuals and as a community. We make amends for past wrongs and we make resolutions for the future. Strassfeld writes, “Yom Kippur is supposed to lead from thought to deed—from looking at ourselves to transforming the way we act” (Strassfeld 119). This, indeed, is the message of the haftarah passage we will read tomorrow, from the prophet Isaiah: “Is this the fast I desire, a day for men to starve their bodies? Is it bowing the head like a bulrush and lying in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call that a fast, a day when the Eternal is favorable? No, this is the fast I desire: to unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, to break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore your own kin” (Isaiah 58:5-7). In turning our attention to one another, to the most vulnerable among us—in being present for one another, God in turn will be present for us. As Isaiah says, “When you call the Eternal will answer; when you cry, he will say, Hineini, Here I am!” (Isaiah 58:9).
Spiritual fasting websites claim that fasting will not only rid your body of harmful toxins but will give you a direct experience of that hineini, that presence of God—the feeling that something Divine is listening to you, looking out for you. Writer David Rakoff, who is basically an atheist, embarked on one of these fasts, paying three hundred dollars in exchange for email consultations and a strict regimen for a twenty-day fast: three days of restricted intake on either end, and fourteen days of a very limited liquid diet of broth and herbal tea. He wondered whether he would shed not only toxins and weight but the rationalism that kept him away from all things spiritual. He wanted enlightenment and clarity and focus—all virtues the website promised he could gain through denying his physical body. He thought the experience would show him something new, like “a new color,” something impossible, something he had never seen before (This American Life, Episode 259, “Promised Land”).
But Rakoff did not experience peace or tranquility or insight. He didn’t have visions. He felt sleepy, he reported at first, and he had a hard time concentrating. As the fast continued, he felt better, focused—but no new insights. On day six, he worried that something had gone terribly wrong; he felt faint. He got reassurance from his doctor, who was skeptical and would have preferred that Rakoff end this quest. But he continued with the fast, which he calls “self-obsessed”: twenty days of “narcissistic rumination” that served to increase what the writer calls his “usual feelings of venality and guilt.” Fasting doesn’t solve anything for him, doesn’t reassure him that life and the universe have a purpose. Toward the end of the ordeal, Rakoff recalls a slight feeling of detachment; he was “aware” of the problems in his life, but they didn’t matter as much to him. Worried that he had gone about the fast incorrectly, he called a woman who has fasted like this five times. She reported a radical cleansing of her body; she saw and felt the toxins released. “You feel like you’re new,” she said, “like you’re a new person […] your highest self” (This American Life). Is this the fast we desire?
About halfway through his fast, Rakoff rode the subway in New York City. I will try to retell the story as he told it on the radio: “One night on the subway, I see a woman at the end of the car. She leans over to the people sitting next to her and asks in a quiet, friendly, almost business-like tone, ‘Do you have any extra food I can buy off of you?’ I can only hear her because the train is silent. She isn’t standing in the middle of the car addressing us. She’s just asking those within earshot. I walk over and give the woman a dollar before I get off at Union Square. ‘But do you have any extra food?’ she asks me. I apologize and say that I do not have any extra food. But I know in that moment that there is neither clarity nor serenity enough in the world that would give me the chutzpah to tell her why not” (This American Life).
Is this the fast God desires? Is this the fast we, as a Jewish community, seek on Yom Kippur? Choosing not to eat so that we can gain something for ourselves, some kind of insight or spiritual experience—choosing not to eat while others go hungry? Rakoff saw the sadness in fasting for “spiritual enlightenment,” out of choice and whim and as an intellectual experiment, in the midst of a city where too many people go home hungry, or can go to no home at all. The woman on the subway asked quietly not just for food, but for extra food. She did not want others to go hungry to feed her, but she wanted something to eat. Such a fast gets it backwards: we pay so much attention to our own bodies, to ourselves, that we cannot see the person in need right before our eyes.
What matters tonight and tomorrow is not what passes our lips, not the form our fast takes. We each make our own decisions about our health as we decide how to restrict the intake of food and water and the pleasures of the body denied to us on Yom Kippur. What matters is not that we torture ourselves or punish ourselves. What matters is not that we go on a spiritual quest for visions and enlightenment.
What matters is that our fast awakens us in ways the shofar call did not—awakens us to the fragility of our lives, to our role as partners with God in bringing about a just society. What matters is that we face the empty Ark, dressed as the dead are dressed, with a new awareness of our duty to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, and to welcome the stranger. What matters is not that we think today alone about our bodies, but that we carefully consider each day what we eat, where it comes from, who prepares it, how they are paid and treated.
God, through the prophet Joel, declares that our fast is desirable. God instructs us, “Turn back to Me with all your hearts, and with fasting, weeping, and lamenting” (Joel 2:13). But this fast cannot be a show. “Rend your hearts rather than your garments,” God urges (Joel 2:13).
May our fast move us, in our very being, to turn our lives toward the care of the neglected, the vulnerable, and the lonely. May we be partners with God in caring for one another.
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