Fasting
Yom Kippur: October 9. 2008/5769
Rabbi Jeffrey Summit

My teacher Dick Israel used to say that fasting on Yom Kippur isn’t a lot of fun. It’s not supposed to be. Ideally, fasting is supposed to enhance and deepen the meaningful experience that we hope to have on this day of atonement.

But there is a problem. Rarely do people know why we fast or what the fast is really supposed to do for us. Many Jews simply don’t seehow this exercise in self-denial can be a valuable addition to the holiday and to our lives.Furthermore, some of the “standard” explanations aren’t that helpful. For example, I’ve often heard rabbis explain, “On Yom Kippur, we fast because we don’t focus on our bodies; we focus on our souls.” This sure doesn’t work for me. I like to eat and when I’m fasting, I tend to focus on my body and how it feels. Another explanation I sometimes hear is, “Giving up food is like giving a sacrificeto atone for what we did wrong over the past year.” But if we really want to be honest, a brief fast placed between two big meals isn’t such a sacrifice. I’ve also heard people say, “We fast to remind ourselves what it’s like to be hungry, so that we can be more sensitive to the people who face each day without enough to eat.” I like that explanation more, but that interpretation would make fasting a rather shallow exercise, if we are just pretending to be without food when in fact, we know exactly where our next meal is coming from. This morning, I’d like to offer some thoughts on fasting, and situate its meaning in connection to our larger goals of Yom Kippur.

Fasting doesn’t seem to be very Jewish. Within moderation, our tradition celebrates pleasure. Jews are good at eating and drinking, and the Talmud says that when we die, we have to give account before God for every permitted pleasure we could have enjoyed but didn’t when living on this wonderful earth. Aestheticism, that is, physical pain or deprivation to attain spiritual wisdom, is simply not part of mainstream Judaism. And I should add that traditionally, it’s not only eating and drinking that we don’t do on Yom Kippur. Traditionally, Jews don’t bathe, use cosmetics, or make love. But this morning, I want to focus on some reasons for fasting, which is so much the defining action of this day.

I need to say two more things to lay the groundwork for my thoughts. Jewish observance is a very personal decision. I know that many people in this room are fasting today. But if you are one of the people here who needed a cup of coffee or a bite to eat before facing hours of services, my observations this morning are not meant to make you feel bad or guilty. Jewish tradition and ritual are valuable to the extent that they bring greater meaning into our lives. If what I’m saying makes sense to you, and you haven’t been fasting so far, you can always fast from now till sunset, if you so chose. And one more cautionary disclaimer: If a person is ill or taking medication, the rabbis are crystal clear: your primary responsibility is to protect your health. Not only are you permitted to eat and drink if you need to for health reasons, you are forbidden to fast if it could injure your health.

With that said, I want to offer three suggestionsabout the meaning of fasting on Yom Kippur. There is fasting to get our attention, fasting to set this day apart, and fasting to underscore that when it comes to making key changes in our lives, our time is limited.

So here’s the first: Fasting to get our attention. We have an essential task on Yom Kippur: to focus on change and growth in our lives. But we are so scattered and so busy that it’s hard to keep our eye on the ball, to keep our thoughts focused on important tasks, for longer than 10 minutes or so. Fasting is not a thing in itself. There is no special good to feeling hungry or getting a headache. It’s a physical tool to keep reminding us to pay attention to the task at hand: putting serious thought and attention to examining our lives and actions over the year that has just past.

Right around the time that Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” our tradition was developing an approach to life that stressed that each one of us was not only obligated to examine our life, but also to move directly from examination to action. We are obligated to consider if we have treated other human beings well, respectfully, sensitively -- the way, ideally, we would hope people would treat us. We are obligated to consider if we have been responsible to our community, if we have contributed to the society in which we live. We know this is important, but the problem is, we are so distractible that it’s hard to concentrate on one thing at a time. Multi-tasking has created a world of constant partial attention. But deep down, we know and understand how important it is to pay attention. Fasting is a physical way to grab us and say, “Yes, these are hard issues, but real happiness in our lives depends on resolving the conflicts we have with the people we love, apologizing for what we did wrong, and committing to act differently in the year that is just now beginning.”

One of my favorite interpretations of the miracle of the burning bush teaches this same lesson. We all know the story of the burning bush, but Rabbi Larry Kushner asks, “What kind of a cheap miracle is a bush burning and not being consumed?” It’s a carnival trick, not a miracle. But Kushner explains,“Do you know how long you have to look at a piece of wood burning in a fireplace and realize it’s not being consumed?” The miracle of the burning bush wasn’t about the bush. The miracle was that Moses could actually focus;that he could pay attention long enough to realize that the bush was burning and not being consumed. Moses was chosen to lead Israel out of slavery because God said, whoa, here’s a person of substance, a person who can pay attention. So we fast on Yom Kippur as a way to make us pay attention to the task at hand. When we feel hungry, the key is to use that hunger to push us back to that essential work: determining the action we need to take to bring wholeness and fulfillment to our lives.

Fasting to set this full day apart from all others. Jews use physical acts to set time apart so that we can explore larger issues in our lives. On Passover, we ask how this night is different from all other nights. And we do all kinds of actions at the Seder to make the night, and the experience, different from other nights of the year, so that we can discuss freedom and slavery. We eat different foods, we tell an ancient story, we sing special songs, and that different night is imprinted on our memories. Ideally, fasting does the same thing for Yom Kippur. You see, Yom Kippur is the big one, the pinnacle, the Superbowl, the Indy500, the determining game of the World Series, when it comes to self-reflection, change, and personal growth. While we know we are always supposed to try to reflect on our lives and how to be better people every day, somehow the business of our day-to-day existence pushes aside spiritual reflection. We get a couple of minutes here or there. When we have a fight with someone -- a friend, a boyfriend or girlfriend, our parents or children,our husbandor wife -- we feel that hurt as we go through our busy days.But how often do we really set aside serious time to consider what we’ve done wrong and how to repair that damage? We fast for 25 hours on Yom Kippur to underscore that some things are so important that they take longer than a prayer, an hour, a morning in order for us to fully concentrate on them, think them through, and make an action plan to address them. Yom Kippur implicitly says, “You need at least a full day to think about these key issues in your life. This is really important. It’s not the kind of thing you can do in an hour here, or an hour there.”

Let me give you an example. There are many amazing films made about the Holocaust. Most of them are 90 minutes or two hours long. Then in 1985, a French filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann, made an entirely different Holocaust film called “Shoah.” That movie was nine hours long. Nine hours? No one had heard of a movie being nine hours. Most people saw it in two sittings,although some insisted on seeing the whole film at once. Lanzmann’s framing concept was, “I know you think movies should be two hours long,but this topic is completely different and we have to change how we think about it.”

So too with Yom Kippur. It’s like the holiday says, “Yes, I know that change and becoming a better person is some part of your life, but the net gain, the impact, will be exponentially different if you concentrate on this for a day rather than twenty minutes here or there.” Fasting is a way to establish the framework for that focus. One day out of the year. Actually, everything else can wait. Give yourself the day so you can think about how to have a richer, more meaningful, happier, more fulfilling year.

And finally, I want to consider the idea of Yom Kippur as a rehearsal for our death. I know this sounds pretty ghastly, but here’s the logic. One of the wonderful things about life is that we think, or we hope, that when it comes to all kinds of important plans and decisions, we have all the time in the world. If things aren’t quite right in your family, you can always fix it some time in the future. If it feels uncomfortable to apologize now, you’ll have other opportunities in the years to come. But Yom Kippur comes to teach us that actually, our time is limited. God willing, we should be healthy and safe, but in fact, we don’t know who will live and who will die. It’s hard to even think about this, but deep down, we know that it doesn’t help us to ignore or push aside the essential changes we hope to make -- we need to make -- in our lives. So on Yom Kippur, we go through this historically and religiously scripted drama where we act like we’re dead. We don’t eat. We don’t drink. If we are more traditional, we don’t shower or use cosmetics. By the late afternoon, we begin to smell like we’re dead. We don’t make love. We don’t do all of those things that make our bodies feel good and alive because today we want to remember and underscore that our time is finite. Life does not go on forever.

You want to have a better relationship with you mother or father? No one is going to be around forever; get on it now. Does it always sort of bother you that you don’t feel fully engaged with your Judaism, with the Jewish community? Then this is the time to reconnect. If you know you want to play some part in making the world better, engaged with community service, start tomorrow. We don’t think about our death to make us depressed or afraid. We remind ourselves that life is so precious that we have to fully take advantage of the blessings before us. On Yom Kippur, the fear is not that we’re going to die; the fear is that we will never fully begin to live.

During the time of the prophet Isaiah, the people asked, “What is the purpose of fasting? What’s the point? It doesn’t seem to do anything to change our lives.” (This is in the haftarah we read on Yom Kippur.) Isaiah answers, “True, you stop eating, but you do nothing to change the way you act.”If you’re dishonest in business and don’t create a just society, then fasting has little impact on your life or the community in which you live. If you don’t pay attention to the cares and concerns of the human beings around you, if you don’t try to liberate yourself from old ways of acting that have distressed you and caused you pain, then fasting won’t change your life or build the connections that make you feel whole. Make the purpose of your fast to open your eyes and look deep into your life. Open your eyes and look carefully at the people who you love. Resolve to begin a new year so that we all can be sealed for blessing in the book of life.May you have a meaningful fast and a wonderful new year.