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With Ramadam and Yom Kippur coming up, I thought I'd resurrect this thread. Anyone else Muslim or Jewish on the board?
It's been slightly strange for me reading this thread, which is primarily magic-based experiences of fasting, since Jewish fasting is so different, so I thought I'd inflict some waffling on the subject on you. I should probably mention now that I've only ever observed one fast, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. There are various minor fasts throughout the year, for instance for the festival commemorating the Destruction of the Temple, but they tend not to be observed by non-Orthodox Jews. I'm somewhere between Reform and Liberal, probably agnostic but still a fairly active member of the community. I've had ME/CFIDS for over nine years so I haven't been able to fast in a long time for medical reasons, but I do the best I can.
The Jewish day lasts for 25 hours (don't ask), from the start of one sunset to the finish of the next. The Jewish calendar, unlike the Muslim one, more or less adds up to a year, so the festival is at roughly the same time every year. The fast is for the entirety of that "day" (whereas Ramadan involves fasting from dawn to dusk), and means that you abstain from food, drink, washing, and sexual intercourse, which I believe is the same in Islam. In theory, you spend most of the time in synagogue when you're not asleep, with an evening service (the Kol Nidre) on the first day, and a series of services from the morning to the evening of the second day. It is traditional to stand for the entirety of the last service, Neilah, but by that time many people are too exhausted, especially the ones who've been there all day, which is draining but spiritually a wonderful and strange experience. The music is particularly beautiful, the liturgy is highly poetic and moving, and even though it's one of the grimmest of Jewish festivals, it's the favourite for many people.
For less observant Jews, if there's one day you'll see them in synagogue, it's Yom Kippur. I know that many observe the fast as a matter of form, abstaining from food and drink but not, say, abstaining from washing or brushing their teeth. I usually wash shortly before I have to leave for the Kol Nidre service and that does me till the next evening. I'll do something quick and practical with my hair in the morning, it's too long to leave unattended. My mother finds it odd that I dress formally but simply (with some white, as is traditional - there's a shroud reference but almost no one actually wears a kittel, a shroud - but I hear that in Israel most people wear white) with no make-up or jewellery, since she considers it disrespectful not to turn up looking properly dressed up. (Mind you, she wouldn't go to the supermarket without make-up on.) For me, that is being too much tied to this world. The fast is about penitence, purity, focusing on the spiritual rather than the physical. There's a tradition of not wearing leather shoes, which actually goes back to avoiding luxuries (sandals), though rumour has it that it's about kindness to animals (which isn't going to be affected by wearing trainers one day of the year); I've not worn leather for half my life, this one doesn't apply to me. It seems more a marker of difference.
Judaism prohibits fasting if you are medically unable to, though I've heard some nonsense about the permissible ways of breaking the fast from ultra-Orthodox sources. I'd like to fast, I frequently forget to eat for half a day at a time anyway, but being in synagogue for even half the services is exhausting enough as it is, I risk keeling over even if I do eat. I compromise by making up a batch of apple flapjacks, which are small, discreet, don't require much time or thought to eat, and do a good job of sustaining me, and hiding them in my bag along with some water. Apples, incidentally, are traditional for this festival cycle, in particular for Rosh Hashanah, New Year, which occurs ten days earlier. They're meant to represent a sweet and fruitful new year (no, mother, I'm not supplying grandchildren just yet, stop giving me that look).
So I do fast in a way. I certainly retreat from my usual life and bodily habits, and it's rather nice having the tradition of making the same special food every year to fast on, especially since it's something which permits me to pay the minimum of attention to eating. For the periods when I'm not at synagogue, I curl up at home with the prayer book (the Reform one as the translations and excerpts are better, the services are longer and the study anthology is amazing) and then usually move onto something vaguely appropriate to read, such as Primo Levi since it's also a day for remembrance of the dead and there's a traditional focus on the Holocaust.
It always amazes me how empty a day is when you take your usual physical habits out of it, especially when you do do deliberately. There's a weird spacey feeling and a strong sense of being isolated from other people, since either you're engaging in communal prayer following a liturgy or you're alone with your thoughts. The absence of chatting is probably the most noticeable point of fasting for me!
It's an intensely communal experience in other ways, though. We spend a lot of time together, we recite our sins together, sung and spoken, Hebrew and English, and everyone reads the same list, partly because you can hardly say, "Ok, everyone who's committed adultery raise your hand," and partly because the idea is that we're each responsible for the sins of our whole community. The sins listed can be against God, against ourselves, or against our fellows (you can spot where it said "fellow men" before non-gender-specific translations came in), but the biggest focus is on the third category, the social. And I suppose that fasting as a group ensures that we are all following an identical pattern for that highly social form of human behaviour, eating. I've always found the tradition of breaking the fast communally, whether with a family meal or a synagogue community one, rather jarring. Even though the synagogue services are designed to take you into the deepest part of the day and then back out again, it still seems too sharp a transition back to the social. Everything seems too noisy and subtly off-key, and making a fuss over food (such as picking your pizza) seems almost indecent. At least it's a decisive change, though; going back home and putting some pasta on alone always felt a bit like I wasn't in either world. |
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