The Art of Not Eating

By MARK ZANGER

The Jewish community is so defined by eating—what our grandmothers fed us, what we eat, what we don’t eat, what we don’t mix, the Passover feast, sharing the Purim baked goods, apples and honey for New Year—that it takes a minute to realize that when we think about High Holiday food, the most interesting and universal Jewish food practice of all is… a 24-hour fast.

Jews who never go to a synagogue all year attend at Yom Kippur and join in part or all of the fast. Fasting on Yom Kippur is in fact the rare commandment in the Torah that carries an immediate consequence. “For whatsoever soul that does not fast in that same day, he shall be cut off from among his peoples.” This Torah is in our hearts; people who’ve never read it and don’t believe continue to fast out of the internal sense that this is a day to be together with our own people. Not fasting would make us feel cut off. This warning is not attached to the even more stringent fast of Tisha B'Av, nor to the five minor, 12-hour fasts.

Everyone has a New Year with sweets. Jews of course have four New Years, two with sweets: Rosh Hashanah, and Tu B'shevat (the new year of trees, celebrated by eating carob pods). Many other religions have fasts. Mohandas Gandhi developed quasi-religious fasting into a political tactic. But his intention was to shame other people into finding their better selves by afflicting himself. We “afflict our souls” to make atonement for ourselves and for the community at large. And we are sort of proud of fasting.

Let us hope we are not so proud as Kafka’s Hunger Artist, who had no other art and thus continued to fast without recognition even when the public had moved on to other spectacles. (Given the current fashion to read the greatest secular Jewish writer as though he were making Torah commentary instead of modern literature, it would be tempting to suggest that Kafka’s Hunger Artist represents religious Jewery, that the jaded audience is divine, and that the revelations of the story suggest that the hunger artist was never in fact religiously committed. This kind of reductionism should be resisted like a pop-tart before shul on Yom Kippur. The story does, however, pluck at pride and regret very much in the manner of penitent on that day.)

We are Jews after all, so there are specific foods customarily eaten before and after fasting. And the Torah broadly implies that we should feast the day before fasting, “in the ninth day of the month at evening, from evening to evening, shall you celebrate your Sabbath.” This is sort of an odd mitzvah, and there are various explanations. One is that we feast in anticipation of successful atonement. Another is that we should feast to make the fast seem worse. So here begins a debate: since eating a big meal before fasting makes you hungrier the next morning, do we feast in order to make the fast more afflicting; or do we put that feast meal earlier in the day and dine on foods which will make fasting more easy?

I haven’t studied what the rabbis say about this, but the decision of K’lal Isroel, the people’s voice, is reasonably clear: Most of us feast early if at all, typically on the same sweet foods we had for New Year. Then we make a bland pre-fast meal designed to minimize the difficulty of the fast. We wish each other, “an easy fast.” This does not necessarily reduce the pressure on our souls. I would argue, with Philo of Alexandria, that an easy fast—for the body—simply detaches us a little more from the material world so that we can concentrate on our soul work.

The methods are generally well known, but let’s go over them one more time: taper off on caffeinated drinks for a week or more so you don’t get a caffeine-withdrawal headache in the afternoon. Hydrate well with chicken soup and water. Avoid salt and sugar, which are hydrophilic and make you thirsty. Include plenty of simple starches such as rice, plain bread, or boiled potatoes, because starch binds to water. (This is one of the most useful devices, in my experience). Protein tends to be un-spiced, such as boiled chicken (generating that soup mentioned above.) There is a medieval custom not to eat fish, because it was thought to warm the body. Likewise spices. Some do not eat sesame seeds or other seeds, which might come back up or get stuck in the teeth, and undo the later fast. Dessert, if any, would be simple fruit.

Some observant people then set a clean white tablecloth, as for Shabbat, but put siddurim and other holy books in the place of challah breads, and cover them with cloth.

Psychologically, the fast is eased if you go to services—individual pain is pain; shared pain is a bonding experience. The mid-afternoon nap, though controversial, also reduces hunger. Some authorities suggest smelling spices like cloves or cinnamon, as at Havdallah, during the afternoon to relieve hunger pangs.

Now we reach the end of the day, and breaking the fast. We start with Kiddush, and then snack on salty foods and drink lots of water or juice. Tea or coffee will be important for those who forgot to taper caffeine. One doesn’t want to eat too much, and one doesn’t feel like eating too much, or anything too rich. In the United States, Ashkenazim have settled on a dairy feast of bagels and lox, our celebratory foods, our most universally ethnic foods—uniting the bagels of Poland with the salmon of the Baltic ports and the cream cheese of Germany.  Sephardic Jews eat foods of their origins, most interestingly harrira, the thick meat soup/stew used to break the daily fasts of Ramadan in the Muslim countries of North Africa.