It’s All Kosher (No. 10): Starving For Advice

Dear Posek,

I have a “sheilah” for the Unpious Posekta. Yom Kippur is coming up and I’m wondering if I should fast. I’m a Chasidish man in my forties. It’s been years since I fasted on Tisha Bav but I always fast on Yom Kippur. I don’t see the point of a day of fasting, but I do it anyways. There are several reasons: I can’t let the kids see me eat, and they don’t leave me alone for a minute in shul on Yom Kippur so I can’t manage to sneak away and eat. I can’t drive to a private place because for God’s sake, it’s Yom Kippur, no driving. And then there’s this: it’s the holiest day of the year, I’ll eat? It feels like going too far. So I don’t eat and it’s the worst day of the year instead. Can you imagine what it’s like to spend hours in the synagogue starving? I need a suggestion.

Signed,

Rumbling and Grumbling

Dear Rumbling and Grumbling,

Unfortunately, your question came in late and didn’t make it to publication in time for Yom Kippur. As this will be published after the advice will be relevant, I can at least still ‘pasken’ with absolute confidence that whatever you decided to do this past Yom Kippur– be it to starve, dine or sneak a meager bite like a thief–it was kosher. I can guarantee you that you won’t be punished for doing any of these. I can’t guarantee though that your stomach won’t punish you if you left it without food for some 30 hours before devouring all the cake and liquor, or that you won’t be sick to your stomach if this was the first time you ate on Yom Kippur, but that’s as far as the punishment part goes.

In the future, I’d suggest that you get out of the habit of starving on Yom Kippur and start to think about ways you can break the fast. Fasting has too many negative effects to be worth the pain. Besides being unhealthy and primitive torture, you mention you have children with you, and it’s hurting them. Since you don’t believe in the religious value of fasting, as a moral parent you shouldn’t. Mothers and fathers, slumped on wooden shul benches with parched tongues, are hardly in the position to be good parents. Good is the keyword here. The Posek wants you to be good. Most of the time.

I can imagine that your poor boys who spend Yom Kippur in shul with you are suffering as much as you are, even those who are under the age of fasting. I can recall my own memories as a child in the care of fasting, agitated parents. The parents often force the children, whose bellies are bursting with peanut butter breads and nosh bags, to eat all the food adults can’t have. And the parents spend the rest of the time either not noticing the existence of the children, or yelling at them to stop doing whatever they are doing, even if they are doing nothing at all. I’d say don’t punish your kids for your hunger and focus instead on how to get yourself something to feed your body.

How can you sneak in food on Yom Kippur when you’re more afraid of being seen by your own kids than by the Almighty God Himself? Well, get creative about it. There are ways. Perhaps some of the readers will tell you how they do it. Under the talis, in the bed, in the basement, a few blocks away from the shul in a goyish neighborhood. Or go away on Yom Kippur altogether, to a supposed rebele in Israel or Kansas or the Catskills. Or maybe you may have to improvise by having your meal in the toilet, where surely the omniscient kids’ curiosities cannot reach. Just don’t get any crumbs in your beard or you’ll be doing more atonement to humans than to God.

I sense from your e-mail that you also fear the idea of eating on Yom Kippur, a day that is so embedded in the consciousness as a fearful one. That sacredness is a very effective feeling that stops many from eating, but once you break through it, you’ll find that a new sacredness emerges. It’ll be a sacredness in which putting on the white kittel isn’t dreaded anymore, but a time to calmly reflect for a moment on the things that matter: life, family, forgiveness and which pocket you should hide the honey cookies in now that you know what an easy fast actually means.

Bon appetit!

Posek