Two Kinds of Fasts

I’m aware this year that so many of the choices we make in the world don’t have to do with the facts on the ground but the attitudes we bring to them. How we construe something changes our experience entirely, which also changes our reactions to it. Now I want to eventually speak about different attitudes we bring to fasting, and what it means for us to come together and choose to abstain from food or drink for this time.

But I want to give us a couple of examples regarding how choices can matter. I read a political science study in which a group of people self-selected as liberals and conservatives were shown the same identical photographs of people they didn’t know, not of public figures but of random people. They were asked to decide, are these people hostile or are they friendly? To no great surprise, the conservative people more often judged the faces as hostile, and the more liberal people more often thought of them as friendly. Neither opinion was objectively right or wrong; nobody knew any of these people to corroborate their view, but like many of us, the viewers brought their own expectations to what they were seeing. We all approach life’s experiences with our own prebaked attitudes. Those attitudes direct our reactions, even though they don’t emerge from what it is we are experiencing. They were hard-wired into us, but they direct our interpretations and how we perceive so that we can’t tell where the data stops and our selected vision starts.

It turns out each of us has an existential choice to make on this Yom Kippur, as we do every day in our life: We can choose whether we will expect shefa, abundance, or whether we will anticipate struggle and denial. Both of those attitudes are sometimes reasonable; life isn’t always rosy, nor is it always bleak. Life’s roller coaster can justify the half-full cheer of the optimist, or the half-empty resignation of the pessimist. Which one is the realist is in the eyes of the beholder.

We choose the attitudes that we use to interpret the unfolding of our lives, and then we give those experiences our best shot through the lens of our preconceptions. We can, if we choose, define our life’s unfolding by what could go wrong, by what has always been, by how we might fail, how we might be judged or looked upon by others. For many, that attitude feels like realism, hard-earned, and many people bring that hard-baked fatalism to Yom Kippur. And they’re not crazy or making it up. For those who seek it, there is plenty of data to support their cynicism. 

Not only in life, but even in our liturgy. I have read the Machzor; I’m aware there are a lot prayers in the High Holy Day retinue that can sound pretty bleak.

We can also make a different choice, we can also choose that this fast is a gift we give to God and to each other out of the fullness of our life experience, that it is an offering we make not out of emptiness and fear but out of fullness, joy and gratitude. 

But we can also make a different choice, we can also choose that this fast is a gift we give to God and to each other out of the fullness of our life experience, that it is an offering we make not out of emptiness and fear but out of fullness, joy and gratitude. 

You’ll notice that on this day it is customary for Jews to wear a little more white than usual. Why white? Because white is the color of purity and of joy. White, the Kabbalists teach is the color of Shechinah (that immanence of God that dwells within). According to these Kabbalists, we dress our joy when we come to greet each other. And we enhance that joy through the elevated music, the piyyutim and other beautiful poetry, and the wonderful connections we have with each other in our synagogues on that sacred day.

Yom Kippur need not be a day of mourning; Yom Kippur is a day of elation.

I want to invite us this year to choose joy, to embrace hope, to focus on elevating the attitude we bring to this day. Yom Kippur need not be a day of mourning; Yom Kippur is a day of elation. We are told by the rabbis of the Talmud that on this day we fast in order to be like the angels: The angels don’t eat, the angels don’t drink; and so for the 25 hours of the holy day we are the angels and we, like them, are able to revel in the gift of each other, of life, this community, and the world that we were given as pure gift, unearned. 

The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic movement in the early 1800s, said, “There are two kinds of fear of God: The outer fear and the inner fear. The outer fear is a fear of punishment, and it serves to induce a person to repent. Beyond that, the penitent person might then achieve the inner fear: The fear of displeasing someone we love dearly: A parent or a spouse, or a child. And at that point, once you achieve the inner fear, then there’s no longer a need for the outer fear: the fear of consequences, the fear of punishment” (Keter Shem Tov 13a).

Can we achieve that higher Yirah, that inner reverence, as well? Could we approach the fast as angels? That is, after all our privilege as Jews; it is our legacy as the descendants of the patriarchs and the matriarchs, as the descendants of people — many in our own community who risked their lives to be able to live publicly and freely as Jews.

What we do on Yom Kippur is to sing praises and to nestle in the joy of what we have made possible by our choices as individuals and as a community.

Can we honor that sacrifice and that gift by thinking of ourselves on Yom Kippur (and beyond) as Malakhim, as angels? What we do on Yom Kippur is to sing praises and to nestle in the joy of what we have made possible by our choices as individuals and as a community. Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra, medieval Sephardic commentator, writes about the meaning of the biblical term for Yom Kippur, “Shabbat Shabbaton.” He explains that this phrase means “both a Shabbat for the spirit and a Shabbat for the body.” On Yom Kippur we celebrate both: We bring our body and our soul into alignment together, and we mobilize our love for the sake of overcoming the fears that hold us back. 

Maimonides, in the Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Teshuvah (the Laws of Repentance) explains that, “A person should not say: ‘I will not fulfill the commandments of the Torah and occupy myself with its wisdom in order to receive all the blessings which are contained therein or in order to merit the life of the world to come.’ It is not fitting to serve God in this manner. A person whose service is motivated by these factors is considered one who serves out of fear, and not out of love. Such a person is not on the level of the prophets or the sages. They are trained to serve God out of love only until knowledge increases and they serve entirely out of love.” 

We lack a holy temple in Jerusalem, where animals’ bodies used to be sacrificed, where blood and fat were thrown on the altar as a way of showing our devotion to God. The rabbis and the Talmud teach that when we choose not to eat for a full day we too are sacrificing blood and fat, this time not of an animal, but our own. 

What a joyous opportunity to give from who we are to the One who made us, to be able to take what is innermost and to offer it up, to say: “To you, God, we offer this gift.”

Let us take it one step further; let’s remember that our Jewish community has been nurturing and caring for each other, for this country, for Israel, for as long as we have been a community of communities. God willing, we will continue to do this for years and decades into the future. We are not a weak, trembling group of Jews buffeted about by bullies on the outside. We are strong. We have vision, we have principles, we have conviction, and we come together every year to remind ourselves that when we stand together, we can achieve anything we set our minds to do. We have in the past, and we will in the future. 

For the duration of the holy day, let’s give our time to Yom Kippur, not because we must, but because we can. Not because we are forced, but because we choose its observance as a free gift. We offer it as free Jews who publicly and privately have the privilege of being ourselves out in the open. And let us then treat the fast day as the celebration it was meant to be. An opportunity for us to leave aside our animal distractions, the things we focus on every day, every month, every week of the year: earning a living, making a meal, taking care of our bodies. All of these are noble and fine pursuits but for 25 hours you and I are invited to be angels, we’re invited to rise above.

Let this be a fast that we give wholeheartedly out of love. And in that love let us inspire ourselves, encourage each other, because we have so much more love to give that our enemies will not have a chance against us. Our love will be relentless; our love will be without end. We will care for each other, we will lift each other up, we will stand together and we will make this world the paradise it was intended to be. 

It starts on Yom Kippur. It starts with us. it starts with love.

Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson (www.bradartson.com), a Contributing Writer for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, holds the Abner and Roslyn Goldstine Dean’s Chair of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and is Vice President of American Jewish University in Los Angeles. He is also dean of the Zacharias Frankel College in Potsdam, Germany, ordaining Conservative rabbis for Europe.