Fasting and Bearing the Yoke

I’ve just completed the easiest fast day of the year – the 10th of Tevet, a minor, sun-up to sun-down fast. (It’s so easy because it always falls around the winter solstice, so the fast usually concludes around 5pm at the latest.) Off the top of my head I couldn’t tell you what the 10th of Tevet commemorates. No doubt it is something about Nebuchadnezzar and the destruction of the first Temple.

Nonetheless, I keep this fast and the other minor ones, including those whose meanings I do connect with intensely, like mourning Moses’ smashed tablets on the 17th of Tammuz, political extremism on Tzom Gedalya.

I like fasting – it’s physical and spiritual and intense, even as you feel a bit weakened. I realize that not so many people in my corner of the world observe the minor fasts. And I wonder about why that is.

Modern liberal people choose not to fast not only because they don’t connect to ostensibly historical events, long forgotten by everyone. Rather, I think we liberal Jews are not so good at incorporating difficult and trying experiences into our religion. We do what we like to do, and rarely feel called to endure any pain.

Not that I favor religious self-mortification for its own sake, or to emphasize basic human abjection. But I do think that – if religion is to be a rounded spiritual experience, not just a birthday party – it needs to confront the bad news as well as the good, and ritualize them and internalize them. Furthermore religion – at least this one – requires you to bear the yoke. You have to carry practices that try your endurance, not only those which celebrate your pleasure.

That’s how I experience fasting and why I continue it: it helps me internalize and ritualize life’s failures and suffering, and trains me in bearing the yoke of service, even in ways I don’t really enjoy bearing.

It all reminds me of a passage in the short story “My Quarrel with Hirsch Rasseyner,” by Chaim Grade <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Grade>, the great Yiddish writer (who just happens to be buried in the Ansche Chesed cemetery). In this work, Chaim Vilner, the narrator, an apostate Yiddish writer who left the world of the yeshiva – obviously Grade himself – encounters an old fellow student, who remains a fierce defender of traditional pietism. The story takes place mostly in 1948, in Paris, and the two hammer out their world views, in the wake of all that each suffered in the Shoah. One gets the impression that Grade is having this conversation in his own head, hearing both the power of the pietistic argument, as well as the inevitability of secularism and apostasy as they force unanswerable questions upon tradition.

The pietist, Hirsch Rasseyner, complains that the liberals only know how to lighten the yoke of Jewish commitment; they never know how to intensify it, until it grabs your whole heart and soul, down into your internal organs. “Lighten the weight a little, they said, so what is left can be borne more easily,” Hirsch says. “But the more they lightened the burden the heavier the remainder seemed. I fast twice a week without difficulty, and they can hardly do it once a year. Furthermore, what the father rejected in part, the son rejected in its entirety. And the son was right! Better nothing than so little. A half-truth is no truth at all. Everyone, and particularly a young man, needs a faith that will command all his intellect and ardor.”

There is a lot of depth to this, even though I have no desire whatsoever to practice ultra-Orthodox religion. But it is certainly true that in my corner of the world we should build up our necks more, so we can bear the yoke better, even when it hurts. We need to, we need these fasts, so we can train ourselves to make religious meaning out of life’s ugliest moments.

See you on Taanit Esther.