A fast way to lose my focus in shul

Despite having been through six years of cheder, I knew very little about Judaism — I wasn’t really listening — but I had managed to pick up that on Yom Kippur you were supposed to be repenting for your sins. This, however, was an incredibly abstract concept — and tricky, too.

Fasting was a much more obvious thing to focus on, and because it caused physical discomfort, it felt like I was “doing” Yom Kippur properly.

I kept this up religiously (so to speak) until I was in the sixth form — at which point I decided that Judaism wasn’t for me at all. I appalled my parents by refusing to engage with Yom Kippur in any way, and actually crept off secretly to school the moment they headed out to synagogue. (The fact that I went to school as an act of defiance says a great deal about my level of rebelliousness as a teenager. It can be matched only by my friend Matt, whose most outrageous act during his schooldays was to tell a friend how to spell a piece of graffiti he was writing.)

I spent a few years deliberately ignoring anything Jewish, before drifting back into the Jewish world in my early twenties. One of the first things I started to do again was the Yom Kippur fast. After all — even if you don’t do anything else, you’ve got to do that… right?

It was only a decade or so later that I really started to question why I was fasting. For several years I hadn’t done so, because I was either pregnant or breastfeeding. When I did finally go back to it, I found that the enforced break had given me a bit of perspective.

What, I wondered, would a meaningful Yom Kippur look like for me? I decided that if I got to the end of the festival having managed to spend a bit of time really thinking properly about my actions and their effect on the world, and having made some concrete plans to try to do a better job this year, then I would be doing it the way I wanted to. Even a minute of true insight would be worth it.

And was fasting more or less likely to help me to achieve that? Less, without a doubt. When I don’t eat or drink, my brain turns to mush and I can barely think at all — still less challenge myself on a moral level. So I decided not to do it any more.

I speak about fasting as though it’s the decision of the individual. Obviously, for Orthodox Jews, the fact that it’s a halachic requirement (so long as you are healthy) means that there is little choice involved. (Incidentally, the part of the Mishnah that says you have to fast also prohibits washing, wearing perfume, having sex and wearing leather shoes. But Rabbi Eliezer says that mothers are allowed to wear leather shoes. This seems peculiarly arbitrary.)

Whether or not you see fasting as a religious obligation, there’s something quite overwhelming about a whole community acting as one. The journey is made together, from the falling semitone at the opening of Kol Nidrei to the final blast of the shofar at the end of Neilah. As the day goes on and you feel weaker and more detached from everyday life, so do the people surrounding you.

There’s huge potency in the knowledge that nearly everyone else in shul is fasting, too. This, combined with the ancient prayers, the beating of the chest, the Yizkor service, the evocative melodies heard only at this time of year… has the potential to be extraordinarily powerful.

By choosing not to fast I am, in a sense, detaching myself a little from that communality; my external Yom Kippur journey is different from everyone else’s. It’s worth it, though, because it works for me.

Once my children are old enough to look after themselves and I can really design my Yom Kippur to be the way I want it, I will bring a book to the service — something meditative and thought provoking, though not necessarily Jewish — and dip in and out of it as the day goes on; I will take a break and stroll outside among the trees; I will sing as much as possible; but I will also — discreetly and in moderation — eat and drink.

@susanreuben