Yes I’ll have another glass of wine, thank you. It’s quiet on this block, I wonder how many neighbors can hear our cheerful patter. The grass is tall, but not overgrown, just that perfect stroke of vibrant green to remind us earth is soft. In the center of the yard is a brick fire pit, painted a chipped white. At first, the wet planks of wood resisted fire, offered only smoke, but as soon as we turned away, heat sprouted. Now the flames are swaying, joyful to overcome the stubborn logs.
I’m at a break fast, not a breakfast but a gathering of people whose sole purpose is to eat, now that the sun has set. The table is covered in a striped cloth, faded purple, tangerine and blue, but you can hardly see it. Bowls of hummus, lox, olives, egg salad, trays of bagels, potato balls and heirloom tomatoes are crowded together. A spread in the most abundant sense of the word.
It was my first Yom Kippur, a holiday that traditionally asks Jews to abstain from food and drink from sundown to sundown nine days after the Jewish new year. The idea is atonement, a ritual to cleanse the physical vessel and the spirit it houses. In our emptiness, we make space for all that God, HaShem, El Roi, Ein Sof, has planned.
I am not one to act under fear of cosmic punishment, but as of late I've thought about the lost art of ceremonial sacrifice. There’s a difference between fearful action and willing action. If we make letting go a joyful act, it becomes an offering.
When you think about the spectrum of ritual sacrifice, fasting for one day is nothing. Celtic traditions saw young women drowned. In Ancient China, young men were beheaded to appease the ancestors. The Aztecs sacrificed up to 100,000 people each year, in an effort to keep the sun alive.
I’m not arguing for a return to blood sacrifice, but have we lost a bit of our collective edge? Each of us lives alongside an extensive digital library of personal photos, fleeting thoughts, communications. We can reference a friend’s out of pocket remark from two years ago, easily searching for keywords in a text chain. When we hit the limits of our memory, there are countless mundane photos to fill in the gaps. I can check my phone, my archived stories, my friend’s grid for clues. Oh, great, now I remember I was an alien for Halloween 2015.
Deep loss still occurs, but so much is softened by the automated archive of our past iterations. We can always look back, look farther, till our neck stays tilted towards the past. If we cannot fully shed our old selves, can we expect to grow into a truer form?
Sacrifice reminds us that all of this will end. And it should. We can start a smoky fire and toss in our words, watching our ink get consumed. Maybe a glass shatters and we are made to clean up every shard, careful not to slice our fingers. Or we take part in a time tested holiday, abstaining from water and food. Yom Kippur only asks you to sacrifice one day, to show up for the powers beyond comprehension and make an offering of yourself.
At the break fast, I was the only person who went without water for the duration. As it was my first Yom Kippur, I wanted to go all out. Plus, I love drinking water, I always have a big cup next to me that I refill often. For whatever reason, hydration was next to godliness in my mother’s eyes. I was trained to take long successive gulps and always have water on my bedside. I knew going without food would be tough, but water would be the real sacrifice. Right before the sun went down and Yom Kippur officially commenced, I poured a tall glass of water straight down my throat, ballooning my belly with fluid.
During the fast, my thoughts hovered just above my dry tongue. Anytime my focus drifted away from water, it was reigned in FAST: oh wow I wasn’t thinking about water! And then I’d be back to thinking about water. I was painfully aware of my dependency, the very core of my humanity.
To feel truly eternal, perhaps we need to meet our mortality by sensing the limits of this lifetime.
For the most part, reconnecting with my Jewish ancestry has been a logical process. I read a book, then another, I attended a shabbat service, I signed up for a 16 week class. The class provided necessary information and while I wasn’t exactly inspired, I wanted a foundational understanding of a very complex religion. I spoke with the Rabbi teaching the class and he offered a mikveh immersion at the end of the process. Yes, finally, a ritual! A mikveh is a large body of water connected to underground channels of ever flowing water. It’s used to cleanse and mark certain occasions, including conversion to Judaism. While I wasn’t really converting since I was born Jewish, the Rabbi understood I valued ceremony. I was excited to earn it.
But here’s the plot twist. Just three weeks before the course concluded, my classmates and I received an email. We would no longer be attending in person classes, we were to switch to a new cohort on Zoom. Our class was no longer in session, because our teacher, the Rabbi, was fired from his temple. The whole class was left in the dark and it was an awkward switch into zoom learning. I tried a couple times to set up a meeting with the virtual Rabbi—who was very passionate and tbh inspiring—but she was busy juggling multiple classes. Things fell through the cracks. The last session was held in person, partially because I was pushing for a real life finale, but I was out of town when it happened. The zoom class was on a different schedule and they graduated later than my original class. It was a weird way to end, there was no closure. And if I wanted my Mikveh moment, I was back at square one.
The summer picked up. I continued to think about Judaism but it became more abstract. Every so often I’d read a Jewish text, but I’ve been deep in research for this longer form project and most everything I read has been in that vein. Still, I couldn’t ignore the lineage I’d begun to explore and luckily, ancestors are patient.
When I was a kid, my mom presented Yom Kippur as a really terrible time. If she sees hydration next to godliness, she sees hunger as the devil himself. And who can argue with that? I started Yom Kippur ready to cave. My mother is one of the strongest willed people I know. If Yom Kippur broke her, then who am I to try?
That’s why I went all in. No food, no water. I even went to an innovative local temple called Nefesh. Their service began at 9:00am and lasted until 1:00pm, but it didn’t feel like it. I was grateful to witness the evolution of an ancient religion and to take part in such a whole-hearted approach. Yes, I was experiencing caffeine withdrawals, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be.
As the service flowed on, my mind lost any hold on the Hebrew prayers and I let the sounds wash over me. Even the moments of tedium became a meditation in presence. With the center of my body feeling so hollow, I became an instrument. The sound waves rolled through me, echoing through my bloodstream. Reverberating within me, out of me, into the people around me. Abstaining from food and water is not logical. Yet the fast of Yom Kippur finally brought me out of the intellectual, into a space beyond words.
Sacrifice is meant to be a challenge, but stepping beyond the body for just one day is not a punishment. If anything, it’s an honor to recall the limits of this lifetime and the endless on the other side. And when the sun goes down, let us come back to earth with laughter, a plate of soft foods and a glass of natural wine. In that easy joy, we remember the physical lives in concert with the divine.
Yom Kippur breaks down your defenses and empties you out so whatever needs to rise to the surface can get there more easily. I found it difficult this year, but the rewards were abundant.