Fasting and Belief

Last night, after the Yom Kippur fast, we ate dinner with some friends, one of whom, a man in of seventy, has recently converted to Judaism. He admits that it was an odd thing to do. He married an orthodox Jewish woman, who was there with him. They both said that people ask them, at your age, why did you bother to marry? After all, you're not going to have children. Bill, the convert, usually responds, "Really?" After all, they're both very young looking.

Bill noted that it was the first time in his life that he had fasted, gone without food or water for 25 hours. I was a bit surprised, because I can't count the number of times I've fasted. It's almost normal for me.

The purpose of the fast is to keep the message of Yom Kippur in mind: God judges us between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, when we have ten days to repent and change our ways, and He delivers our sentence on Yom Kippur, when our fate is decided (actually, there's supposed to be a grace period until the end of Sukkot). If we repent for our sins now, we won't die this year. Otherwise, our fate is sealed.

Did any of the six of us around the table last night, all of whom had attended the long Yom Kippur services and fasted, take that message literally? I doubt it. I know that my wife and I don't believe it, because we discussed it.

So why do we bother?

Solidarity, for one. Jews have been fasting on Yom Kippur for a couple of thousand years, and for many otherwise completely unaffiliated Jews, fasting on Yom Kippur is still a sign on their part that they feel an allegiance to the Jewish people. The Marranos in Spain used to fast on Yom Kippur for the same reason. It's the kind of religious observance you can practice without people noticing it.

Okay, but why sit through and participate in the long and repetitive liturgy? Why pound your chest endlessly, confessing to an alphabetical list of sins? Why get to your knees at certain points in the service? Why not just stay home, fast, and listen to music or read a book?

The best answer, for me, is one that a learned friend of mine proposed: "Spiritual Theater." I know that, like an actor, I am speaking with a kind of sincerity when I recite the prayers. But what am I acting out?

First, I'm responding to the terrible uncertainty of life. I looked around the packed synagogue while we were reciting one of the central prayers, "Unetane Tokef" (Let us now relate the power of this day's holiness), and I realized that, without doubt, some of the people present in the room will not be alive next year at this time. Perhaps I myself won't be. Maybe I don't believe specifically that by observing the Sabbath more meticulously, I will avoid that fate. In fact, I don't think that anything I might do will be helpful, except exerting caution, watching my health, and so on. But I know that, as carefully as I drive, a car could veer into my lane and cause my death, just to name one of the many reasons why I might not make it through the year.

Second, I'm responding to the need to repent - maybe not in the orthodox Jewish sense of trying to observe more of the commandments more scrupulously - but certainly in the sense of trying to be a better person. It's easy to avoid examining one's life. The High Holidays push you in that direction.

Third, let's not forget solidarity. After all, publicly observing Yom Kippur as part of a community is much more powerful than privately observing it. Part of my identity is that I am the kind of Jew who attends religious services quite frequently, setting aside the issue of belief.

Fourth, the High Holiday liturgy is very beautiful. Even though it is too long and repetitive, there are some aesthetic high points, some great poetry, some dramatic moments in the service, some beautiful music in the hymns we sing. It has a lot of emotional depth and power. Not only is it "Spiritual Theater," it's good theater, and theater of a unique sort, in which the spectators are also actors.

Last, it's therapeutic. Yom Kippur brought up many deep and disturbing memories in me, memories of people I had disappointed, relationships I hadn't done justice to, personal failures of various kinds. I barely slept at all on the night of Yom Kippur. I felt that my life was shattering. But over the day the pieces fell together again - I hope not in the same way. Because self-improvement is a process of dismantling, sometimes painful and frightening, and reconstruction, often challenging and uncertain, with some of the bad pieces left out and the whole structure different from what it was.

Read Out Loud in British English

A while back I had a little story accepted by a creative British organization called The Liars' League. Every month they hold an evening at which actors read short stories that have won their contest, and they also post the stories and the MP3s on their web site. I've attached the MP3 to a video and I'm uploading it here.

The pictures aren't really connected to the words. I found out that the only way to upload an audio file is to use Windows Move Maker to make the audio file into a sound track, and then you can stick whatever picture you like on it.

It was very amusing to me to hear my work enunciated very carefully in British English. It was also amusing to me to hear the audience's reaction: it took them a while to figure out that it was supposed to be funny. Probably because of the deadpan delivery. I wish I could have been there in person. Next trip to London!

Being Away and Coming Back - Awareness of Change

I just spent a bit more than three weeks in the United States, in the suburbs of the capital, and once again I had to deal with the intense and contradictory feelings of familiarity and strangeness. It's the country where I grew up, where I speak the native language like a native, but so much has changed in the 36 years that I've lived away from North America. Frequent visits and keeping up with the media - seeing American films and TV shows, reading American books and magazines - all that is not the same as living there.
On my last day in Washington, DC, I went into a Borders book store for the first time (!) and bought a couple of books, including The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, who may be a bit too glib for some people's taste, but he's definitely very smart and insightful. I read the book within a couple of days, on the plane home and in bed when jet lag gave me insomnia.
I was especially taken by the chapter on context: if you change the context in which people act, you can change their behavior. I began to wonder (and I am far from coming up with any answer) how it would be possible to change the context here in the conflicted Middle East so that the epidemic of violence would tip and an epidemic of non-violence might begin.
Long ago I was involved in Tai Chi, where, as in many Asian martial arts, the theory is that you can defeat your opponent not by overpowering him but by using his strength against him. The sub-title of Gladwell's book is something like: how a small change can make a big difference. The peace movement doesn't have the power to make big changes, but if it makes the right small changes in people's attitudes, in the context of behavior, they could lead to a big change. Up to now, the Israeli peace movement has been largely ineffective in changing attitudes. Obviously it's been doing the wrong thing. What would the right thing be?
So what's the connection between my opening paragraph about the strangeness of being in America for me and the rest of it, about the Tipping Point and changing the context of behavior? For me, the strangest (and most wonderful) thing about America was the visible change in racial relations. Over and over again I saw mixed groups of black, white, and Hispanic people walking in the street, sitting at tables in restaurants, passing each other on the street, in the most natural way.
When I was growing up, even in multi-racial New York City, it would have been very rare to see people of different races mingling. Something has tipped in America with respect to race, and the election of a man with an African father as President is a symptom of the change, not a cause of it.
I'm not so naive as to think that discrimination is gone, or that people of darker color aren't disproportionately poor, incarcerated, and badly educated compared to people of lighter color, but the open, unselfconscious mingling shows that some of the fear and hostility that had marked race relations in the America I grew up in has abated. Black people are no longer invisible in the United States.
So couldn't the same thing happen between Jews and Arabs in Israel-Palestine?