Some coffee-addicted Orthodox Jews have a particular Yom Kippur ritual: they take caffeine suppositories on the Day of Atonement, a gambit that allows them to refrain from consuming any nourishment while also avoiding caffeine-withdrawal headaches. It’s a way—ignoring, for a moment, the delivery mechanism—of helping ensure the traditional Yom Kippur greeting, of having an easy fast.

But, then, the fast need not be too easy. “Although in Hebrew it is customary to say tzom kal, I don’t think it means, ‘Hope you don’t notice that you’re hungry,’” says Rabbi Daniel Nevins of the Jewish Theological Seminary. “I think we should start saying, ‘Have a meaningful fast,’ which is the point.” To which the caffeine-dependent might retort: “How can I draw meaning from my fast if I can’t think straight?”

Where God commands a fast on the 10th day of the seventh month—which He does at least three times in the Torah—it is always cast as a means toward the end of atonement and purification. “The point of the fast is not the suffering in and of itself,” says Rabbi Howard J. Goldsmith of Temple Emanuel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “The point of the fast is to spur us to action and to help us really reflect.” It’s a mistake, in other words, to fetishize the fast. For one thing, it is not the only prohibition: labor, too, is banned on Yom Kippur, as on Shabbat; and so is sex, despite its being perfectly kosher on a typical Friday night. The fast is best thought of as an instrument to achieve greater things. And so there’s nothing wrong with making your fast as easy as possible, within reason. “You should do whatever you can to go into the fast prepared,” Levin says. “You shouldn’t compel the headache.” (more…)

Fasting, repentance, getting inscribed in the book of life: these are all important aspects of Yom Kippur. But for me, it’s all about the music.

I stopped doing most of the things that Jews are supposed to do—going to synagogue, studying the Torah, not preparing shellfish dishes for Friday night dinner (I’d suggest the moules marinière, The Way to Cook, p. 120)—a long time ago. And God only knows how long it’s been since I entertained the idea that He/She/It might actually exist. But Yom Kippur still rings my chimes, mostly because of Kol Nidre. The melody alone has an almost Pavlovian effect on me: all it takes is a bar or two, and I swing into full-blown contemplation mode, complete with a detailed review of my personal failings over the past year.

This has nothing to do with the Aramaic text, which is all about the nullification of unfulfilled vows between man and God. When it comes to words, it’s the viddui—the confessional prayer that follows the Kol Nidre—that really hits home. Reading through that laundry list of sins, of betrayal and slander, perversion and arrogance, I can’t help but notice how many I’ve committed, how many people I’ve wronged. Ever the eager beaver, I inevitably use the viddui to catalog my own transgressions in an effort to improve upon last year’s performance. (more…)

When Jews decide to chow down on Yom Kippur, it’s usually done clandestinely, sneaking tasty morsels in a dark pantry, or disappearing into a diner in some nearby non-Jewish neighborhood. But furtive noshing wasn’t always the heretical path of choice on the Day of Atonement. Just over a century ago, a range of leftists held massive public festivals of eating, dancing, and performance for the full 25 hours of Yom Kippur, not only as a way to fight for the their right to party, but to unshackle themselves from the oppressive religious dictates they grew up with. What does one do, after all, when prayers and traditional customs no longer hold any meaning yet you still want to be part of a Jewish community? Eating with intention on a fast day allows you, in one fell swoop, to thumb your nose at the religious establishment and create a secular Jewish identity.

These Yom Kippur Balls, organized initially by anarchists in the mid-1880s, started in London and migrated to New York and Montreal. Smaller nosh fests and public demonstrations were also celebrated by Jewish antinomians in other locales. Unorthodox Jews in interwar Poland could pull hundreds of locals into small venues on Yom Kippur in shtetls like Kalish and Chelm; in larger cities like Warsaw and Lodz, they could sell out 5,000-seat circuses. Heresy was big business; tickets for early 1890s Yom Kippur events cost 15 cents for anarchists: capitalists who deigned to attend paid double.

Advertised in the Yiddish press, Yom Kippur balls, lectures, and nosh-fests were decidedly communal events created by and for an alternative community. You had to be a Jew to avail yourself of a blintz given out by a Jewish organization in Warsaw on Yom Kippur. Otherwise, it just wasn’t heresy. Yet it was not just provocation that motivated people to engage in what critics would consider a supremely obnoxious activity. Some people partook to spite a god they don’t believe in. Others to antagonize their parents. Still others to harass the religious establishment. In fact harassment may have been the biggest draw. (more…)

As Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is almost upon us, now is the time for soulful reflections. Here’s mine: a hardened technophile with a doctorate in video games, an obsessive geek whose home is a mausoleum of machinery, I can recall few moments more peaceful than the Yom Kippur observances of my childhood in Israel, sitting on the unlit balcony of my grandmother’s house in Ramat Gan, unplugged and happy.

Although largely secular, my family took the Day of Atonement seriously. We would spend the last moments before the holiday’s descent tearing apart squares of toilet paper, as even this most mundane of acts was deemed disrespectful of Judaism’s most awesome day. Riding a bicycle, a Yom Kippur tradition among young and unobservant Israelis, was similarly judged in my family as excessively profane, and so, as soon as we would return home from synagogue after reciting Kol Nidre, I would run up the stairs and onto the balcony and look around.

The neighborhood, a small and modest enclave in the heart of a small and modest town bordering on Tel Aviv, was shrouded by the thick, ink-blue sky. The glow of television sets, the flickering of refrigerator lights, and all the other ghosts of electricity that haunt our daily lives were nowhere to be seen. The neighborhood was dark, dark and quiet, with mumbles and prayers drowned by the shattering silence. And I, a kid who spent most of his days with his Atari and VCR and various battery-operated trinkets, would just sit there and stare and listen and give myself over to this immense stillness and feel something that wasn’t precisely religious but intensely personal, a feeling I suppose was peace. (more…)

When I heard that A. had changed his name, I wasn’t a bit surprised. With its faint whiff of geriatric mitteleuropa, it had marked him as the child of survivors: the green shoot risen from the ashes of the camps. We were all Jewish, the majority of us children of immigrants, but the differences that distinguished us were discernible to the trained eye. If someone had a name more suitable to a grandparent, wore a suit to the first day of school, or succeeded brilliantly, more often than not, he was a survivor’s kid. The Soviets, who flooded the school in the mid-’70s, had jarringly Christian names like Mary, played piano and violin, displayed an academic aptitude more inborn than sweated over and, when asked to bring in baby pictures, showed up with black and white snapshots, taken with ancient cameras, that looked eerily like photos of the rest of our parents from the 1930s.

So A. took a new name, according to my cousin—their boys played together—a foursquare North American moniker that could be shortened to one syllable, suitable for barking on the sports field, at a hockey rink, across a sea of office cubicles. It’s a typical assimilative immigrant trajectory, but I couldn’t help feeling partially responsible.

I learned this in autumn of 2003. The summer was over, and with it the heat-induced coma of the season. The weather had turned clear and cool, with air that “gave steel to one’s thoughts,” as the writer Leonard Michaels put it. As surely as the pomegranates find their way onto the grocery store shelves, my newly steeled thoughts inevitably turn to notions of guilt and forgiveness. That’s not entirely true. A. had been on my mind, on and off, for close to 30 years. I had tried to find him on more than one occasion, but the name change had left the trail cold. I mentioned casually to my cousin that I’d like to contact him, got an address, and sat down to write, my homemade version of slichot. (more…)

We were busy last Saturday, and so we failed to notice that Fox News host Glenn Beck chose Rosh Hashanah to declare his latest initiative: a day of Fast and Prayer for the Republic. When, exactly, will this new fast day fall? Conveniently enough for us, on Yom Kippur! In a Twitter post, Beck exhorted his 132,735 followers to “spread the word. Let us walk in the founders steps.”

Luckily, National Jewish Democratic Council spokesman Aaron Keyak spent some time considering Beck’s proposal in his Huffington Post column, and offers three possibilities: that Beck was trying to co-opt the Jews, that Beck was trying to co-opt all of Yom Kippur, or, more plausibly, that Beck just didn’t really notice. “Maybe Beck will be surprised when his Jewish staff doesn’t show up on Monday,” Keyak wrote. “I bet he will be surprised when they take the Fast and Prayer Day for the Republic that seriously.”

But here’s a question Keyak didn’t consider: when Beck invoked “the founders,” was he talking about George Washington and his friends or Abraham and his sons? Because as far as we know, George Washington and Ben Franklin were neither Jews nor given to observing Yom Kippur, and, you know, there wasn’t any Republic to fast for way back 5770 years ago. Mysteries upon mysteries! Anyway, we’ll keep you posted on how the fast parties shape up.

Glenn Beck: The Grinch Who Stole Yom Kippur [HuffPost]

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the most awesome of all Jewish holidays. We mean that literally: The very last of the Days of Awe, the 10-day period beginning with Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur marks the sealing of the Book of Life and with it our fates for the coming year. Jews—even some who cheerfully ignore other holidays—fast, repent, confess, and do their best to unload themselves of their sins and get on the Almighty’s merciful side. Yom Kippur occurs on the 10th day of the seventh month. Tradition has it that on this day, Moses received the second set of the Ten Commandments after 40 days of preparation, which is the time it took God to forgive the Israelites for their peccadillo with the Golden Calf. To hear the Book of Ezekiel tell it, the original Yom Kippur was a much different experience than our own food-deprived observance and was meant solely to cleanse the Temple’s sanctuary of any impurity that might have accidentally found its way into the Holy of Holies. This was the only time of the year the High Priest was allowed into God’s sacred dwelling, and an intricate set of rituals was required for him to do so. He had to take five dips in a mikveh, change clothes four times, and sacrifice a variety of animals. Among the latter, the most fascinating was the lottery of goats: one beast was chosen to be sacrificed for the Lord, and the other for Azazel (ancient Hebrew for “strong and steep mountain,” the word has since come to mean “hell”). After a short prayer, the animal was taken to a precipitous cliff outside Jerusalem and pushed off the ledge, serving as the literal scapegoat for the sins of the nation of Israel. All of this ancient tradition is recounted in the prayers that constitute the avodah, or worship portion of the liturgy recited during the musaf service. In some synagogues, congregants emulate the High Priest’s actions, gesturing in a way that mimics the sprinkling of bull’s blood on the Holy of Holies. Other congregations, however, ignore this part of the prayer altogether, finding it archaic and irrelevant to modern Jewish life. But while the ancient rituals may be largely forgotten, their deeper meanings stay with us. Like the two goats, for example—one offered to please God and the other to repent for the people’s sins—we still mark each Yom Kippur by observing the difference between wrongdoing committed “bein adam la’makom,” or between Man and God, and that perpetrated “bein adam le’chavero,” between Man and Man. Which is why vidui, or confession of guilt, is both practiced in public prayer and encouraged in private conduct. Another echo of the old ritual is evident in the custom of kapparot, which involves swinging a rooster or a hen over one’s head, for males and females respectively, reciting a prayer, and sacrificing the animal in the hope that it would take on all of the misery that might befall the person. (more…)

In the spirit of Delia Ephron’s classic How to Eat Like A Child, illustrated by Edward Koren (Harper, 2001), we offer a guide for our elementary-school-aged friends on how to celebrate the holiday.

Gently kick the back of the pew in front of you. Kick rhythmically to the cantor’s chanting, until your mother suddenly clamps her hand on your knee.

Stare into the Eternal Light until your eyes begin to water. Imagine it is a gateway to another dimension.

Flip ahead in the mahzor and read the Martyrology, the description of how 10 rabbis were tortured by the Romans on Yom Kippur after the destruction of the Second Temple. Read it again. Ponder which would suck the worst: being beheaded like Shimon Ben Gamliel, having your face flayed like Rabbi Yishmael, or having your skin raked with iron combs like Rabbi Akiva? Marvel that you are allowed to read this but were not allowed to go see “Final Destination 4.” (more…)

Click here to listen to Mayim Bialik explain how she learned to blow the shofar.

When I first attended High Holiday services at UCLA, as a 19-year-old college freshman in 1995, two sisters shared cantorial duties. I had never before been so moved by chanting; their singing wasn’t flowery or operatic, as it had been at my Reform synagogue growing up. It was simple, soulful, and understated. After several years, these sisters moved on, and the UCLA rabbi, aware that I was the director of the school’s Jewish a cappella group and that my career in show business had included singing, asked me to take over. Having seen me in services, he knew I was already familiar with the way our community davened. On a dozen cassettes, the sisters recorded the trope for the hundreds of High Holiday machzor pages so that I could practice nightly in the year leading up to my first yontif as cantor, or chazzanit.

I felt I was living out a personal destiny: my mother’s father was a lay chazzan for his community of Holocaust survivors in the Bronx and San Diego. As a nine-year-old child in Poland, he left yeshiva to earn money for his family, but I had been told that he could have been one of the greats. My grandfather Ephraim (he went by “Frank”) was a feisty, primarily Yiddish-speaking Orthodox man who barely grasped the concept of a girl having a bat mitzvah. How would I explain to him, then almost 90, that I was going to lead services? That I’d wear a lacey kippah and the white kittel, or robe, typically worn by pious men on the High Holidays?

He was incredulous that a 26-year-old woman would perform a role traditionally reserved for men. He smiled gently, opened his mouth to debate the halachic implications, then thought better of it and sighed deeply. The world was changing faster than he could grasp. (more…)

 

Elul, the last month of the year on the Hebrew calendar, is often regarded as a time to prepare for the rigorous self-reflection that takes place on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Throughout the month, the shofar, or ram’s horn, is sounded to induce an appropriately wakeful frame of mind. And so, in order to get into the spirit of the High Holidays, Tablet Magazine’s Gabriel Sanders met up with an old family friend: lung specialist, Judaica collector, and expert shofar-blower Ira Rezak. The two discussed the shofar’s ritual significance, and then they settled in for a lesson in the difficult business of getting a shofar to sound the way it should.