to “shed” clothing donations at Housing Works (a thrift shop that supports AIDS patients), then pause in front of restaurants with names like “Gossip” and “Perdition”—apt stimuli for atonement. Amichai keeps demanding that we make this ritual real for us, that we don’t cheat the expiation. It’s not working if it’s too easy. We make our way to the 46th Street footbridge that leads to the Hudson River, where we pause in a cluster, a communal confession. People verbally throw out the things they’re discarding today: “Indecision.” “Intolerance.” “Guilt.” I’m tempted to say, “I’m shedding my initial resistance to this event.”
We cross over to the park by the river and Amichai gathers us in a large closing circle, holding hands once more, with the USS Intrepid aircraft carrier in view (more echoes of a summer of war). New Yorkers stroll by us, unfazed by the tambourine in Amichai’s hand, the ram’s horn jutting out of his jeans pocket, or our last flying breadcrumbs arcing into the Hudson. I’m struck by the unapologetic visibility of this faith: our big circle, the singing, the shofar, the bread lobs. Observance requires a certain boldness. Maybe today I’ve managed to shed a little of what keeps holding me back.
Rabba Sara Hurwitz
ON TZOM GEDALIAH (THE FAST OF GEDALIAH)
Although the Fast of Gedaliah memorializes the assassination of the Jewish governor by the same name, this fast day commemorates something far more tragic. The story of Gedaliah’s death is recounted at the end of the book of Kings, which completes the narrative of the biblical story of the Jewish people. In other words, the story of the Jewish nation begins at the end of Genesis, with Jacob taking his family down to Egypt, after he learned his son Joseph was still alive and living there, and ends in the book of Kings, with the Jewish people fleeing back to Egypt after the First Temple is destroyed by the Babylonians. Seen in this light, we are fasting not only for the death of one person, but for the tragic cyclical story of our nation—one that began and ended in Egypt—the symbol of our people’s destruction. But, just as the Jews were redeemed from Egypt the first time, each year, we pray for redemption: an everlasting, but ever-elusive, freedom from injustice and oppression.
9. 28. 14
THE FIRST FAST of the year falls two days later, and no, it’s not Yom Kippur. The Fast of Gedaliah (“Tzom Gedaliah”) is obscure, to say the least, and my having to honor some ancient assassinated governor feels like a major test of holiday stamina.
The story is dramatic: after the bloody destruction of the First Jerusalem Temple by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., most Jews fled The Judean kingdom (ancient southern Israel) to seek safety in Babylon. The cruel, conquering Babylonian king picked a kindhearted Jew named Gedaliah to govern those Jews who stayed behind. Gedaliah was murdered by a power-hungry rival—at a banquet, no less. The Fast of Gedaliah marks the assassination of one Jew by another and the destruction of the First Temple (the first of four nods we’ll make this year to the losses of the First and Second Temples—our ancient, holy centers of worship).
It’s safe to say that, until this year of living Jewishly, I never knew we had to fast before The Big Fast. And it’s annoying. Especially because this fast happens mid-atonement, the day after Rosh Hashanah ends. (Except if the calendar drops Gedaliah on a Saturday, as it does this year, in which case the fast is delayed a day because fasts are prohibited on the Sabbath. Got that?) The upshot is that I’m fasting on a Sunday, September 28, 2014, six days before Yom Kippur.
This fast technically isn’t as onerous as Yom Kippur’s because it lasts from dawn to dusk instead of the full twenty-five hours (it’s twenty-five because you have to wait about forty-five minutes after sundown on the day the holiday ends to make sure it’s dark). But not eating or drinking is onerous at any stretch, at least for this Jew. Especially on a Sunday, when there’s less to distract me.
My husband and kids choose not to join me in my starvation, though they apologize for the waft of toasted bagels. But my friend Jeremy from synagogue has offered to be my “Fast-Chum” in solidarity (I came up with that title since he’s British), so that helps me feel less sorry for myself.
And what does Gedaliah have to do with Rosh Hashanah? It’s a little fuzzy, but basically the Jews who chose to stay in Judea after the Temple’s destruction were not sure whether to hang around after Gedaliah’s murder. They awaited God’s word, which would come through the prophet Jeremiah, who awaited divine guidance for ten days, around the time of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. (Jeremiah urged the people to stay; he was ignored and most fled.)
The Talmud (Torah commentary by ancient rabbis) says that we should fast for Gedaliah just as we fast for the Temple’s ruin itself because “the death of the righteous is equivalent to the destruction” of the holy Temple. We fast to remind ourselves what happens when one Jew turns on another.
It reminds me of how ugly the divisions became months earlier, when every American Jew seemed to have an immovable opinion on the summer war in Gaza and an inability to listen to one another. Of course I understand dissent. But the discourse went beyond debate and turned vicious. Maybe this fast offers a way to be alert to that degeneration.
Steven M. Cohen, the droll, eminent sociologist who studies trends in Jewish identity, connectivity, and indifference, offers me an interesting tidbit: some peace activists have suggested that this holiday be updated to honor Yitzhak Rabin, the late Israeli prime minister who some pegged, like Gedaliah, to be a betrayer, and who was assassinated by a Jew in 1995. But during the fast itself, I’m more focused on hunger than infighting. Cohen explains to me that it’s actually legal to eat breakfast before the sun comes up (technically seventy-two minutes before sunrise) so one can start the day on a full stomach, but I forget to set my alarm and I wake in the daylight, when the fasting-clock has already begun. My headache explodes from caffeine withdrawal as I kick myself for forgetting Cohen’s advice.
But I have to admit that, whether or not Gedaliah’s murder speaks to me, I remember I am a Jew today. All day. Hunger reminds me again and again of why I can’t eat, why we give things up so that we don’t repeat the errors of our ancestors, mistakes that are so easy to commit again. This people, to which I belong, doggedly replays history, however remote its events may be.
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg
ON YOM KIPPUR
This is the one time the Jewish religion really focuses on death and puts it before you. Yom Kippur is about failure and death. Stop and weigh your life. Have you lived on the side of dignity and what have you done wrong—not just to other people but to yourself? Did you respect your own life: or did you run it down? That’s the dialectic. Celebrate life, but part of celebrating life is not to boast of it, but rather to look at your failures, look at your weaknesses, not in despair or in guilt, but as a corrector. . . . The Talmud says that if you overcome failure, if you try a second time with renewed effort, you’ll reach a higher level than people who have never failed.
Yom Kippur is literally a ritual reenactment of your death. The Jewish version of what it is to die. You don’t eat, you don’t have sex, you’re dead even if you’re living. If your life were going to end tomorrow, where do you stand?
