Fasting

If I had given it any forethought, Del Taco probably would not have been my choice for a last meal before a Yom Kippur fast.

When I was in college, and the Del Taco was still a Mexican franchise known as Naugles (and boy, would I love to pick the brain of the marketing genius who picked the name Naugles to sell Mexican food -- or any food, for that matter.  I mean, doesn’t ‘Naugles’ sound a bit too much like ‘nauseous’?), every Tuesday was Taco Tuesday, which meant you could get three soft tacos for 99 cents.

This also meant you could get six soft tacos for $1.98, nine soft tacos for $2.97, and this one time, when I thought I was really hungry, a dozen soft tacos for $3.96.

Turns out I wasn’t quite that hungry -- I only finished eleven.

Nevertheless, when my friend Paul suggested Del Taco for dinner Wednesday night, I didn’t have to think twice.  A grilled steak taco, spicy chicken burrito, Del Taco Macho Combo burrito and a medium Coke -- and $7.92 -- later, my hunger was sated.  Which was good, considering it would be my last meal for 24 hours.

Now, unless I am the only Jew you know, I am most definitely not the most observant Jew you know, but unless I’m in the midst of doing something insane like training for a marathon, I like to fast on Yom Kippur.

For those of you whose knowledge of Judaism begins and ends with Adam Sandler songs, Rosh Hashanah, which was last week, is the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, ten days later, is the Day of Atonement.  Traditionally, in the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, you are supposed to ask for forgiveness from those you have wronged in the last year, and then fast from sundown the night Yom Kippur begins to sundown the next day.

And for those of you I have wronged in the last year, I know I’m a little late, but can you find it in your heart to forgive me?  If not, feel free to wrong me in the next 12 months.  I’ll totally understand.

Anyway, with a bellyful of Del Taco pressing on my belt, I began my fast.

Now, Jews more observant than me likely would’ve skipped work and spent the day in synagogue.  But the world does not plan its schedule around the major Jewish holidays the way it does around Christmas, and the way the Jewish calendar works, Yom Kippur doesn’t get planted neatly on a Sunday the way Easter does, and since I’ve only got a limited number of days in a semester to teach all the class sessions I need to teach, and I’d already tweaked the syllabus so I could be in Atlanta to see the season-opening Monday Night Football game between the Eagles and the Falcons four weeks ago, I went to campus and taught on Thursday.

And all around me, people ate.

One of the things I’ve always found interesting about fasting is that when I tell people I’m doing it, they’re always apologetic or confused.  They apologize for snacking in front of me as though I’m trying to quit smoking and they’ve just blown smoke in my face, or they can’t understand why, if I’m fasting, I’m not at services.  This is why I usually don’t mention that I’m fasting -- I just don’t eat.

But when I do that, it’s not because God, or my mother, or the Pope (and Jews don’t have a Pope equivalent, but I really think we should) is making me -- it’s my choice.

As unobservant as I may be, I choose to fast because I appreciate the tradition.  I also like the idea of taking one day a year to reflect, to think about my beliefs, where I fit in the universe, who I want to be and how I want to treat others in the coming year.  Because it’s not something you do every day, fasting makes you conscious of things you otherwise do every day.

Like eating.

Had I made my mother happy and gone to services (and I’m convinced that at least half of all High-Holidays-services goers are there to make their mothers happy, and not themselves), I would have been surrounded by others who were not eating with me.  The problem with that, though, is that if you’ve been going to Yom Kippur services every year since you were a kid, you already know the plot, which means you sit there doing two things:  judging what everybody else is wearing, and thinking about how much you want to eat.

When you go about your normal day and just take out the eating, you’re too distracted by everything else you’re doing to think too much about being hungry.

Unless you get a little light-headed, at which point eating sounds like a really good idea.

Or you see other people eating, and you think to yourself, “Hm.  I remember what it was like to eat.”

Or you smell food around every corner, and your stomach says to you, “Hey brain, I thought we were friends -- can’t you talk to the hands and mouth about getting me a little something?”

Or you sit in a committee meeting, as I did late Thursday afternoon, and talk about the food you’re ordering for an upcoming event you’re planning -- giant pans of pasta con broccoli, buckets of mozzarella sticks, garlic bread -- and you start salivating.  One of the other committee members had gone to services, but not fasted, which is why she was able to speak so recklessly about the mozzarella sticks.

But despite those waves of hunger that periodically washed over me, I found the fasting quite manageable.

Around lunch time, realizing that I hadn’t eaten for 17 hours, I was not passed out from hunger and I was still mostly functional, I started thinking about how much I normally eat on a daily basis, and I felt a bit gluttonous.  I’m getting by on nothing today; do I really need that much on all the other days?

Mostly, though I didn’t have anything to eat, I thought about all the things I do have.  I thought about the things I’m grateful for, and the promise of a new year.  I thought about how much I appreciated being able to make a choice not to eat for one day, knowing that when the day was through, I would no longer be hungry.  I thought about sacrifices, and how much they are worth making.

And, you know, I thought about dinner.

I thought a lot about dinner.