There is something so mournful about the act of turning away from food that its pairing with sorrow seems an extension of the thing itself.
If grief is our naturally unfurling response to loss, the absence of food is its most obvious material reflection. Life turns on us, and we do not, or cannot, eat.
The quandary with ritual observance of grief and the injunction to abstain from food is that its quiet sagacity is easily subsumed by the rhythmic obligations of custom. Even the nonreligious tend just to follow tradition, perhaps in a folkloric spirit, and easily overlook how uncannily true it is to the circumstances.
Foodlessness is an instinctive, primal reaction to pain. A number of years ago the Chilean writer Isabel Allende took a hiatus from novels and produced two works of nonfiction. The first, “Paula,” was a diary of the illness and death of her daughter. The second is entitled “Afrodita” — a frolicking book of recipes and childhood memories, it is ostensibly much less than the novels for which Allende became famous. In truth, as she explains in the introduction, “Afrodita “is about her return to life.
“After the death of my daughter Paula, I spent three years trying to exorcise grief with useless rituals. It was three centuries of feeling that the world had lost its colors and a universal gray had inexorably extended itself over everything.
“I can’t specify the precise moment in which the first brushstrokes of color began to appear, but when I started dreaming of food I knew I was approaching the end of the long tunnel of mourning and, finally, was emerging on the other side, in plain light, with a tremendous desire to eat and frolic again. Thus, very slowly, kilo by kilo and kiss by kiss, this project was born.”
There needs to be space in life for grief, just as there needs to be space in life for pleasure. Most importantly, there must be a framework for separating ourselves without permanently relinquishing our place in the pageant, in the way of mourners sitting shiva.
Fasting, with its inherent respite, may be the wisest way. It opens a window to contemplation. It is a discipline that spells out the meanings of loss without allowing them to overpower life. And, it is safe. In the case of ritual fasts, life always wins; we resume eating.
The foods with which we break a fast are also instructive in their simplicity. After Yom Kippur, traditionalists begin with a clear broth. In the Middle East, bread and salt are given to mourners: the bread of life, the salt of tears. Once the period of abstinence is passed, nourishing the body and the spirit are two sides of the same coin.
Fasting focuses the mind and the soul like nothing else. Fasting is purifying in the way that silence is; and silence, of course, expresses our deepest selves: the wondrous silence of love, the hush of admiration, the mute agony of grief. Words, another staff of life, at these moments become entirely superfluous.
Think about it; in the first blush of love, in the dark spiral of grief, who can eat? Who can speak? Who wants to? Every year I am struck again by the realization that in following the conventions of Yom Kippur we are, in fact, receiving guidance on how to heal our own sorrows.
And yet, there are distinctions. Not eating because of depression or compulsion is not a fast; it is an illness. Not eating as a result of despair is a symptom. Not eating out of vanity is an indulgence. Not eating as a result of poverty is a curse.
A fast is, by definition, an act of will, a choice. Ask any hunger-striker: For the act of nonconsumption of food to have any meaning, it must be the result of deliberation and decision, a behavior selected from an array of alternatives.
Choice is the critical factor distinguishing between conscious renunciation and a way of life. The one-day fast of Yom Kippur can in this way be compared with another highly ritualistic form of restraint — niddah, the Jewish custom of abstaining from sexual relations during a woman’s menstruation, or with the custom of standing for a moment of silence to mark a tragic loss.
We stand aside, at attention, to draw our hearts and our minds to what we have put aside. There is something affirming, even cleansing, in the decision to even briefly say no to something we could just as easily have said yes to, and to stick to it. It affords us the sense of having taken a better measure of our own selves.
On Yom Kippur, choosing to forgo food, we acknowledge its sacred place.
Silence, renunciation and reticence may not make for a happy life, but they make for a single day of tremendous concentration. It is our private and undisturbed accounting with ourselves.
Despite the popular misconceptions caused by the English term Day of Atonement, there is in fact no place in the observance of Yom Kippur for public confessions or absolutions. It is, at the end, a built-in moment for pause. Its essence is abnegation, the reverse of indulgence.
We not only renounce the food in our mouths, but also, for one day, forgo the social experience of eating, the proclamation of connection to family or friends. For one day we stand alone.
Noga Tarnopolsky is a Jerusalem-based author.