The Day of Atonement

"Yom Kippur. The Day of Atonement. Should we fast? The question was hotly debated. To fast could mean a more certain, more rapid death. In this place, we were always fasting. It was Yom Kippur year-round. But there were those who said we should fast, precisely because it was dangerous to do so. We needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we were capable of singing his praises.

"I did not fast. First of all, to please my father who had forbidden me to do so. And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God's silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against him."

~~ from Night by Elie Wiesel

Yom Kippur Eve

"This Yom Kippur Eve in the ghetto is unique. In the apartments, people are cooking in big pots, as if nothing is the matter. People are washing and scouring (as if everything around them were normal)."

~~ from The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939—1944 by Herman Kruk

3/29/1985: on Yom Kippur with Isaac Rosenfeld and Marc Chagall

"Thinking about [Marc] Chagall in [New York] during the [second world] war, when he once met up with Isaac Rosenfeld and me on Yom Kippur, 57th Street. I feel a comradely twinge toward a fellow Jew when I remember his speaking Yiddish to us and admitting that though he could not get himself to work on the High High Holy Day, he was sauntering on to Pierre Matisse's gallery for a look (no doubt at his own work). Chagall and Vitebsk did summon up that feeling about Jewishness being a kind of sealed treasure, so deep within oneself. . . And what is it? In my case, the sense of all those others who have gone the long, long road. Solidarity. . . especially with those who so silently died at the hands of one power mad group or another."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, Selected and Edited by Richard M. Cook

hard times

I read and watched, about Madrid and then Athens and then London. People all over the world are eating out of dumpsters; they need food. Donate if you can.

But I eat too much, and I know I could stand to lose a few or fifteen, and the Jewish New Year offered just such an opportunity.

For Yom Kippur, it was easy on Iran and Israel for me, but I cheated with liquids, milk in the coffee, orange juice, etc. before finally succumbing to a sandwich around 5 p.m. That's not fasting a full day, I know.

What's on your mind?