I did. And I do pretty much every year, though last year I got an out, since we had a baby the night before. But as I was in the throes of near-hallucination toward mid-afternoon yesterday, I finally asked myself the question: Why?
I’m not what you might call much of a believer. While I mark the various holidays, including Shabbat, it’s really more my wife doing the commemorating, not me. And good luck finding me in the sanctuary of a synagogue, unless there’s a really good reason (though I was there for Kol Nidre — we even got a sitter). So why did I fast?
The answer I came up with is, I don’t know. And I really don’t.
There’s the intended reason — to clear our bodies and our minds and thoughts so we can focus on our transgressions of the past year, and I suppose more than anything there’s something to that. But I wasn’t one of the many pounding my chest during what a lot of them called a very powerful service this year.
There’s the prostrating ourselves before God reason, but as I’ve already stated above, I’m just not that much of a believer.
Or there’s the reason that it’s an important way to mark the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. But it’s not like I was doing anything more particularly holy than I usually do. I stayed home from services with the baby and did all the things I needed to do to make sure he can, eventually, survive on his own in the wild. Not to mention keep him away from the shoe rack, as eating shoelaces seems to have become his favorite pastime. I was hungry the whole time, and starvation does not lead to better child-rearing decisions. I can tell you that from experience.
Yet many people I know also treated the day with some amount of reverence and some amount of using the time to get things done that they can’t otherwise find the time for. Like getting their emissions checked. Or grocery shopping. Or going on job interviews. Or watching soap operas (nobody actually admitted doing that, but it must happen. It must!). Most of them, too, fasted.
So I ask: Did you fast? And if you did, why?

So everyone who was ever a child is very busy freaking out these days (in a good way) because their favorite book, Where the Wild Things Are, has been made into a movie.  Dave Eggers adapted the screenplay and the trailer has that one Arcade Fire song in it and it looks AWESOME.

Anyway, the fellow who wrote the book, Maurice Sendak, is Jewish. The San Francisco contemporary Jewish Museum has an exhibit about him going on right now. Apparently, along with Where the Wild Things Are, he also wrote a whole lot of other vaguely unsettling kids books, some of a Jewy nature. The Forward has pictures of some of his illustrations if you are interested.

This came to my office, addressed to somebody who doesn’t even work here. And though I have to say, much to the protestations otherwise from the director of the local chapter of StandWithUs that they are not a right-wing organization and that the majority of its members here lean more center-left, the national organization is obviously playing on the fears of those who think any Muslim wants to destroy both Israel and the Jews. This lowest-common-denominator fundraising tactic is insulting to me, it’s insulting to Muslims — how could identifying them by name with that bloody photo on the front of their envelope be anything but? — and it’s insulting to the intelligence of people who understand that just because someone has a beef with the Israeli army’s actions it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily “anti-Israel.” 
The informational brochure included shows all the odious things the so-called anti-Israel people are doing, from demanding the boycott of an Israeli dance company to handing out pens with a Magen David equaling a swastika. And it is odious. Many of these groups are creating disinformation or spreading half truths when they hold their rallies (or their counter rallies of people who support Israel). But just because many of the tactics a lot of these people use are disgusting and in many ways racist themselves, it doesn’t mean that there’s not a glimmer of truth in there.
But fighting garbage with garbage does not make us look good. Printing xenophobic captions on the face of mailings only serves to scare people — the apparent tactic being that scared people write bigger checks. During a time when Jewish educators are attempting to find new ways to teach Israel in their classrooms, creating an us vs. them atmosphere does not seem to be the most productive method to at least try to change people’s minds.
If we’re to get out of this spiral of hatred, scraping the bottom of the figurative barrel serves no one but the people who own the barrel.

If you read Joel’s poem about the chicken-swinging ritual of kaparot and had no idea what in the hell it was about, you’re not alone. Kaparot is, in my mind, one of those fringe oddities of Judaism, like metzitzah b’peh, that is best kept under wraps lest the goyim find out and decide their bigoted ancestors were right to hate and fear us. Admit it people, sometimes this religion is very very strange.

Okay though, just between us, here’s what’s up with the chicken swinging:

The original form of the kaparot ceremony involves taking a chicken (a white rooster for a male, hen for a female) and waving it over one’s head while reciting this prayer: “This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my atonement. This chicken will go to its death while I will enter and proceed to a good long life, and peace.” Then the chicken is slaughtered and it (or its cash value) is given to the poor.

Good news for the chickens though: Although kaparot is still practiced by many observant Jews prior to Yom Kippur, most choose to do it instead with a sack of coins which then go to the tzedakah box, rather than a real, live animal.

I am for eating, not swinging, thank you.

I’m not exactly quite sure what this means. In fact, I should probably not even blog about it all, since all they want is the publicity. So I’m going to not mention any of these people by name, I’m not going to question what exactly they mean by fig, or why figs are evil. I’m only going to let you see the fax that showed up in my inbox this morning.

But I do have to wonder what’s so wrong with these sweet, delectable, oh-so-Mediterranean fruits of joy. I just don’t get it.

(By lepiaf.geo/Creative Commons)