Got the Yom Kippur blues?

Lauren Kramer

It’s the Jewish holiday I dread most: Yom Kippur. Each year, I feel it coming with a knot in my stomach, remembering a month before it even arrives how dehydrated, famished and headachy I’ve been in previous years. 

There are good fasters in my family – my husband, for one, who barely feels the force of the fast until 5 p.m., just a few hours from breaking it. Not me. I’ll have tummy rumbles from 8:30 a.m. on Yom Kippur, and by 9:15, a headache is drumming insistently at my temples. At 11 a.m., Advil and a glass of water beckon like a mirage in the desert. By noon, I’m faced with a dilemma. Do I medicate my headache away, thereby making a more spiritual, meaningful fast possible, or do I abstain from the quick fix and suffer the day away like most everyone else? Usually the oasis wins, the Advil is downed, and I emerge from the grey fog feeling better, but with the knowledge I cheated. 

“Have a meaningful fast,” we wish each other on Yom Kippur. I don’t quite understand this wish, because although I long to immerse myself in spiritual thoughts, consider my wrongdoings and make resolutions for the New Year, most of my thoughts on the Day of Atonement centre around food and drink. At home, we play the “what I miss most” game, our list growing longer as the hours tick slowly by. We start with wishes for a hot cup of tea, graduating to salads, challah and rich comfort foods as the day progresses. It’s a futile game, one that defeats the object of atoning, distracting us from the spiritual.

But the truth is that once we’re home from synagogue – our attendance threshold is 2 p.m. on Yom Kippur – the spiritual is hard to find. I issue warnings to my kids banning digital usage that day, but inevitably someone sneaks in time on their phone or iPad, particularly after they see Dad reclining in bed, watching a movie on the sly. A feeling of grumpiness prevails in the house. Experience has taught me that when I start policing the behaviour of various family members, harsh words get exchanged. “Don’t tell me how to behave,” my husband will snap if I suggest he turn off the iPad. “You observe Yom Kippur the way you want to, and I’ll do the same.”

He has a point, of course. Except that screen time can hardly be counted as observance. Still, I don’t have the energy to be the Yom Kippur cop. As a grownup, he gets to choose his level of observance.

In my childhood, my grandmother, Sadie, would leave her apartment to spend the High Holidays with her son and grandchildren. I’d sit next to her in shul, where she’d spend the entire day without a murmur about hunger, always in the same seat. 

Her wrinkled hands would clasp an ancient, leather-bound machzor, and she’d cover the service in her own time. Only hours later, when the light had faded and the shofar had sounded, would she make her way slowly back to our house. There we’d gather around the dining room table for a cup of tea and a slice of chocolate cake, carefully resisting the urge to over-compensate for a day without food and liquid. Later, kichel and chopped herring would further take the edge off, leading into an evening of slow, meditative recovery from the holiest day of the year.

On Yom Kippur, I miss her, the synagogue we attended together a lifetime ago, and the spirituality that clung to the day, demanding respect in the years before cellphones, computer screens and iPads. As a parent, my Yom Kippur challenge is massive. How do I convey its spirituality to my kids? How do I help them infuse their fast with meaning when I struggle to do the same for my own? How do you get another person to look deep inside themselves, acknowledge their faults and misdeeds and commit to improving themselves? And how to do all this when you yourself are feeling weak, riddled with hunger and impatient for the day to end? Every Yom Kippur, I ask myself these questions, and each year, I’m so consumed with hunger that the answers remain ephemeral at best.

I wish I could grasp those answers, though, because I fear if I don’t, my kids won’t have a good reason to observe Yom Kippur when they reach adulthood. And if that happens, I will most certainly have failed as a Jewish parent – big time.