A Day of Hunger—Yom Kippur 5769 (Kol Nidre, October 8, 2008)
When the Germans rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1939, they immediately set to work to rid the country of its Jews. They set up concentration camps and ghettos like the infamous Terezinstadt. Among the many Jews who were able to get out, one was Anny Stern who saw the writing on the wall and spent nine months struggling to get papers to leave the country so that she and her son David could join her husband George in Palestine. Her 70 year old mother Mina Pachter –healthy and able-bodied-- refused to go with them. Anny pleaded with her mother and pleaded with her but to no avail. Minna was defiant. “You don’t move an old tree. Besides, who will do anything to old people?”
She was shortly and tragically to find out who.
Three years later Mina was interred in Terezinstadt. The ghetto, like all Nazi ghettos, was a terrible place of cramped quarters. As many as 53,000 Jews lived in a space that only one year earlier had housed 7000 Czechs. Food was scarce and the food that existed was barely edible. Residents stood on lines in inclement weather to get the daily ration of tasteless soup, bread that had to last three days, margarine, barley and turnips. And while almost all were hungry, some were more hungry than others. The Council of Jewish Elders, the group forced by the Nazis to run the internal affairs of the camp, discovered early on that they could not divide the limited food supplies equally. They determined that those who labored at the hardest jobs had to be allocated more to eat and that the children had to fed more than others. They also decided that the fewest calories would have to go those least likely to survive the ordeal of the ghetto. Such people like Mina, age 70, had to be sacrificed so that others might live. “For younger people, Teresienstadt was bearable,” said one survivor, “For older people it was hell.”
Starving old women begged for watery soup and dug for food in garbage heaps rotting in the courtyard of the barracks. Elderly men were transformed into scavengers and beggars. They would pounce on any morsel of food such as a pile of potato skins, food considered to fit only for pigs. This led to severe enteritis and diarrhea, a chronic camp condition but especially serious in the elderly. By the fall of 1943, Mina was suffering from a protein deficiency referred to as hunger edema. A relative, who was transferred to the ghetto that fall, discovered Mina’s frail, emaciated body and quickly placed her in the ghetto hospital where she received woefully inadequate treatment. As she lay dying, she visited with a friend, Arthur Buxbaum, an antiques dealer, and related to him her final wish. She handed him a parcel wrapped in brown paper. “If you ever get out of here alive, “ said Mina, “Please deliver this package to my daughter Anny in Palestine.” But because most of Anny’s letters hadn’t reached Mina during the war, she couldn’t provide him with an address. Arthur promised he would deliver the package. The following year, Yom Kippur 1944, Mina was dead. She joined the ranks of the other 33,000 souls who died in the ghetto by the war’s end of starvation and other diseases and many more who died (88,000 in all) after being deported to Auschwitz in the east.
Arthur Buxbaum was unable to honor his friend’s deathbed wish and the package sat in his New York apartment for 16 years. In 1960, Arthur remembered his promise to Mina and sent the package off with a cousin who was going to Israel. The cousin could not track Anny down and the package returned mysteriously back in the U.S. 10 years later where it was finally delievered by a total stranger who was visiting New York from Ohio.
“I remember so well the day the call came,” Anny said, “Because it was my past on the other end of the line. ‘Is this Anny Stern?’ the woman on the phone asked me, and when I answered yes, she said, ‘Then I have a package for you from your mother.’” Anny gasped and her eyes brimmed with tears. . “After all those years,” said Anny, “it was like her hand was reaching out to me from long ago.” For 25 years the parcel had followed Anny as her mother’s final wish and when Anny opened it, she discovered a hand sewn, bound manuscript – a cookbook-- its cracked and crumbling pages covered with recipes for everything from stuffed eggs to coffee cake collected by the women of Terezinstadt.
It was sweet, sentimental gift from a mother to a daughter. Why a cookbook? Why did Mina send a cookbook? And why in a place like Terezinstadt, where ingredients for things like sachertorte and liver dumplings and goulash did not exist – why in a place where delicious, filling food was a fantasy – why did Mina and many other women like her compile cookbooks? Did the setting down of recipes bring comfort to these women among the chaos and brutality? Did it bring hope for a future in which someone might prepare a meal from them again? For sure, Mina’s cookbook was an act of spiritual resistance, says Cara DaSilva, the author and translator of “From Memory’s Kitchen” which contains the text of Mina’s cookbook. “The cookbook was a forceful testimony to the power of food to sustain them, not just physically, but spiritually. It strengthened their resolution to survive, if only because it made more vivid not what they sought to escape from, but what they were resolved to return to.”
When we explain Yom Kippur to our non-Jewish friends, we always start by calling it a “fast day.” It is a funny word – “fast” -- because there is nothing fast about the day except that most of us would like it to pass as quickly as possible. The whole idea of calling it “fast” is a euphemism for the truth of what the day is. It is a day of hunger. It should be called the hunger, not the fast! In fact, if anything, the hunger is going to slow us down. We need to eat to keep living. Hunger is the ultimate act of self-imposed restraint on human life; something that we might also apply to other behaviors like losing your cool or engaging in gossip. If we slowed down and thought twice about our misdeeds, we probably wouldn’t act on them.
Now you may be surprised to learn that in the five places the Bible speaks of Yom Kippur, it never refers to it as a fast. The Torah does not instruct us not to go without food on Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur is described as a positive commandment: “And you should do affliction to your souls” on this day. Now “affliction” sounds like something like medieval monks do like wearing hair shirts or sleeping on a bed of nails or flagellating oneself. In many cultures, fasting is also about mortifying the flesh. It is about striking the corporeality of our existence in order to promote our true spiritual selves. If we punish the body we can somehow have atonement for our sins. But I do not believe that is what our ancestors had in mind when they proclaimed this the “day of affliction.” In fact, Maimonides avoids words like atonement and affliction altogether when he gives Yom Kippur a chapter heading in his code of Jewish law.—He calls it “yom shvitat asor,” “Stopping on the Tenth of Tishri.” Affliction (or in Hebrew “Anitem et nafshoteichem”) must mean something entirely different than some kind of morbid fascination with torturing the body. Going hungry on Yom Kippur is not an affliction like cutting off pleasure. On Yom Kippur, we stop as a point of departure for the year ahead. Going hungry on Yom Kippur is not a denial; it is an exercise for the soul.
Going hungry on Yom Kippur arises out of the oral tradition, not the written word. In fact elsewhere in the Torah the work is attached to the act of eating itself. The Talmud draws our attention when it cites the Torah that tells us that:
God afflicted the Israelites (and made them hungry) by having them eat the manna which they had not known in order to make you know that not by bread alone do humans stay alive but that all that issues at God’s order do humans stay alive” (Deut 8:3).
If God fed the Israelites with manna, how is this a case of affliction? Surely God sustained the people, fed them, kept them full and happy so that they could continue their trek across the wilderness. It was an act of mercy not affliction. How could they eat the manna and not enjoy themselves! But that is precisely the point. They ate the manna out of necessity, not pleasure. The Talmud tells us that eating the manna was a test of their ability to cope with uncertainty because they didn’t know what they were eating. They learned to hunger for something more than food alone. Eating the manna did not provide them with satiety – it provided them with anxiety. It was about feeling “almost full” – that slight discomfort we get when we finish our plate but still want more. It was about those first days of being on a diet and always feeling a little bit hungry. The Israelite trekked through the wilderness remembering their days of satiety in Egypt and always had that gnawing feeling of wanting more.
The modern Torah commentator Avivah Zornberg points out that the name for the food “manna” originates with the question “mah hu”- “what is it.” Its very name suggests its uncertainty . The people never acknowledged it as food. Even though the Israelites are told by Moses that it is food it is never called food throughout the entire journey. The name “ma” “what” (or we might say “whatchamacallit”) adheres to the stuff forever. The manna follows the people through the wilderness expressing their not knowing, their uncertainty with where their next meal was coming from. We might visualize them sitting at a meal asking for the “whatchamacallit” to be passed. Pass the “whatchamacallit.” Manna is not what they expected – man does not live by this stuff – for knowing is dependent on God’s mysterious gifts to his creatures. The manna taught them that being a little bit hungry wasn’t about starving themselves. It was about faith in God.
Yom Kippur is about this kind of hunger. It is about letting the body be for one day – continuing on its natural course and not taking active measures to relieve the discomfort that comes with hunger. It is not about starving yourself – it is about experiencing hunger as desire. That is the positive commandment.
There are two types of starvation. We can suffer from starvation because we missed a meal. Starving involves a longing for something in the past. There is a trigger from the body that it expects what it was fed yesterday. We know that body cannot run on empty and we experience discomfort because we know we must replace what is missing
Starving can also be construed as anticipation. Anticipatory starving means preparing oneself. Rashi explains that in one place the Torah tells us that we get credit for afflicting ourselves through eating on the ninth day of Tishri, the day before Yom Kippur. We prepare ourselves by dining in a festive way so we can experience spiritual strength the next day. Yom Kippur is no different from any other festival in enjoying the food we eat. Preparation is more than half the experience of the holiday. Anticipatory starving is looking ahead, not looking backward It is about imagining what could be.
Think about the concept of dessert. It occurs to me that human beings are the only animal in the world that can be trained to save room for dessert. If we are told that we are going to have a three course meal with dessert at the end, most of us can limit the portions that we take in initially so that we can get the sweet stuff at the end. We can control overeating because we have the expectation of a dessert. My father-in-law, who studies eating behavior at Columbia University, tells me that studies performed on people with memory loss tell us that they tend to overeat because they cannot remember when they had their last meal. He also told me that overeating may occur in people with traumatic memories of starvation. People who worry about starving eat more because they miss the food; whereas God taught the Israelites in the desert that the not-quite-full feeling was an orientation of looking ahead– that was their affliction but it was also their test. It was a test to see if they could save room for dessert. Of course, the promise of dessert would only come 40 years later when they settled in the land of Israel, in a land of milk and honey. In the meantime, the manna was a spiritual test to create a people who would always be hungry for more.
This turns our attention to what Yom Kippur, the day of hunger, is truly about. Hunger is a spiritual test. We hunger for more than just food. Hunger is about wanting more from life. What do you hunger for?
Maybe you hunger for more time with your children.
Maybe you hunger for more time with your spouse.
Maybe you hunger for that vacation you always promised yourself.
Maybe you hunger for solace and quietude after a year of busyness and noise.
Maybe you hunger for a return to Judaism – to set aside time to nourish your soul.
Maybe you hunger to start a project or finish a project that you keep putting off
Maybe you hunger for an adventure that will change your life.
You see hungering is not mourning over the food that we don’t have. It is not about missing our meals. It is about looking ahead, embracing the uncertainty of a life that sometimes feels as though it hangs by a thread, and knowing that God commands you live not by the food that fuels our bodies. Because that is a means to an end. Remember the verse in the Torah: “God afflicted you with the manna – you went hungry—so that you could learn that man does not live by bread alone.” Faith resides in hunger. Imagination resides in faith.
Think of the faith of someone who goes on a hunger strike. Hunger strikers use hunger as a protest to change something, reverse something, or anticipate something. I think of Natan Schransky when he was prisoner in the Soviet prison. He said that by using the hunger strike he imagined himself knocking down the entire totalitarian system of communism. One man against the Soviet machine … and it worked! Or think about how our Jewish culture is constructed with imaginary heroes like Elijah who visit our seder tables every year holding out the promise of the Messiah. Or a book of Jewish law called the Mishna compiled by Judah the Prince 200 years after the destruction of the Temple that gives detail by detail instructions concerning Temple sacrifice and the priesthood for a world that no longer existed! We Jews have been taught to hang on to the promise of the future. And we say “Ani maamim,” even though “af al pi sh’yitmamaha” – even though the messiah may tarry we will wait!
One midrash tells us that in Egypt, the taskmasters would fatten up their Hebrew slaves so that they would work and be happy. But in the desert, they ate the manna and felt the discomfort of being unfulfilled. And that sense of affliction is the Jewish engine— always holding out, always remaining hungry, never getting fat and complacent, always facing an unfulfilled reality with the fantasy that one day we will get there. On this Yom Kippur day, we face that unfulfilled reality of our lives and ask ourselves: what is it that we hunger for? That is the Jewish way. The whole enterprise of our lives is geared to that single question: What is it that we hunger for – because we don’t live just to survive, but to imagine a better world.
And the more we let our imaginations go, the harder we work to make that better world a reality. The midrash tells us that the people “went out to gather the manna.” For the righteous, the manna fell right in front of their homes; for the average person, they had go a short distance away from the homes to collect their portion and for the wicked they had to go further away to collect the manna. The lesson? The Israelites learned that the harder they worked at being virtuous, the more they reflected on their conduct and changed it, the more they could be deserving of God’s food. Being hungry is holding out for dessert. Being hungry is asking questions so that you can live a better life. Being hungry is the way we perfect ourselves and ultimately perfect the world. That is true affliction.
Minna Pachter knew this instinctively when she collected the recipes for her cookbook from the women of Terezinstadt. And as her daughter Anny looked into the cookbook, she found notes scrawled in the margins from the authors -- “Sehr gut” -- wrote one contributors of her cake. “Lasse der Fantasie freien Lauf” - “Let fantasy run free” – says Mina of her Stuffed eggs.
“The farther away it is, the worse it seems, this enormous thing that happened to my mother and all the Jews of Europe,” Anny Stern told the editor of “From Memory’s Kitchen,” “When you look in the caldron, you can’t believe what was in it. Yet here is the story of how the inmates of the ghetto, living on bread and watery soup and dreaming of cooking habits of the past, found some consolation in the hope that they might be able to use them again in the future. By sharing these recipes, I am honoring the thoughts of my mother and the others that somewhere and somehow, there must be a better world to live in.”
Today we ate a meal before coming to shul as though it was our last meal. I know there are many out there who ate greedily and stuffed their stomachs. And this I promise you: we will all get through Yom Kippur. For the meaning of Yom Kippur is really in the meal that we have at the end, tomorrow – the break- the –fast. Because in that meal, we don’t eat greedily, we eat gratefully. And some of us don’t eat enough even to feel full. Because everything we have done during the day to fulfill the meaning of hunger has brought us to this moment. So may new year’s wish to you is this: May you learn the true meaning of the word “affliction” this Yom Kippur. It is a day of hunger. May our hunger continue into the year to come. Let us save room for dessert and learn from this affliction in the day ahead.
Rabbi Jonathan Perlman
