OPINION: Fast and loose on Yom Kippur

My father’s father fasted on Yom Kippur until the end of his life. On the final occasion, a heady combination of ailing health and a lack of sustenance meant he fainted outside synagogue and required a trip to the hospital adjacent to Lord’s Cricket Ground. I know more about Lord’s than the Lord but a self-inflicted head injury didn’t feel like the best way of honouring Him. There is always something to be said for the spirit of cricket trumping the letter of the law.

I found myself in the same hospital last month while my own father was undergoing major surgery (although, as my friend is wont to say, minor surgery is when it’s happening to other people). While nervously pacing the mean streets of St John’s Wood, I pondered the sheer number of nervous habits and superstitions that I have thought could control everything from England’s performance in a penalty shootout to turbulence on an aeroplane down the years.

I might claim not to believe in a higher power but still found myself showing G-d the respect of that hyphen in my youth and beyond, a hangover from childhood I have just about managed to shake. It is telling that, when our son was born in 2016, it was important to me he was at least half Jewish; that is to say, from the waist down.

I don’t eat pig although it has occasionally been known on foreign soil, a strange quirk I’ve inherited from my mother that seems to imply His jurisdiction is England and England alone, the kind of isolationist arrogance this country was built on. One rule which is steadfast, however, passed down through the generations like eczema, is fasting on Yom Kippur. I have not imbibed so much as a sip of water on the Day of Atonement since the year I turned 13. Judaism is a religion built on questioning, so one enquiry feels inevitable. Why?

Oddly, there is a certain comfort in the ritual, as gruelling as it can feel in the home stretch. I do it because I’ve always done it. Through good times and bad, factoring in different friendships, relationships and, latterly, children, I have always fasted on Yom Kippur. Like Manchester United, Seinfeld and precious little else, this is a thing I feel as strongly about in my forties as I did in my teens.

Yom Kippur is imminent and I will likely spend little to no part of it in shul. Orthodox Jews would undoubtedly view my version with disgust since the day will involve childcare, driving, music and television. With any luck, there might even be some sleeping involved. In George Costanza’s words, the best character in the aforementioned Seinfeld or anything else: “I love a good nap. Sometimes it’s the only thing getting me out of bed in the morning.” Fast and loose might be a more appropriate term for what exactly it is I do.

There are those who claim to go to synagogue not to be with Hashem but to be with Jews. My participation in Yom Kippur is not really about either but instead a timely reminder of what it means to have nothing. There but for the grace of God I don’t believe in go I. My grandfather on my mother’s side was also fasting at the age of 13 but he was doing so in Auschwitz, a fact that is never far from my mind on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

Autumn just makes more sense as a starting point for the year, a far less gauche option than January. Football has recently returned, schools are open again and the trees are shedding their leaves. It is a time of rebirth and reflection, as the late Rabbi Sacks observed, “The single most important lesson of Yom Kippur is that it’s never too late to change, start again, and live differently from the way we’ve done in the past.”

Yom Kippur is ultimately about learning from the mistakes of the past in order to live better in the present. There can be no better exemplar of this notion than my father, unlike his father in the mid-2000s, eschewing the fast this year for the first time since the 1960s as a result of those health issues. God willing that will get my dad’s name written in the Book of Life this year and with any luck there might be a few more volumes still to be written.