The demand for repentance is a demand that we leave behind our more base selves and embrace our more holy selves.
Strip away our physical needs and what’s left? The soul. It’s true that God created us as physical beings, but not only as physical beings. There are times when we must test what it means to leave our physical selves behind. It is not easy. Our physical selves cry out in discomfort. We must allow our souls to raise themselves above that discomfort. When we walk home after Neilah, our thoughts should not be, “Boy, am I am hungry!” but rather, “I am purified!”
By afflicting our bodies, we afflict our souls – the true goal of the fast. Jewish values do not embrace physical affliction. Rather, the Torah teaches us to “afflict your soul.”
“V’inisem es nafshoseichem” – afflict your soul so your physical existence has meaning. We fast to rouse ourselves from a deep slumber, from the numbness of apathy and egotism, from the superficiality of our physical existence.
We know, intellectually, that there will be a day when we shirk off our physical selves forever. We will die. We know it in our heads but in our hearts we believe we will live forever. This is the reason an eighty-year-old man can stare at his wrinkled reflection in the mirror and be astonished that the smooth face of a young boy is not looking back at him.
The moments seem to slip by so imperceptibly; when can we actually feel the passage of time? It is only during a fast, the rare occasion that demands we discard the temporal, that we shirk, if only for a few hours, the comfort of our physical selves. It is only then that we have the chance to glimpse the person we are beyond our body.
Only through those hours do we finally begin to get to a place where our awareness is not merely intellectual, but deeper and therefore more frightening.
Our end is nigh. We know it because we can feel it during our fasts. And, feeling it, we have the opportunity to move forward from our fasts by making our lives more holy and meaningful.
The psalmist writes, “So teach us to number our days, that we may get us a heart of wisdom.”
Even for those who are “observant,” mitzvot often lose power because they are done almost by reflex. We mumble berachot so fast so that the words have no sound or meaning. We speed through the Amidah so perfunctorily that we sometimes cannot remember if we’ve said Ya’aleh v’Yavo. We cover the challah before Kiddush so as “not to embarrass the challah or hurt its feelings” but then go on to say things at the dinner table that embarrass someone.
Many engage in ritual but never emerge from it with an increase in holiness or meaning.
It is taught that in the days of the Messiah, the commemorative fast days will be abolished. “All of these fast days,” Rambam writes, “will be nullified…. Moreover, they will all become days of sasson v’simcha – of rejoicing.”
It is difficult to fast. It is not meant to be easy or enjoyable. But – until Messianic times – we must do it, because the job is not yet completed. During the Messianic days we will be truly holy. Until then, we focus on our bodies rather than our souls. And so we need to stop and separate ourselves from our basic bodily needs. We need to fast so that we can know, truly know, that one day we will indeed “shuffle off this mortal coil.”