It's yom kippur today. This is often called the "holiest day in Judaism" (in fact I think even Wikipedia calls it that), because this is the day you're supposed to atone for your sins. You're supposed to spend all day at temple, davening and prostrating yourself before the Torah, and not eating. Yes, the most memorable bit of yom kippur for me has always been the fast. After a health scare a few years ago, I decided to allow myself water on yom kippur, but even though I don't go to temple anymore, I still observe the fast. Actually, the fast became even more important after I stopped going.
I'm not particularly religious. I don't believe that any being you could classify as "God" presently exists at this stage of the universe's development, though I won't preclude the possibility of one having existed at one time—i.e. to carry out the primordial chain reaction that led to the formation of the universe. The idea that I must prostrate myself before an outsized being to seek forgiveness for things that I think it might have an issue with does not sit with me. Indeed, this led me to disregard yom kippur altogether while I was in college. However, some stuff happened in 2012 that made me redefine it—while I don't want to go too far into it, I'll just say that I realised the line between safety and vulnerability is gossamer thin in the corporate feudal state. While I'm reasonably certain of my own financial security right now, there are so many people in the world, this state, this city, and even this very building who have no security of that kind. They don't know how to get enough money to afford even a loaf of bread, let alone how to pay their bills. More people than the corporate feudal state is willing to admit don't even have the security of a roof over their heads.
Yom kippur isn't about sin, it's about experience. I'm privileged enough that, for a 25-hour space of time, I can choose to not eat. It's not enough to say, "poverty and homelessness are bad" and then go and stuff a turkey sandwich in my face. I've always believed that you need to experience as many sensations as possible in order to be a good human being, and one of the most pervasive sensations is gnawing hunger. 25 hours is hardly enough time to experience the full breadth of food insecurity, especially as I am able to bookend the day with large and impressive meals. But, for this sliver of time, I am privileged enough to say, "I, who have all the food in the world, have decided that I will not eat today".
How is it even more important to fast now that I don't go to temple anymore? Because of the reason why I left. Palestine.
Right now, thousands of Israeli Jews, including in the occupational forces, are simultaneously seeking forgiveness for personal sins and committing the worst sin of our age. You can fast for 1000 years and still not come close to absolving yourself of the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people in the name of territorial expansion and conquest. I suppose I'm just as guilty of this as my Israeli counterparts, being a white woman in America. I know the manner by which I came to be here on occupied Pawnee territory. I know how this land came to be under the ownership of the corporate feudal state and I know what happened to the people who lived here before. I continue to benefit from the savagery of my forebears, as does every white person in this country. I know it's insufficient, compared to the generations of suffering my people have subjected to the Pawnee, the Oto, the Cheyenne, the Lakota, and every other so-called "tribal nation" that existed here before Europeans came stomping in and fucking everything up, but it's all I can do.
Ok, maybe yom kippur is still about sin just a bit.