In general, my feeling is that I do not have to fast on Yom Kippur because I was anorexic for an entire year. I think fasting days can be deducted from that year and used as credits towards my salvation.
Yom kippur, for those of you who don’t know, is the Jewish holiday of atonement, when you don’t eat, and you go to temple and feel guilty and beg god to forgive you for being a generally sucky person. As holidays go, it doesn’t hold a candle to Purim, when the bible commands that we drink until we can’t tell the difference between good and evil. Now THERES a holiday I can support.
Despite my feelings about it, I decided to be a good Jew and fast and go to services this year. It’s not so much that I’ve become religious, it’s more that I have a lot of sins to atone for this year, and I figured this couldn’t hurt. Plus, it’s never a bad idea to fast. If the Jewish religion has chosen to help me on my quest to look exactly like Nicole Richie... so be it.
I found a free service online and convinced the only other Jew I thought might be interested in going to temple to come with me. As we quickly learned, in the Jewish religion, you really get what you pay for.
We should have left when the rabbi spent an hour begging for donations.
We should have run screaming when the service opened with a large, tattoo covered black man in a leotard performed an interpretive dance to motown to “capture the essence of the holiday”.
But we actually waited an hour and a half, until the rabbi used this allegory to explain gods love: God is not like the father, who coming home from a long hard days work is excited to see his baby until the baby wets itself and repulses the father. Our god is like the mother, who spends all day at home tending to the baby, and lovingly changes it when it wets it’s diaper.
That was the final straw. We were laughing too hard to stay, so we split and went for sushi.
So ultimately, I only cut it as a good Jew until about 12:30, but thats still better than last year.
Later in the day I went to my cousins to “break the fast” although no one present had fasted. I had tons of fun since I got to teach my baby cousins to refer to their faces as their “moneymakers”, and my mother called my sister fat, at which point my sister called my mother an obese son of a bitch, and told her (in front of friends and family) that she was the reason I had been anorexic.
The funny thing about that was it marks the 5th consecutive year that my sister has blamed my eating disorder on someone on Yom Kippur. Last year she blamed my father. The year before that she blamed herself. The year before that she blamed the dogs. The year before that she blamed my mothers brownies which we all thought was a bit of a long shot.
It’s also funny because I didn’t even HAVE an eating disorder... I just wan’t hungry. You know, like some days you’re so busy you forget to eat? It was like that. Except for a whole year. It’s not like I had a problem or anything. I could have stopped at any time, as I tried to explain to the doctors at the clinic, to no avail.
Besides, I looked really cute at 98 pounds.... I was like a baby kitten, all covered in soft hair, curled up in front of the heater. Those were some good times. And thanks to Biggy, I get to relive them at least once a year.
Fortunately, that pretty much ends the run of Jewish holidays for a while. Nothing to look forward to now until Chanukah, when hopefully I’ll get to find out who Big Big feels is to blame for my childhood lisp.
