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How to break a fast

As Jews prepare for Yom Kippur, experts recommend foods to follow abstinence
David Holub/Durango Herald illustration

Yom Kippur, the most important day in the Jewish year, will start Friday night. For 24 hours, you don’t drink, you don’t eat and you don’t have sex. Instead, you think about the sins you committed last year.

You call that a holiday?

I can fill a day contemplating the sins I committed last week, so 24 hours to atone for the wrongdoing of a full year seems scant time to get the job done. But here’s the question: When the sun falls on Saturday and the hours of deprival are over, do the faithful return to their food-loving ways? Do they load up at the buffet table, slosh down the best wine, reach for the richest dessert?

Does a day of starvation deserve a night of gluttony?

“I don’t think people are very hungry after that,” said Shani Winer, who has observed the Yom Kippur fast and would rather nibble lightly than chow down. “You’re just getting your system back online.”

The Cortez baker, co-owner of the Pie Maker and the creator of the most delicious eclairs this side of Paris, also rebuffs sweets after a fast, preferring an aromatic root vegetable soup and maybe a piece of good bread.

The next day? Well, that’s a different matter.

“I might go have ice cream,” she said, a little abashedly.

Besides the objections of your stomach to a luxurious meal after an entire day without food, you also run afoul of the spirit of the holiday, said Rabbi Eliot Baskin of Durango’s Congregation Har Shalom.

“The idea is for us to forget about the body and focus on our spiritual self,” he said.

To observe the Day of Atonement, the synagogue holds a food drive. Members bring nonperishable goods to services, and Baskin adorns the pulpit with them as a reminder that the fast of Yom Kippur is voluntary. For many people the world over, it is not. Going hungry is just a fact of life.

The relevance of the day, beyond asking God to forgive our iniquities, is to sensitize ourselves to the suffering of others and, the most important part, to resolve to help. There’s the added motivation that, if you do this, God will write you into the Book of Life for another year. If you don’t, well, you take your chances.

Fasting is an old tradition, known to many religions from Islam’s Ramadan to ancient mystic cults. It started in Judaism when the Israelites worshipped the golden calf while Moses was away collecting the 10 Commandments. To defer God’s wrath and reinstill themselves in his good graces, they refused food and water and prayed for forgiveness.

If you’re amid the fast, you may wish your ancestors hadn’t been spared – the light-headedness, the headache, the sheer misery of consuming not so much as a single sip of coffee.

Thankfully, once you’ve acquitted yourself of the religious obligation, you do get to eat. So, are ritual foods required for the occasion as they are in so many other holidays, Jewish and otherwise? You’d be surprised.

“There’s no story on Yom Kippur food,” Baskin says. “The big story is the fast.”

In other words, you can do what you like, a rare thing in Judaism, and a provisional one. So let’s rephrase that – you can do what you like as long as you observe the laws of kashrut, which, when boiled down, means rebuffing seafood, pork and the best cuts of beef and not serving meat and dairy in the same meal.

Because you’re not allowed to work on Yom Kippur – and that includes cooking – food to break the fast is prepared in advance. That’s the origin of the prototypical break-fast meal of smoked fish, cream cheeses, abundant salads and simple breads like bagels and rye. If you’re feeling expansive, you might include sweet cheese blintzes or a sour-cream-laden noodle kugel, both of which can be made in advance and finished when the fast concludes.

Nutritionally speaking, however, that spread is exactly not what someone coming off a day of no food and water should eat.

“Stay away from sweets, wheat and dairy,” said Emyrald Sinclaire, a registered dietician newly moved to Durango to practice her specialities in detoxification, cleanses and fasting. “Having sweets after a meal is actually horrible in terms of digestion.”

Who knew there’s a right and a wrong way to break a fast? And who would have thought that through all these years of preparing meals based on oily fish, creamy kugel and filling wheat breads, we were misguided?

But the body can’t take all those rich foods after a fast, Sinclaire says. For every day a person goes without food, it takes that long for his system to recover. Filling up on such heavy foods, delicacies though they are, can retard the digestive system’s return to normalcy.

Herewith, Sinclaire’s guidelines for the proper way to break a fast – start with drinking water, of course, the most life-giving of all substances. Followed that with fruit, which also aids in rehydrating. Move – slowly – on to a raw salad or vegetable soup and then a grain-based salad like quinoa. Eat small portions and with deliberation. Add protein only after the consumption of water, fruit and vegetables has gone well.

Really, you may ask, after such difficult self-denial, a celery stick is your reward?

“Chopped herring, salmon salad, cheese blintzes for dessert, sometimes a noodle kugel, that was the way you would break a fast,” said Durangoan Phyllis Max, recalling her New York upbringing. “It was a feast.”

For those of us looking for a port in the break-fast storm, keep the faith. Not all nutritionists adhere to such a strict re-entry into the world of food.

“I say whatever sounds good is what you should you eat. Trust your instinct,” said dietician Mikel Love. The only absolute is to drink water.

You mean, one can indulge in say, turkey-bacon and eggs? You could have, um, cake and ice cream?

“Trust your hunger cues, not your mind. Most people coming out of a fast aren’t going to want that,” she said.

Love doesn’t recommend fasting as a way to lose weight or improve health, but she says going 24 hours without food or water isn’t going to damage you in the long term, either. Short term, though, your body will zip through quick-burning carbohydrates and start breaking down fat and protein to keep blood-sugar levels as normal as possible. Some people will barely notice, but anyone with blood-sugar issues will have difficulties. (She discourages those from fasting at all.)

To make fasting easier, Love suggests nixing salty foods in the days beforehand, as well as alcohol and caffeine. Also, taper off carb-heavy meals and snacks in favor of protein and good fats – get out the nut butters and lean meats.

But unlike cleansing fasts one performs for good health, the fast of Yom Kippur is done to purify the spirit. It marks the end of the 10 days of repentance that fall between Rosh Hashana, the New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. What you eat before or after doesn’t really matter, says Rabbi Baskin.

“God doesn’t give a darn,” he said. “The ritual cleansing is so that we can go out and help change the world.”

I say bring on the kugel. That will help me help change the world.

phasterok@durangoherald.com



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