Fasting

The Kotel, Western Wall

It was a fast day yesterday, meaning no food or water from sunrise to sunset (we have 25-hour fasts, but this one, the 17th of Tammuz is considered a "minor" fast, less intense). FD and I woke up at 3:45 am to get in some breakfast before sunrise.

This helps tremendously, a pancake or two, a cup of coffee, a couple of preventive Advil. But when you're fasting until 9:15 pm on a summer day, you get more than a little thirsty.  I traditionally tease my children with a text, a reminder of the joke about the old Jewish guy on a train in Europe. He continuously bemoans aloud, "I'm so toisty," until someone finally listens to him. (There are variations, all with the same punchline.). It is my final text of the long day.

Anyway by 9:00 that day I'm at work, where people are often talking about food, and their diets, how cutting out certain foods, white flour or sugar especially, helps them lose a couple of pounds and improves their state of mind. Abstaining from anything is empowerment, imho, in moderation.

A Jewish fast is an empowerment opportunity of a different sort, however. It is thought that the Old Mighty (my grandfather's nickname for Her) is more accessible, a little closer on these set days, that She's really listening, hoping we'll connect sincerely, and more often. And when we fast, we're more likely to tune into that side of ourselves, the side that communes with a higher power, people say. I like to call this part of us our religious life. We have many lives, all tucked inside, and this can be one of them, or not.

When we're depressed it can go missing.

As it is also the Muslim month of Ramadan; Jews are not the only ones fasting this day. This has to be an interesting month, psychologically, for the cousins, and the world over their effort is both baffling and admired.

There are two summer fasts for Jews, one the 17th of Tammuz, then another, more compulsory, on the 9th of Av, three weeks apart. The fasts remind us not only of the destruction of the Holy Temples of Jerusalem by the Babylonians (586 BCE) and the Romans (59 CE), but also the many bloody initiatives of other nations intent upon destroying the Jewish people.

mass grave in Belson

Since the experience with Germany in World War II is so close to us, and because there are still survivors of the war, some of whom are still around to speak about it, and cinematic footage of them in dirty striped prisoner pajamas, blank-eyed living skeletons, and footage of the dead, too, ominous mountains of real skeletons, mass graves, thousands of confused, terrified men, women, and children shoved onto trains for days, no food, no water, no toilets, on their way to the ovens, and death marches, miles in the snow in those thin pajamas, sub-zero weather, those who stumble and fall, if they aren't already dead, shot on sight. The Holocaust reduced the population of Jews in Europe dramatically from almost 17 million to less than 11 million. But what is 6 million Jewish people, after all. What do Jews even contribute to society?

Oh, never mind. It wasn't my intention to go here. It is too sad. For a look at photos of the Holocaust, mountains of Jewish shoes and eye-glasses, maps of concentration camps, emaciated bodies, look at Shamash.org or better, visit a Holocaust memorial museum, like the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance  in person. Any Holocaust museum will do. Anytime.

Fasting, if you do it six times a year, for many years, is still likely to be dreaded each and every time. But it isn't really that bad, and those of us who wouldn't, couldn't, miss a fast, know it. The less spiritual can point to the benefits, purging the body of all the garbage we've eaten the week before. When the fast is over, if we don't eat too much in breaking it, if we keep dinner moderate and healthy, we feel great, assuming we haven't a "caffeine headache." (Hence the early wake up before dawn for coffee).

And even the next day, today, at the pool at 6:30 in the morning, when the body has adjusted to the cool water, the jump in serotonin in this therapydoc's brain is measurable, words for this post swimming in the brain with every stroke.

It is paradoxical that the anorexia of depression functions to increase depression, makes it worse, denies a good state of mind. The treatment is to increase appetite, and certainly, make sure the patient sleeps a solid six, at least, which is one of the benefits of medication. Sleep and food are healing.

So unless fasting is one of those things your doctor tells you to do before a procedure, or your clergyperson really recommends as a traditional way to connect to certain events and your Higher Power (assuming the pri-care has signed off on it), take all this talk of fasting from food and water for many hours at a time with a grain of salt.

Preferably on a no-yoke omelet, half a bagel on the side. With butter, thank you, and at least a quarter of a cantaloupe. They're in season it just so happens.

therapydoc 

The Tricks of Sociopathy

There is a how-to. Genetics aren't everything.

Book burning, Nazi Germany, 1933

               I have to preface this by saying that I can only speak from then lens of my own culture, not teach (well) about anyone else’s. Although I would like to say that I could write from the perspective of someone who lived in Japan, or France, or Iraq, it would be warmed over, the experience of another.  So here’s what you get when you read from the perspective of a Jew.

               When some of us mention Hitler we add the words, y’mach sh’mo (sounds-like, rhymes-with y’locked-sh’go), meaning, His name should be obliterated from the face of the earth.  On Tuesday some of your Jewish friends or co-workers might have looked ashen and tired, fasting (yet going to work, which isn't encouraged but necessary sometimes) the fast of T’isha B’Av (sounds-like, rhymes-with mish-uh-b’-ah’v).  It is a long, grueling, 25-hour fast in the dead of summer, beginning at sundown on the eve of the ninth day of a lunar Jewish month, ending as the fires of Jerusalem had begun to wane, the next night. Three weeks before we began to show signs of mourning, the men stopped shaving. Then nine days prior observant Jews showered less, stopped wearing clean clothes (we drop them on the floor as a symbolic gesture). No meat, no music. Mourning.

               Mourning for what?  The loss of the Holy Temples, over two thousand years ago.  Not that's culture.  Every year, same thing.  Jews have other fasts, there are seven in all, but usually, if we get up before dawn and have a bite, they aren't as difficult, and none are as emotionally trying as T’isha B’Av. We had two of these holy places. The Babylonians, then the Romans, destroyed them both, built on the site that Abraham was asked to sacrifice his only son, where a mosque sits at this moment in Jerusalem.  The Jews, lost in battle for the city, were sent packing from Jerusalem, exiled.  Something like the Native-American experience for the likes of Tonto.  

               Now.  A proper fast, for an observant Jew, barring pregnancy or illness (which leaves out quite a few of us) means no water (zero, not even rain), and no food, not even a stick of gum.  No teeth brushing. Not a pretty day, Tisha B’av, between the dirty clothes, the bad breath, the sweat and a little starvation. The point of the fast, surely, to draw attention from the Old Mighty, She should notice we’re serious about redemption and hope for the universe.  No one should suffer, not even Her favorite scapegoat, the Jews.

               The other point, one more in line with therapy, is that we learn empathy. We are in the shoes of a Holocaust survivor, in the shoes of a Holocaust victim, in the shoes of a Ruwandan, an Indian, any indigent who suffers, starves, struggles daily.  One would think that this is empathy, but we learn, if we watch the documentary Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust   that our fast is a very weak approximation of the true horror, the true suffering of one who experienced the Holocaust. Nothing, nothing, nothing compares to this horror.

               Indeed, when Hollywood first took on the task of bringing the Holocaust into the homes of the international media-loving public, it was with trepidation.  The directors and producers of the time trembled at the thought of diluting the experience. Because, after all, to manipulate emotion, to capture our souls, a good film has an arc, and that arc is designed to be watchable, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, preferably a happy ending.

               Like dentistry or any surgery without anesthesia, there is no way to adequately convey the experience unless we have been through it.  And most who went through the Holocaust did not live to talk about it, and those who did were speechless for many years.  No words.

               The story, however, had to be told. So it began with brave attempts, The Mortal Storm, Charlie Chaplan’s The Little Dictator, Judgment at Nuremberg (the movie within the movie) and gradually culminated with War and Remembrance, very vivid, the Pawnbroker, Sophie's Choice, The Producers, Cabaret, and a first a television series, airing soon after Roots, The Holocaust.  That film-- four days in a row of nail-biting--captured one of every two Americans, had us glued to our television sets, a generation of teenagers, at once, newly aware of the Jewish experience in Germany. Then Schindler’s List, and ever since, more Holocaust films and documentaries than ever before, many so new that we can’t even get them on Netflix or Amazon-- each an amazing, sobering snap of life that none of us should miss, not if we wish to empathize with the most devastating experiences known to man.

               Therapists, certainly, need to be able to do this, empathize, if only to the degree that we can, having never been through such a thing.  

               Not to ruin your summer.  Here's a quick history lesson.* We learn empathy from history, too.  

Back in the thirteenth century, the French King, Louis IX, a religious zealot,made the Jews miserable if they didn’t convert. He would attend the baptisms of those who did this voluntarily.

When only 500 of the 3500 Jews in a town chose conversion over the alternative, death, an apostate, Nicholas Donin, came up with the idea that without their holy books, Jews were nothing.  Burn the books, destroy the culture. They will replace it.

Donin found an audience with Pope Gregory IX in Rome. He charged that the Talmud contained blasphemies against Christianity and God. The books were the power behind Jewish refusal to accept the true faith. The books needed to be confiscated, destroyed.

The Pope, convinced, ordered seizure of all copies of the Talmud and examined them. On June 12^th a stacked public debate sealed the fate. The rabbis defended the faith, but it was a foregone conclusion that 1200 plus copies of Talmud and related commentaries, all written by hand, some a thousand years old, would be lost forever.

The Jews, of course, were not.  That burning in 1242 included 24 cartloads of books. This didn't stop the people from writing about the event, or rewriting their books. All is recorded by eye-witnesses without iPhones.

By 1306, the French King Philip IV (the Fair) expelled the Jews from all of France, and in Germany, taxation, pogroms, blood libels, inspired them to leave for what was then Palestine, where they had originally been banished on Tisha B’Av, a millennium and a half before.   Rudolph I, not wishing to lose them, declared the Jews personal property and refused to let them leave. They were far too successful.

One doesn’t let a resource like this go so fast.

Then the Spanish Inquisition (Was Columbus Jewish?  Did he have to leave Spain?), the pogroms, and we didn't even talk about the previous Crusades. A people forever on the run.

Then in 1933, Hitler took note, burned classics, not just Jewish books, but any old classic that threatened the worship of Nazi ideology, books by:

 Henri Barbusse, Franz Boas, John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger, Friedrich Förster, Sigmund Freud, John Galsworthy, André Gide, Ernst Glaeser, Maxim Gorki, Werner Hegemann, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Kästner, Helen Keller, Alfred Kerr, Jack London, Emil Ludwig, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Hugo Preuss, Marcel Proust, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, Margaret Sanger, Arthur Schnitzler, Upton Sinclair, Kurt Tucholsky, Jakob Wassermann, H.G. Wells, Theodor Wolff, EmiléZola, Arnold Zweig, and Stefan Zweig.. 

You see, you can learn some of the tricks to sociopathy, it isn't all genetic.

Not to say that Hitler hadn’t an original thought in his head.

therapydoc

*The full story can be found on p. 360, commentary to Kinah 41, the Complete Tishah B’Av service, Artscroll Series. The kinot  are lamentations, sad poems sung in a sad, sing-songy drone)..: