Fasting

Fasting

Innovations in Jewish Life Collections

2023

Gregg Drinkwater, Hilary Kalisman, Samira Mehta, Maggie Rosenau

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Jewish and interfaith leaders, as well as political activists, often draw attention to the life-sustaining necessity of food by calling for political or spiritual periods of fasting. Observant Jews practice several fast days each year, most notably on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when Jews traditionally refrain from all food and drink.

Fasting in service of political campaigns centers the relationships between food, the body, the spirit, and our social and political world.

For example, in March 1999, religious leaders in New York called on supporters of the New York State Labor-Religion Coalition to fast for 40 hours as a “symbolic cleansing of our complicity in the practices and policies that exclude workers from just wages and safe working conditions.” As many who have fasted for religious or other reasons can attest, emerging from a fast and returning to food can often invite a more mindful relationship to food and to the body.


It is for this reason that social justice and
Eco Judaism activists sometimes encourage
communal and public fasting as a form of
activism highlighting the injustices within
our systems of agriculture and food production.