The loneliness of the long-distance Yom Kippur faster
The loneliness of the long-distance Yom Kippur faster (JTA) — I’m a sucker for outrageous games — or possibly finding out about them. My ideal Sunday evening includes a comfortable seat and a thick book or Netflix narrative about hikers attempting to get away from a torrential slide, or a ultra-sprinter enduring during a 24-hour race.
Accounts of individuals under extremis appeal to the 12-year-old kid in me, however I additionally read them trusting their writers’ misery and wins will hack up an insight about the human state of some kind or another. What do they find out about themselves when they stretch their bodies to the edges? It’s the interesting book by a traveler or perseverance competitor that does exclude a snapshot of satori, the Japanese Buddhist expression for arousing or edification — or if nothing else a glint of self-information. Composes the long distance runner and mountain biker Terri Schneider: “Getting through is, fundamentally, a concentrated rendition of life put under a brilliant magnifying instrument.”
I am not always glued to the comfy chair, but probably the most physically punishing thing I do all year is the Yom Kippur fast. The 25-hour fast and synagogue marathon is its own endurance event. I hear echoes of the endurance athlete when rabbis describe the day as a test of “our willingness to submit to discipline” or “whether we are made of that same tough stuff that allowed Judaism to survive for thousands of years.”
As Yom Kippur approaches Tuesday night, one of the books on my end table is “The 12-Hour Walk,” a self improvement guide by the perseverance competitor and globe-trotter Colin O’Brady. (He has expounded on his own endeavor to turn into the primary individual to ski alone across Antarctica.) He proposes that you put away 12 hours to walk alone, turned off, at your own speed and to the extent that you need to or can go. The actual test, the quietness and the feeling of achievement will leave you believing you can defeat anything and “open your best life.”
“When I was crossing Antarctica alone in 2018 I was pulling my sled in silence for 12 hours per day. In the latter half of that crossing I felt deeply connected to mind, body, and spirit,”O’Brady told an interviewer. “Despite my body being worked, despite my ribs protruding, despite the frostbite on my face and limited food, I found this sort of flow state, this connection to purpose and fulfillment. I thought I could take that with me forever.”
A 12-hour quiet walk seems like something contrary to Yom Kippur, which includes long stretches of sitting in a group and confronting a downpour of words. Be that as it may, the experience he depicts has its likenesses with the Day of Penance. There is frequently, for instance, the point in many travelers’ journals when they discuss passing on, or what they realized when they assumed they planned to kick the bucket. That also is a subject of Yom Kippur — while perhaps not really driving ourselves to our actual cutoff points, it is a day, as Lew once made sense of, to “practice your own passing. You wear a cover and, similar to a dead individual, you neither eat nor drink nor have sex. You bring the frantic strength of life’s last minutes.”
Summoning that desperate strength is also the point of endurance sports. Joshua Kulp, a triathlete and the rosh yeshiva of the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem, has written about his running in the context of Judaism. “When I was exhausted running the marathon, when all I wanted to do was join all of those walkers, I was somehow able to reach deep into my kishkes and go to places I’d never been,” he writes.
At long last, the Yom Kippur quick, in the same way as other perseverance tests, about happens when you separate yourself from standard delights. Yom Kippur, composes Sue Levi Elwell in “The Hallowed Table: Making a Jewish Food Ethic,” “bears the cost of an exceptional chance for admirers to remain for stretched out hours in temple and to reduce most, if not all, connection with mingling and food.” The 12-hour walk makes this “removing” in excess of an illustration, yet likewise recommends illumination accompanies the shock of division.
In both cases, blessedly, such deprivation is temporary and voluntary. As Kulp points out, the suffering distance runners inflict on themselves is in some ways a luxury of the fit and the healthy. A grueling race offers “the opportunity to suffer without fear of loss,” he writes.
A 12-hour walk, even at a walking pace, sounds sufficiently. Doing it without paying attention to web recordings or a book recording seems like unadulterated torment. Be that as it may, it will not be lethal. I’m interested what I could realize if I somehow happened to propel myself past my usual range of familiarity. Surely, that’s what yom Kippur does. In some cases it simply leaves me head-achey and irritated. What’s more, some of the time, I hear a request or run over a section that contacts me profoundly and may simply have an effect by they way I treat others. Furthermore, by nightfall, and my most memorable nibble of bagel, I feel prepared — for a brief period in any case — to carry on with my best life.