“Is not this the fast that I choose; to loose the bonds of injustice?” Isaiah asks the people who have chosen a liturgically proper fast (Isaiah 58).
By fasting we may symbolically renounce greed, but if it’s anything more than symbolism why are there so many hungry people?
“It’s an announcement of a good intention that people don’t follow through on,” Merkur said.
From a scientific point of view denying oneself food may open the way to a different kind of experience, said retired University of Toronto professor of physiology and medicine Dan Osmond.
“Physiologically speaking, eating is associated with heightened parasympathetic nervous activity, also associated with sexual arousal, the suppression of which may facilitate mental concentration on religious matters,” Osmond told The Catholic Register in an e-mail.
But Osmond also thinks there’s a social logic behind not eating as a religious activity. Both fasting and feasting are ways for people to draw closer to each other and to God, forming a religious community, he said.
“There are social bonding and reinforcing aspects to this,” wrote Osmond. “Eating together as families and groups acts as a powerful bonding mechanism. Refraining from eating together at expected times is certainly an attention-getter, as is the powerful influence of release from fasting after sundown (Ramadan) or at the end of the fasting period (Yom Kippur).”
The connection between feasts and fasts is important for Rabbi Baruch Frydman-Kohl of Toronto’s Beth Tzedic Congregation.
“There are certain things that are very basic to who we are as human beings — food, sex, work,” he said. “And the opposite as well — no food, no sex, no work. Judaism, like other religions, at times encourages feasts as celebrations and at times encourages fasts as ways of gaining a different kind of focus, an inner focus.”
On Sept. 28 Frydman-Kohl will be fasting with his congregation for the Jewish Day of Atonement. He doesn’t think it’s just ritual for most seriously religious people.
“I know some people who fast on Yom Kippur and they turn the cost of what would have been their meals for that day, they turn that to charity, sometimes to feed the hungry,” he said. “And I know of people for whom they fast and that’s what they do ritually and it doesn’t connect on a moral level. I don’t know whether one can make a broad generalization.”
While in Mecca on the Hajj, Toronto Imam Aly Hindi returned a call to point out that fasting is a sort of via negativa practice in spirituality.
“You don’t show off with this kind of worship,” he said. “Because it’s not that you are doing something. You’re not doing something.”
One of the first things fasting achieves is a kind of intimacy with God, said Hindi.
At the same time the Ramadan fast is not intended to be a navel-gazing, purely personal exercise.
“It also makes you feel with poor people. You feel how they feel,” he said.
In Christian tradition, St. Benedict thought of fasting during Lent as a declaration of freedom.
“Let each one, over and above the measure prescribed for him, offer God something of his own free will in the joy of the Holy Spirit,” reads the rule of St. Benedict. “That is to say, let him stint himself of food, drink, sleep, talk and jesting, and look forward with the joy of spiritual longing to the holy feast of Pascha (Easter).”
In the 1233 Rule of St. Francis, the brothers are urged to fast between the feasts of All Saints and Christmas and through Lent.
“At other times however, they are not bound to fast, except on Fridays,” wrote Francis, who was clearly worried that enthusiasm might cause the brothers to damage their health.
The 20th-century monk, poet and spiritual writer Thomas Merton asked why it was that people in the peace movement were able to fast on the steps of the Pentagon while the rest of society seemed allergic to fasting.
Merton was fascinated by the desert fathers and Zen Buddhism. He saw fasting as a way of breaking away from a mechanistically rational consciousness. It’s irrational to forgo your own sustenance, but for Merton merely rational thinking was the death of the soul.
He wrote:
When I had a spirit,
When I was on fire
When this valley was
Made out of fresh air
You spoke my name
In naming Your silence:
O sweet, irrational worship!