The First Fast

Last week, with the Jewish high holidays around the corner, Ella asked me about Yom Kippur. I explained to my curious 12-year-old what the most solemn day in the Jewish religion was really about. And fasting was the day's "signature event."

The Day of Atonement, I explained, took place 10 days after the new year and signified the day when Jews are forgiven for all of their sins over the previous 365 days, and thus get inscribed into God's "good" book for another year.

(For my gentile friends: Think of Santa's "nice" list, but instead you have to suffer through dehydration and hunger headaches while spending most of your day stuck in synagogue. And the reward is not presents but leftover brisket from Rosh Hashanah. So, just like Christmas but...totally not.)

Despite my distaste for observing arcane and outdated religious customs just because someone else told me to, my parents will be proud to know that 12 years of private Jewish education were not wasted. Translation: I understand the reasoning behind many of the traditions celebrated by what I like to call, "Christmas-Easter Jews." As such, I can make sense of them, and choose to follow the ones that actually mean something to me. This one, unlike the milk and meat thing, or the lack of bacon thing, or the let's-equate-electricity-with-work-on-the-Sabbath-thing (really, guys?), for some reason, I actually get.

No offense to Catholicism (especially with refreshingly "lefty" Pope Francis hanging out on the East Coast this week), but Yom Kippur is about much more than hopping into a confession booth, admitting a sin to some guy you can't see, being told to recite some phrases and voilà...forgiven!

No, Yom Kippur is meant to be the culmination of many days of reflection and prayer, including a concerted effort to right wrongs. (Not that I did all that this year.) Depriving oneself of food, drink and other creature comforts (archaic, but kind of cool, in a minimalist/environmentalist sort of way) is more than just a formality; it's a metaphor for improvement, in that it requires introspection to help us not only figure out why we did certain things, but to cleanse our palate of them before they can be officially erased. There's an element of rebirth in there, like an exorcism without the spinning heads.

It seems that the religious scholars of days past felt like in order to really gain a fresh start and demonstrate one's willingness to atone for misdeeds, one must not only suffer a bit, but also rid the body of whatever remnants of the past year's bad juju still remain. For us medical folks, Yom Kippur's basic premise might be likened to a colonoscopy for the soul: you can't really examine one's innards until the old stuff is gone. Bring on the bowel prep, baby.

I had made it very clear to Ella that fasting or not was to be entirely her choice, with the only requirement that she knew WHY she was doing it. If she chose to try, I offered to even do it with her. (I am obsessed with food, so this is a BIG deal for me, FYI.)

She did, and I did. Ella even texted me at lunch, asking if she could have a chocolate milk. I texted back that she could have whatever she wanted. Around 3:30 she texted again saying she had decided to forego the drink. I was impressed. She had clearly thought about it.

I was very proud of my middle schooler, not because she withstood the temptation of eating and drinking for an entire day at school. For that, I don't really care either way. As I said, I'm not into the Jewish thing much anymore. What I am into, is trying to teach my kids to think for themselves. No atonement necessary for that one.

"I love you." "Well, duh..."

All relationships are filled with subtle games and ongoing unconscious conversational tête-à-tête. For example: We all say things like "How was your day?" and "Did you sleep well?" without actually thinking about what they mean, or even awaiting an answer. In our family, one of the most frequently uttered is the "I love you—I love you, too" exchange.

I often take for granted those snippets of banter. But yesterday, as I was driving Ella to volleyball practice, something happened that made me think about it a little more.

Out of the blue, Ella says: "Dad, I love you."

"Of course you do!" I reply. "I'm awesome!!!"

"Uh," she says, with prototypical tween-dramatic-annoyance inflection, "not the response I was looking for but...okkaaayyy."

I laughed as she squirmed for a bit before reciprocating her sentiment, and also waited with breath held to see if I had really hurt her feelings. Thankfully, Ella is fully aware of my penchant for silliness and sarcasm, and is also quite adept at flinging it back to me. Nevertheless, I started thinking about what it might mean to a child to have his or her overt, unprompted volleys of love and affection returned in kind. Or not.

From what I've read and observed first hand with my own kids and others I have spent some time with, those little psyches can be fragile. Yes, it's important for them to become self-reliant and able to deal with adversity, but I think it's more important for them to first feel secure and develop a high level of self-worth. These values need to be constantly reinforced, at least until they start to navigate the world on their own.

I don't think that telling a kid we love them on a regular basis amounts to overly coddling or infantilizing them. On the contrary, it continually reinforces that Mom and/or Dad (or Mom and Mom, or Dad and Dad, whatever the case may be) thinks they are worthy of their place in the universe. Better to be loved too much—is that even possible?—than not enough. My parents did it to me and my sister, and while I admit that at the time I thought I HATED it, I realized once I hit my early 20s and then again once I had my own kids that all that annoyance and irritation was not only a genuine expression of love, but also might have been part of a carefully thought-out plan.

Of course, my little joke with Ella and her reaction brought to mind the possibility that their plan backfired, in the form of my absurdly overinflated sense of self-worth. (Inflategate, anyone?) But I doubt it. I'm probably just that awesome, and of course Ella would love me.

But I sure do love her, too, and she definitely knows it.