Fasting

Tomorrow, 8/3, is a fast day on the Jewish calendar (the holiday of Tisha B'Av that mourns the destruction of the Temple (twice) as well as other tragedies endured by the Jewish people in the Hebrew month of Av). My knowledge of Jewish holy days is regretably minimal, but the discipline of fasting that has been incorporated into the Jewish calendar from the beginning is perhaps the great discipline that the Christian tradition has misunderstood and left behind. To fast as a discipline of spiritual purification and sacrificial holiness is rarely if ever talked about as a virtue in Christian circles. Fasting is simply seen as self-deprivation that doesn't really accomplish anything. Moreover, fasting, like many other spiritual disciplines, can be easily perverted into ritualism and/or boasting. The fear of lurching in this direction is a healthy one. But too often, this fear is used as an excuse to scuttle the discipline altogether, which is extremely dangerous.

God did not prescribe disciplines such as fasting because he somehow needed us to fast. Repeatedly in the OT, God disdains the very sacrifices he prescribed in the Torah, because the motives of the people in making such sacrifices were out of step with what the sacrifice was supposed to represent and accomplish. Fasting for the sake of fasting is indeed meaningless. But when fasting becomes an act of worship, where we deprive ourselves temporarily in order to open ourselves up to spiritual purification, this is not only a good thing, but it can also be transforming. In the break-neck evangelicalism of our day, when evangelicals are constantly looking for the next big thing in Christianity, and the next big spiritual high that will get them to a deeper place with God, it would be wiser instead to re-embrace the rigor of the spiritual disciplines that have been prescribed by God from the beginning for this very purpose. A lack of practicing spiritual disciplines reflects a lack of loyalty to the God who prescribed them. The complete and total fidelity/loyalty to God as commanded in the Shema (Deut. 6:4ff) takes a serious hit when we spurn disciplines like fasting under the guise of ritualism, in order to embrace a very modern ritualism of trying to keep up with the latest spiritual crazes, often with little accompanying discernment.

The Christian tradition still has much to learn from the Jewish tradition.