The Great Feast Before the Fast: A Personal Reflection

Dear Friends and Readers,

I wish each of you a Gemar Hatimah Tovah (to be sealed in the Book of Life). I hope you have a chance to glance at the text for the Feast before the Yom Kippur Fast known traditionally as the "Se'udat Hamafseket". For me this is the highlight of everything Panim is doing these High Holidays. I have experienced many powerful moments around the table with family and friends. I love the joyful spirit of a Shabbat table, the pageantry of a Passover table, the sense of newness of a Rosh Hashannah table, the vulnerability of a feast in the Sukkah, the sense of nature's power at a Tu Bishvat seder, and the outrageous playfulness of a Purim feast. But the feast before Yom Kippur, like Yom Kippur itself is on another level entirely.

Several stories in the Talmud dwell on this meal, telling stories of the sages returning from the academy to their families. In typical fashion, the Talmud reveals the truth of these encounters. They are not all lovely and filled with accounts of reconciliation or repentance. However, clearly the ancients regarded this meal as a time for people to gather and make one last great push to repair relationships and to bring about reconciliation. It was in essence a Teshuvah feast.

This tradition is deeply inspiring to me. It is yet another example of how Jews have made feasts times of opportunity and spiritual power. It reveals a religion in which relationship is so important, so concrete, and so necessary of our personal attention regardless of who we are and where we are in our lives. Judaism is not an abstract religion; it is a religion which places relationship in the center: our relationship with family, with nature, with God.

Before I spend the day in personal communication with God, I prepare for it with personal and attentive conversation with family and friends around a table. The urgency of the meal is in the word 'mafseket 'meaning ending or interruption. This meal ends the time for repairing relationships with humans and transitions us to repairing our relationship with God. The link is illustrative. You first have to attend to humans and then attend to God. Not the other way around.

Shannah Tovah,
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg