Bubbe’s Wisdom on Breaking the Fast
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
There’s nothing like knowing you can’t eat to make a person want to eat. For many Jews, Yom Kippur means a 25-hour fast bracketed by two meals – the pre-fast seudat mafseket and the meal to break the fast. But just because you’ve managed to make it through those 25 hours without eating doesn’t mean you should scarf down a greasy shawarma the minute you’re allowed. If you do, your stomach may not be very thankful afterward.
True, breaking the fast the wrong way is unlikely to land you in the hospital, but it may leave you feeling unwell. While Magen David Adom treats an average of 2,000 people every Yom Kippur, including many who feel unwell due to fasting, rescue service spokesman Zaki Heller says he cannot recall any cases of people calling in the paramedics because they broke the fast with the wrong food.
The director of the nutrition and diet service department at Petah Tikva’s Rabin Medical Center, Sigal Frishman, agrees. She says that while you’re unlikely to do real damage to your digestive system by overloading it immediately after a fast, you might regret it afterward.
During a fast the digestive system is relatively inactive. “If we then put in lots of things that are difficult to digest, there’s no way the digestive system can cope. That will give you a stomachache,” she says.
Read more at Haaretz.com.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
