Jews with eating disorders follow new traditions on Yom Kippur

JTA – Shonna Levin is an Orthodox Jew, but she didn’t spend last Yom Kippur in a synagogue.

The Brooklyn activist planned to set up camp in Prospect Park, where she was going to host an all-day gathering for Jews with eating disorders for whom the holiday centred on fasting can be especially difficult.

Levin, who herself has struggled with disordered eating in the past, was forced to cancel, however, due to an injury.

Her event was to follow rules typical of recovery-focused spaces: no weight, calories, or numbers talk. She also intended to bring along something that’s not typically part of Yom Kippur observance: the materials required for a seudah, or festive meal.

“I’d love to do it in future years,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA). “Too many people feel so isolated in this experience.”

Levin’s idea reflects an increasing number of efforts to craft new rituals and offer new modes of observance for Jews with eating disorders. Recognising that the holiday’s traditional demand of a 25-hour fast could cause people with eating disorders to undertake dangerous behaviour, advocates across the Jewish world are developing alternatives and working to normalise Yom Kippur observances that don’t preclude eating.

The Blue Dove Foundation, an organisation that seeks to change how Jewish communities handle mental-health issues, has created a framework for reflecting on repentance that doesn’t depend on fasting. Rather than asking for confessions of wrongdoing, which can be part of the pathology of eating disorders, the framework asks users to consider what they are already doing and want to do more of.

Many college Hillels are making food available in private spaces so that students with eating disorders or other needs can eat while remaining set apart during the holiday from the rest of the student body.

Meanwhile, the National Council of Jewish Women is encouraging Jews to turn a ritual around smelling fragrant scents on Yom Kippur into an opportunity to set new intentions for the coming year – a move that the group’s promotional materials emphasise is ideal for people who are and aren’t fasting.

“And in terms of eating disorders, since that comes up every year, again, health comes first, always,” the group’s rabbi in residence, Danya Ruttenberg, wrote last year on Twitter before promoting the scent ritual. “Take care of yourself, and if that means not fasting, don’t fast.”

Efforts to support Jews with eating disorders have grown more resonant since the COVID-19 pandemic, which heightened the isolation and loneliness that those who struggle with the disorders are already prone to experiencing. A study from the first 12 months of lockdowns and social distancing showed that a children’s hospital in Michigan admitted more than twice as many adolescents with eating disorders as it does in an average year.

The findings are no surprise to Temimah Zucker, an Orthodox therapist and social worker in New York, who treats many Jews and has seen a rise in both new and relapsed patients.

“People didn’t know what to do with their time, and there was so much emphasis around ‘this is the time to change your body’, and no focus on whether you’re taking care of yourself and your mental health,” Zucker said.

Yom Kippur serves up its own array of unhealthy messages, she said.

“There’s the theme of repenting, where individuals already experience high cognitive distortions around themselves and wrongness,” Zucker said. “Plus, the pressure to connect to the day and whether that means fasting or not fasting.”

Jewish tradition is clear that people whose health would be jeopardised by fasting need not abstain from eating. That includes those who are ill, pregnant, or nursing, and according to many religious leaders, people with eating disorders.

Still, many of those in recovery struggle when they attend services where they are surrounded by hungry people and triggering associations between fasting and discipline or morality. Others, driven by their disorder, ignore spiritual and medical advice.

“Expect the patient to come up with all sorts of ways to try to get out of eating,” said Levin.

“I knew a young man who told his psychiatrist that his rabbi is insisting he not eat for religious reasons, then told the rabbi the psychiatrist OK’d him fasting,” she said, but neither case was true.

Hannah Davidson, a 23-year-old Brooklyn college student, said her family’s rabbi had advised them that she shouldn’t fast because of her eating disorder. Davidson said that she, like many others with eating disorders, had embraced fasting because it dovetailed with her disorder.

“That’s why we don’t fast – because we shouldn’t look forward to it,” Davidson said. “That defeats the purpose.”

Esti Jacobs is the co-ordinator and co-founder of Ayelet Hashacher, a non-profit organisation in the Orthodox community which helps people access treatment for eating disorders. She said that even with a rabbi’s instructions to eat on Yom Kippur, those with eating disorders can still struggle to prioritise recovery.

“It’s like how during the COVID-19 pandemic, people found it very hard not to go to synagogue. You’re raised to do anything to be in synagogue, to miss a flight or leave the house with a high fever,” she said. “So even though G-d wants us to stay home because of COVID-19’s risk to life, it just doesn’t feel right.”

Said Jacobs, “It’s hard to realise that what G-d wants from you is different from what G-d wants from others, that you’re keeping Yom Kippur by doing what appears to be wrong.”

Many Jews with eating disorders do structure their lives to insulate themselves from the challenges presented by Yom Kippur. Davidson, for example, said she rarely travels home from college for the holiday.

But avoiding the holidays shouldn’t be the only option.

Yocheved Gourarie was a 24-year-old Orthodox woman who documented her struggles with anorexia and depression on Instagram until her death by suicide. Now, her father has his own account honouring her memory and documenting her experiences, especially around special events such as holidays.

“She didn’t fast for nine years, and she didn’t attend services completely,” Avremi Gourarie told JTA. “We made certain that any time religion could have been a factor [in harming her recovery], it was taken out of the equation.”

Levin’s group had aimed to offer a middle ground: a space for those who do attend services and need a place to eat throughout the day. Her goal was to allow people with eating disorders to have a meaningful Yom Kippur without having to choose between isolation and risk of relapse, in an unstructured, supportive space.

That kind of setting – and other initiatives like Levin’s – is exactly what observant Jews with eating disorders need more of, Zucker said.

“It’s so beautiful that there are so many opportunities for more support like that,” she said. “Part of it is greater community awareness so that there’s less judgement, so that it’s normalised to do what’s best for you in the effort to uphold Jewish law.”

Published with permission from jta.org