firm and atoned

It's Yom Kippur. I'm doing my secular fasting thing. If i need to eat tomorrow in order to be productive, then i may have to break my fast early, which will suck, but we'll see. I have mixed feelings about the relationship between fasting and atonement, and about the problems of limiting atonement to a single day. But i think Yom Kippur's important even for someone extremely secular because i think that atonement and reflection have an importance that surpasses liberal guilt, which strikes me as a reactionary performative politics which demarcates difference and privilege and embraces the inevitability of change and the futility of trying. Yom Kippur is useful for me because it imagines a collectivity which strives to understand iniquity and commit to change. Atonement is an act. So even if i'm uncomfortable with the sometimes individuating nature of the way we think about this, i also think it's incredibly important. I should note that my attatchment to this day and practice grew exponentially in my first year of college, when the very problematic assertion of myself as a figure of Jewish suffering in opposition to my racist, roman-numeraled roomate became a very attractive gesture, but it also felt powerful, for reasons, which, i think, i've tried to describe above. This power is something deeper than redemptive suffering. As Deerhoof say on their brilliant new album, "Don't forget me yesterday/'Cause today's no place to stay/Will you spirit me away?"

(All the folks who know more about Yom Kippur than i do can smack me down now. Also, it being Yom Kippur, I should point out that the new issue of Heeb, while not containing any bizarre pictures of any of my relatives or people with whom i have organized, is pretty funny and worth reading.)