What do different faiths say about fasting?

In Judaism, fasting is never really about the food. That might sound strange, but it gets to the heart of how the tradition understands the practice. A fast is a tool, not a goal. It is meant to shift something inward, to create a kind of opening in the self that ordinary life tends to fill in. The Hebrew prophets were already warning against fasting done badly, pointing out that going without food while carrying on with injustice, selfishness, or empty ritual achieves nothing. The outer act only matters insofar as it reflects, or better yet prompts, genuine inner change. This keeps Jewish fasting grounded and honest. You are not earning points. You are trying to wake yourself up.

The Jewish calendar holds several fasts, and they vary considerably in their weight and meaning. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the most solemn. It is a full fast lasting around twenty-five hours, observed by the vast majority of Jews including many who keep very little else of religious practice. It sits at the end of the Days of Awe, a ten-day period of reflection and return that begins at Rosh Hashanah. The fast is bound up with teshuvah, a Hebrew word often translated as repentance but more accurately meaning turning, as in turning back towards who you are meant to be, towards others you have wronged, and towards God. The day is not one of misery but of seriousness and ultimately of relief. There is something almost freeing about stepping entirely out of ordinary life for a day. Tisha B'Av, the ninth of the month of Av, is the other major fast, marked in mourning for the destruction of the Temple and other catastrophes in Jewish history. Several minor fasts round out the year, each connected to specific historical or spiritual moments.

The rabbis of the Talmudic tradition thought carefully about what fasting actually does to a person, and their reflections are characteristically practical as well as spiritual. Afflicting the soul, a phrase the Torah uses in connection with Yom Kippur, was understood to include the body. Denying yourself food and water, abstaining from washing, from leather shoes, from certain other comforts, all of this works together to strip away the usual layers of physical ease and self-satisfaction. You become more aware of your own fragility and dependence. That awareness, the rabbis suggested, is itself spiritually valuable. It loosens the grip of ego. It makes a person more open to genuinely asking forgiveness from others and more willing to grant it. The fast is preparation for the real work, not a substitute for it.

Medieval Jewish philosophers and mystics took this further in different directions. The Kabbalistic tradition in particular saw fasting as a way of disciplining the physical self so that the soul could move more freely, drawing the person closer to divine presence. Figures in the Mussar movement, which emerged in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe and focused on ethical and spiritual self-development, treated fasting as one practice among many for refining character, though they were careful not to let it become self-punishing or obsessive. Across these different schools of thought, there is a consistent concern that fasting done in the wrong spirit can actually make things worse, breeding pride or self-absorption rather than humility and openness.

If you are approaching Jewish fasting for the first time, or returning to it after years away, it is worth sitting with this underlying logic. The tradition is not asking you to suffer for its own sake. It is offering you a structured interruption, a way of stepping out of routine so that you might see your life, your relationships, and your commitments a little more clearly. Many people find that even the discomfort of hunger serves this purpose unexpectedly well. It keeps pulling you back to the present moment. And the breaking of the fast, usually with community and shared food, carries its own warmth. After a day of stripped-back solitude and reflection, sitting down to eat with others feels, in the best sense, like a return.