For Waldo County resident Joseph Pearl, Yom Kippur may hit a little differently this year.

The holiday, the most solemn day on the Jewish calendar, begins at sunset on Wednesday. Observant Jews will spend the day in synagogue, fasting and reflecting on wrongs they committed in the previous year.

The Day of Atonement won’t be the first time in recent months that Pearl has fasted, nor the first time he’s been thinking about making amends. Early this summer, Pearl was among some 40 Mainers who participated in a six-week fast organized by the national nonprofit Veterans for Peace to protest U.S. aid to Israel and Israeli policies in Gaza.

He said his understanding of Yom Kippur was “definitely” something he was thinking about when he decided to join the protest. When he was a child, “it was really drilled into me how important repentance and commitment to self-improvement is to being Jewish,” said Pearl, a carpenter.

The war in Gaza has caused deep and bitter rifts among American Jews over how to address the growing humanitarian crisis and Israel’s military operations in the region. Rabbi Gary Berenson of Etz Chaim synagogue in Portland said fasting to protest Israel’s policies in Gaza is misguided, and maintains that peace will only be possible when Hamas militants return the remaining Israeli hostages and lay down their arms. “But they’ll never do that because this is not a new skirmish,” he said. “It’s just a new tactic.”

CHILDHOOD NORMS

Pearl grew up in a small, rural college town in Vermont with few Jewish families. “Jewish identity was an important part of our family’s life, but we weren’t living in a very Jewish place,” he said. The High Holy Days, the 10 days that begin with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and end with Yom Kippur, were when he felt closest to the greater Jewish community.

On Yom Kippur, the family would spend the day together at synagogue, fasting, followed by a quiet time at a nature preserve. “I was always a little grumpy, but it was important to be together and break (the) fast in the evening. It felt like a time where the whole community was going through a reflective process together.”

Demetri Blanas, a doctor of family medicine from Bath who also participated in the Veterans for Peace fast, grew up in Denver, son of a Jewish mother and a Greek American father. His mother would light candles and say prayers at Hanukkah, and he grew up reading Jewish intellectuals like Primo Levi, but by and large it was a secular household. “I did not celebrate the Jewish holidays, and I still don’t observe them.”

But whatever his personal religious upbringing, “It is important to call on spiritual and cultural traditions and every other tool available to bring attention to the ongoing atrocities and do everything we can to stop them,” Blanas wrote in an email.

DAILY DIET

Pearl began his fast on May 22 by restricting his calories to 250 a day, the amount that Veterans for Peace said was “recently reported as the average intake for people in Gaza.” For reference, the average daily calories recommended for an adult male is roughly 2,500.

In three weeks, he lost 18 pounds before deciding “between exhaustion, the brain fog and the weight loss,” to double his caloric intake, a regime he maintained until the fast ended in July. Each morning, Pearl would boil a potato and eat it with one egg and a handful of greens. After breakfast, he restricted himself to tea and electrolytes.

“This was one of the places where my fast caused a lot of reflection because I was immensely privileged, even at 250 calories a day, to be able to choose the highest-quality, most nutrient-dense foods that I wanted,” Pearl said. “I knew that what I was eating was so incredibly different from the calories that people in Gaza were able to access.”

Blanas did not limit his calories, instead fasting from dawn to dusk. He’d eat a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast, for example, then would not eat again until dinner, when he’d join his family for a meal. “I am a physician and have two little kids and don’t think I’d be able to do it,” he wrote in an email, “although the people in Gaza have no choice.”

For Blanas, the fast was not about what he was eating or not eating. Instead, he saw it as a way to prod his friends, family and community to pay attention, to share his outrage and to join in demanding humanitarian aid for Gaza. Though the original fast ended in July, Blanas is participating in a second 30-day fast that will end in October.

CORE VALUES

Neither man is a stranger to protest. Pearl’s past activism focused on the environment. For Blanas, it was public health, social justice and American involvement in Iraq. But the situation in Gaza cuts particularly deep for both. Blanas said his activism has been ignited by the “disproportionate response” of Israel to the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, the “ongoing and never-ending horrors,” as he described it in an email.

At the same time, connecting with other Jews who share his views on Gaza has been powerful. Last year, Blanas brought his children to a Tashlich ritual on a pier in Portland that he found “profoundly moving.” During the annual Rosh Hashanah ritual, Jews throw bread or pebbles into flowing water to symbolize casting off their sins from the previous year. The ceremony, he said, brought home to him the sacredness of all human lives.

“In the last two years, I’ve engaged more with my Jewish heritage than I ever have at any other point in my life,” Blanas said. “In the face of so much, we do need some way to maintain our own spiritual well-being just to keep going and make sense of it all.”

Growing up, Pearl said he was taught on Yom Kippur to think about individuals he may have offended or been unkind to the previous year. As an adult, he sees that the holiday is equally about communal responsibility.

That view has support in the Yom Kippur liturgy, according to David Freidenreich, a rabbi and a professor of Jewish studies at Colby. The prayers recited on Yom Kippur are almost entirely in the plural, he said. “We need to seek forgiveness for what we have done wrong, not just I need to seek forgiveness for what I have done wrong.”

HOLDING OUT HOPE

Hope is intrinsic to Yom Kippur, whose premise, Freidenreich explained, is “that we have the ability to change what the future holds by engaging in self-reflection, by repenting, by praying, by engaging in acts of kindness to other people.”

Blanas said he struggles to feel hopeful. Pearl was more sanguine, noting he’s pleased to see more American Jews questioning Israeli policy, and he appreciates some political shifts, such as a recent statement by Sen. Angus King in favor of blocking arms shipments to Israel.

“I’m becoming a parent this year,” Pearl added. (His son was born a few days after he spoke with the Press Herald.) “For a very long time, I felt far too much despair about the world to be willing to become a parent, but I’ve come around to the fact or to the belief that — and I think this is a very Jewish belief — human beings should exist. The world is a better place for having humanity.

“And you have to maintain hopefulness,” he said. “Hopelessness and despair is not something that we can afford.”