Fasting can be hypocritical. We can fast to show ourselves how pious we are. We can brag of how much weight we have lost in just twelve days. We can occupy ourselves with the outer rules of fasting but forget about what we are fasting for.
To make a show of prayer and fasting are condemned by Jesus (‘a) in the gospels. Jewish scholars also have made the point that fasting is worthless if it does not awaken one to repentance. Jews used to put ashes on their heads when they began to fast, and the eldest among them would admonish them: “Brethren, it is not written of the men of
All of the laws of the Torah, civil and penal as well as ritual, serve no other purpose than to clarify and facilitate our response to God. But they do so not by vanishing nor by subjuming or displacing that response but by sustaining and giving it its concrete sense and instantiated application.
Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah (of Maimonides) concerns sound opinions, the beliefs that convey the essential elements of the true understanding that philosophers pursue in regard to God and nature and our relations toward both. Regulations regarding fasts and repentance fall under this heading, since moral reformation and spiritual purgation are prerequisites of theological insight and of the alchemy that transmutes sound opinions into critically testable philosophical ideas.
-Lenn E. Goodman, God of Abraham, p. 162.
)وَاتَّقُوا اللٌّهَ وَيُعَلِّمُكُمُ اللٌّهُ وَاللٌّهُ بِكُلِّ شَيْءٍ عَلِيمٌ (
“Be God-wary and God shall teach you, and God has knowledge of all things.”[89]
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