A Day To Atone

TigerBlog's people have two holidays that really mess with his eating habits.

The first is Passover, the eight days that celebrate the Israelites' exodus from enslavement in Egypt, led ably by none other than Moses.

For each of those eight days, TB's people are not allowed - well, not supposed - to eat anything leavened, which essentially eliminates bread, pasta and basically everything else most people eat every day.

The other is Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, which just happens to be today.

On Yom Kippur, Jews are to fast, from sundown of one day (yesterday) to sundown of the next (today). No food. No liquids. Nothing. For 24 hours.

TigerBlog has spent much of his life mulling over the question of which is more challenging, going eight days minus so many huge staples of his diet is tougher or one full night and day without eating anything.

Yom Kippur is the most solemn day of the Jewish year, a day of quiet reflection and prayer to atone for one's sins of the past year.

It is the end of the Jewish High Holy Days, which began eight days ago with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.

In Jewish culture, the High Holy Days never come on time. They're either early or late, as in "the holidays came really early this year," which is said at every family celebration as a way of suggesting that the hostess was caught completely off guard, what with the end of the summer and all, and therefore couldn't create a proper meal for the occasion. This is usually followed by a general agreement that "we should only be together on wonderful occasions."

For children, the goal on Yom Kippur is always to go the entire 24 hours without eating, though it's rarely achieved.

The tendency is to overeat at dinner before sundown when Yom Kippur begins, but this doesn't do anything to sustain someone the entire next day.

TB's schools were always closed on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and he never went to classes in college on the holidays. He's almost always taken off from work, except at some point when he began to attend Princeton's games should the holiday fall on a weekend.

This put him in a different place than Sandy Koufax, who famously did not pitch in Game 1 of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur.

TB's first Yom Kippur game was a football game at Brown back in the 1990s.

He decided to make the trip because he figured that leaving at 6 am, driving to Providence, working at the game and then driving some of the way back - all without eating - would be a tougher challenge than sleeping later and not being as busy.

Brown Stadium is not located on campus, set instead at the end of a residential neighborhood about a mile away with a temple across the street from the parking lots.

TB decided to go to the services being held at the temple, and he went in and found three players - two from Princeton and one from Brown - at the services as well. As he recalls, the Brown player was in his uniform.

The 2010 Princeton football season opened on Yom Kippur with a game at Lehigh, and TB did the radio for that one. About five feet from his booth was the pregame media food, which looked great from TB's hungry standpoint.

As for that Brown game, TB made the trip with Princeton's radio team of Tom McCarthy, now the Phillies' TV play-by-play man, and Walter Perez, now a reporter on Channel 6 TV in Philadelphia. The two of them spent the entire trip eating, and when not eating, talking about eating. As TB remembers it, they both got really good bacon and egg sandwiches at a bagel place in the morning.

That particular Yom Kippur, TB broke his fast at a Wendy's off I-95 in Rhode Island.

Anyway, TB is talking today off, except for a few reflections on the holiest day of the year.

He'll be back in the office tomorrow morning, well fed and fully atoned.