[THREAD] Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, when the faithful fast for 24 hours and spend the day in contemplation and prayer asking god for forgiveness for all the sins they committed in the past year, begins tonight with Kol Nidre.

Not having believed in god or practised religion since I was 16, I’ll be giving that a miss. My personal Yom Kippur tradition is tweeting about the Yom Kippur Balls. Here’s Rebecca Margolis’s informative pamphlet: https://libcom.org/files/Margolis_2001_yom_kippur_balls.pdf

The balls were organised by socialists, prominently anarchists but also others, in immigrant Jewish communities of London, NYC, and Montreal, and aimed to subvert the solemnity and religious superstition of the day by bringing Jews together in a spirit of defiant celebration...

...that also acted as a platform for radical propagandising and agitation, and class-struggle organising.

It was a revolutionary transgression against religious authority and obscurantism, where Jews would eat pork (treyf!) and get pissed when they were “supposed” to be fasting in shul.

The story of Benjamin Feigenbaum’s atheist lecture, which preceded a ball, is one of my all-time favourite moments from Jewish leftist history. This account, an excerpt from Tom (“Mot”) Eyges’ ‘Beyond the Horizon’, is in Bill Fishman’s ‘East End Jewish Radicals, 1875-1914’:

Personally I feel a deep sense of affinity with this tradition of militant anti-theism and secularism, which was entirely anti-clerical and anti-religious whilst still being profoundly Jewish.

On a far left where postmodern and cultural-relativist attitudes to religion are commonplace, a reconnection with the spirit of Feigenbaum would be a wonderful thing. The ideological project of socialism requires, in the first instance, that we “convert” people to “free thought”.

So if you’re an observant Jew wrestling with your faith, and an empty stomach, tomorrow, consider the possibility that you might do more to heal the world by spending the day in an atmosphere of celebratory resistance than by spending it in shul in contemplation of your own sin.

“Down with fanaticism, long live free thought!” [/THREAD]