One day a year everything is blessedly quiet. No street noise, no loud music, no shouting. Just glorious peace and twittering birds. I'm speaking, of course, about Yom Kippur.
This is a secular kibbutz, aggressively so. It's part of a movement that is so left wing that in the early days adoring pictures of Stalin were hung in the children's classrooms, a bit of information I would file under "What the hell were you thinking?" When we got married so many years ago it was forbidden to have a huppa in the public areas – rabbis were forbidden. You could have it at your house, but not at the dining hall. While this rule has since changed, the attitude has not. So it's fair to assume that most people here don't fast.
Still, the day is treated quite respectfully. Why this is, I don't really know. Maybe because it's tradition, or part of Jewish identity, or because the rest of the country has shut down and there's nothing else to do. For whatever reason there are no barbecues and no kayak races on the fish ponds. One day a year, those precious hours of silence. It's marvelous.
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