Did You Take Your Caffeine Suppository at Yom Kippur?
Yom Kippur is about atonement, cleansing your soul and starting anew. And since atonement doesn’t come easy, it also requires self-affliction, mostly performed through fasting. But if the fasting and the no washing and the no wearing leather shoes and the ban on sexual relations isn’t enough, next year you might try to inserting a caffeine suppository into your anus.
Turns out many Jews, unable to go sundown to sundown without a caffeine jolt, use the small rectal pills to get them through the day. One Williamsburg pharmacy claimed to have sold 150 suppositories the day before Yom Kippur.
“It helps — you know, it’s hard to concentrate when you’re fasting and also addicted to caffeine, one Orthodox Brooklynite, Baruch Herzfeld, told The Brooklyn Paper. “Some take it before sundown, but most take it throughout their fasting. These guys love a good loophole.”
The Halachic ruling on the magic little pill is unclear. Some believe ingesting anything, through any hole, undermines the ritual of the fast.
“We’re supposed to do it the old fashioned way — I wouldn’t advise [suppositories],” said a Hasidic rabbi. “We want to keep Jews in the synagogue and not in the bathroom” — even though there’s no liquid involved, caffeine still keeps your bladder loose.
If you’re squeamish about the physical discomfort, just remember the Day of Atonement requires a lot of standing.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO