by A project has sent me to reading all things Brandeis. I ran across an interesting statement by Brandeis that may capture an important aspect of the religious practice of fasting. This may seem strange to those who know much about Brandeis. Brandeis lived a very modest lifestyle, but I know of no instance of his fasting. Brandeis was morally Jewish (very Jewish), but not religiously so. However, in a letter to his future wife Alice, written a few months after they met, he expresses in a human-to-human relationship some of what fasting does for the human-to-divine relationship. He says:
If only you were near me. It was a pleasure today to feel you in refraining to smoke that after-dinner cigarette, because you do not like it. That made you almost physically present.
Sept. 7, 1890, LDB to Alice Goldmark (Urofsky and Levy’s The Family Letters of Louis D. Brandeis).
Thanks to Dallas Willard’s Spirit of the Disciplines, I fast for at least part of the day on Sundays. The practice makes me feel a stronger presence of God (though I think, in general, he likes food).
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