historical perspectives: from the hasmoneans to bar kokhba in light ...

142 NOAH HACHAM
I desire goodness, not sacrifice; Obedience to God, rather than burnt
offerings" (Hos. 6:6, JPS translation). And of fasts it is said:
"Because you fast in strife and contention, and you strike with a
wicked fist; your fasting today is not such as to make your voice
heard on high" (Isa. 58:4). Thus the same criticism of sacrifices is
made of fasts: sacrifices are deemed undesirable since they are mistaken
for a goal rather than a means, and fasts are undesirable for
the same reason. Here, too, fasting is an element of the same physical
rite as the sacrifice, and the danger that the worshipper will
overestimate their efficacy, independent of his moral regeneration,
exists for both. Further, Jer. 14:12 draws a comparison between fasts
and sacrifices:
"When they fast, I will not listen to their outcry; and when they
present burnt offering and meal offering, I will not accept them." 61
In other sources, fasting is presented as a substitute for sacrifice.
When the Babylonian Amora Rav Sheshet kept a fast, on concluding
his prayer he added the following:
Sovereign of the Universe, Thou knowest full well that in the time
when the Temple was standing, if a man sinned he used to bring a
sacrifice, and though all that was offered of it was its fat and blood,
atonement was made for him therewith. Now I have kept a fast and
my fat and blood have diminished. May it be Thy will to account my
fat and blood which have been diminished as if I had offered them
before Thee on the altar, and do thou favour me (b. Ber. 17a). 62
61 In this verse, both sacrifice and fasting are depicted as means to a common
goal, to be heard and found acceptable by God. See also Sir. 34:21—31, although
the fast of an individual is the subject.
62 The fast is also treated similarly in a piyyut recited on the eve of Yom Kippur:
"Let the fasting
of thy people, who sprinkle their blood to thee be accepted; esteem their fat as if
it were that of a sacrifice, and despise not their offering" (translation of A. Rosenfeld,
The Authorised Selichot for the Whole Tear [London: n.p., 1957], 337). E. E. Urbach,
"Ascesis and Suffering in Talmudic and Midrashic Sources," in The World of the
Sages: Collected Studies (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1988), 442~45 (Hebrew), claims that
following the destruction of the Second Temple there was a surge in fasts, and he
ascribed this phenomenon to fasts being regarded as