I am sitting in the Nagycsarnok — the Great Market — in Budapest, thinking: I’m only here for 4 days, there’s no way I can possibly eat my way through this country! Only four days, and one of them Yom Kippur.

This food is the Hungarian countryside, only edible. Cucumbers. Celery. Leeks. Melons. Yellow beans. Carrots and parsnips and piles and piles of peppers — pale green ones and bright red ones that look like crumpled wads of newspaper. While the amount of global food in Budapest is a little sobering (Burger King, pizza places, gyros and felafel and Chinese fast food), there are still a lot of foods I’ve never seen before, and that makes me feel I’m in a new place.

Such as bags of cheese — turned out to be a sort of dry cottage cheese. And a biscuit-type thing with cheese and pumpkin seeds. And (baruch hashem!) all the “meggy” treats — sour cherry turnover, strudel with sour cherries and poppyseeds….

What does it mean, to eat my way through a country? And what does that mean for Yom Kippur, a day of not eating?

Eating is one of those things that are so remarkable we forget to even notice. Plants grow in the ground. We pick them and put them in our mouths. Our bodies absorb their energy and that’s how we stay alive.

Crazy, I know.

But this is why local food is so grounding — literally — like a lightening rod captures the electricity and brings it to the earth, eating the food of a place literally connects our living energy with the physical world around us. Eating the food of a place connects us to that place by actually bringing it inside of us — and instead of distancing our relationship to creation (as do the Burger Kings and frozen dinners in fluorescent-lit cases), they bring us closer to the awesomeness of the world, and the awesomeness of being alive.

Hence, clearly, my eagerness to eat Hungarian pastry.

However, if eating is such a profound way to connect to the divine — why do we spend the holiest day of the year davka not eating?

Ostensibly, we fast on Yom Kippur so we can give our full concentration to prayer, repentance, gratitude. But a day of not eating makes two other very powerful points as well: 1. We get to remember how wonderful food is, and 2. we get to realize that even with all its amazing capacity to nourish and connect, food is not the only thing that holds us — and possibly not even the most important, though it may be the most immediately obvious. Our spirituality, while rooted in the earth and its produce, does not actually dwell there. Call it God, call it divine spirit, shechina, as you wish…we do not live by bread alone.

When God is explaining the shmitta year to the Israelites — a whole year where nothing could be planted or harvested — he says: “Don’t worry! Even though the idea of this terrifies you and is utterly incomprehensible, I will provide. Ya just gotta trust me.” (Leviticus 25; translation, uh, mine). If so much was true for a whole year, how about for the one day of Yom Kippur? We get roughly 360 days a year (minus the other fast days) to eat. That’s a lot of grounding. On this day of not eating, we can be reminded of all the other was we are held, grounded, connected: community, prayer, gratitude, spirituality, love…

May your fast be easy, and may you break it with foods that bring you right back down to earth, connect you to the splendor of creation, life itself and the place where you are. For me, I think my break-fast in Budapest will somehow involve paprika…