Rabbi Eliezer Diamond is the Rabbi Judah Nadich Associate Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

The old saying goes, “50 million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.” The idea behind is that if just about everyone believes something to be so, it must in fact be the truth. One of the tasks of scholarship is to examine these widely held assumptions and to determine whether these purported truths are, in fact, correct. Often enough, they are not.

Rabbi Eliyahu Stern, in a recent article in NJJN (“Hollywood and Stein: The tragedy of Jewish success,” May 18), tells us that “there is no mitzva in being an ascetic” and that in Judaism “Puritan moderation is not seen as an ultimate value.” I spent a number of years writing and researching Holy Men and Hunger Artists: Fasting and Asceticism in Jewish Culture, and my conclusions are quite different.

It is true that celibacy has never been a common Jewish practice, and that the average Jew has felt comfortable eating and drinking to his or her heart’s content. However, in matters of both food and sex there has been, particularly among Ashkenazi Jews, a strong tendency toward self-denial.

The Talmud already tells us that by the end of the third century Jewish women had adopted a stringency that added a number of days to the time during which a couple could not have sexual relations each month, a stringency that is still observed in the Orthodox community. The second-century Rabbi Yohanan ben Dahabai forbids most sexual practices other than intercourse in the “missionary” position. It is true that his colleagues disagree and later rabbis say that the law is not in accordance with his views. Nonetheless, 16th-century Rabbi Moses Isserles, after ruling in accordance with the more permissive view in his glosses to the Shulhan Aruch, the Code of Jewish Law, adds that “one who sanctifies himself regarding that which is permissible is called holy.”

Fasting on Mondays and Thursdays was a common practice among Jews in the Land of Israel in the first centuries of the Common Era, though not among Babylonian Jews. One of the few things that Greek and Roman authors seem to know about the Jews of their time is that they fast. The Talmud mentions a number of rabbis for whom fasting was an essential element of their spiritual discipline.

Throughout the centuries there have been groups of Jews for whom self-denial in matters of food and sex has been an essential part of their practices. Beginning with the Essenes in Qumran in the centuries before the Common Era and the Theraputae in Egypt in the first century, these groups include the German Jewish pietists of the 12th and 13th centuries, the ascetic mystics of 16th century Safed (one of whom, Rabbi Joseph Caro, authored the Shulhan Aruch, arguably the most authoritative code of Jewish law ever written), the Vilna Gaon and his followers in the 18th century and the self-denying adherents of the 19th-century Mussar movement in Lithuania.

Why, then, is it news to most American Jews that Judaism has long included a strain of asceticism? I believe that there are two reasons. The first is that Christianity and Judaism have had a mutual interest in seeing Judaism as non- or even anti-ascetic. For Christians it makes it possible to view Judaism as a more materialistic religion in comparison to what is seen as the superior spirituality of Christian faith. Jews, on the other hand, are able to feel that Judaism has a healthier attitude toward the body and pleasure than Christianity, especially in sexual matters.

The second factor is that asceticism as a spiritual discipline has largely disappeared from the scene in Jewish America — more accurately, it never really appeared in the first place. Upwardly mobile Jews, including a great many in the Modern Orthodox community, are part of America’s consumer culture. There are upscale kosher restaurants and fine kosher wines. Jews with money use it to buy large well-decorated and well-furnished homes and late-model automobiles. There are vacations in Israel but also in Disney World.

Is this a bad thing? It need not be. In the end, all that I have said notwithstanding, mainstream rabbinic Judaism does validate the importance of physical and material well-being. Yet I cannot help but feel that we have lost touch with an important religious impulse in our ready embrace of the American way. The pleasure that material goods can bring is limited and often fleeting, and the pursuit of wealth, as Hillel reminds us, diminishes the time and energy available for Torah study and other mitzvot.

I do not think that it is time to return to fasting on Mondays and Thursdays. It may be time, however, to seek ways, in the words of our rabbis, to sanctify ourselves regarding that which is permissible: to live more simply and modestly although we could afford a more sumptuous lifestyle. If we do, we will be better Jews and better people.

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