With Yom Kippur only hours away, you may already be dreading the caffeine headache that will soon distract you from your morning prayers. Yom Kippur may be the Day of Atonement, but how can you focus on atonement without any coffee coursing through your veins? How can you be expected to stay awake through a service without the necessary morning jolt?
Some communities have found a very creative—and a little disgusting—way to solve this serious Yom Kippur problem: caffeine suppositories. Instead of getting your caffeine the old fashioned way, through sipping a hot cup of joe, you simply insert a caffeine suppository into your, uh, tuches. Though it may sound like cheating, some rabbis hold that the prohibition against eating and drinking on Yom Kippur only applies to things that enter your body through your mouth. Other orifices aren’t included in the prohibition.
Where to get these suppositories? The Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn is a good place to start, as this article points out. In the days leading up to Yom Kippur the pharmacies in this Hasidic neighborhood sell suppositories like hotcakes.
Still, we’d advise just drinking lots of water before the fast. It’s a bit less…yucky.
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