I Tried to Explain Yom Kippur to My Coworkers and Now They Think I'm in a Cult, Which Is Understandable
On reflection, "we don't eat for 25 hours, feel terrible, then eat a lot and feel better about ourselves for exactly one year" does sound like something a cult would say. I maintain it is not a cult.
Every year, without fail, I attempt to explain Yom Kippur to my coworkers. Every year, without fail, I lose them somewhere around the part where we apologize to God for things we did between the last apology and this one. "So it resets?" asked one colleague this year. "Annually," I confirmed. He nodded in a way that suggested he was being polite.
The fasting is usually where I lose people completely. "You don't eat for a day?" "Twenty-five hours." "On purpose?" "Yes." "And then you feel better?" "Significantly." There was a long pause. "That," said my colleague Janet, "is exactly what a cult would say." I did not have a response that fully addressed this concern.
What I have come to understand, after many years of these conversations, is that most religious traditions sound unreasonable when summarized in a hallway. The difference is that most people have already been told what to think about other religions and come to Yom Kippur fresh, without the benefit of prior context. I consider this their loss. They consider it a reasonable response to the information available. We meet in the middle, which is to say we do not meet at all, but we are both very professional about it.