Why Do We Torture Ourselves? Ice-baths, Fasting, and the Allure of Discomfort

Yonah Lavery-Yisraeli on the past and present practices of asceticism

Pablo Picasso. The Ascetic, 1903 [detail] | The Barnes Foundation © 2026 Estate of Pablo Picasso

Self-mortification is regarded with suspicion in the Jewish mainstream. Specifically the suspicion is that it is an infiltration from Christianity. The group most heavily associated with spiritually-motivated self-injury in Judaism, Hasidei Ashkenaz, is sometimes thought to be imitating fringe practices from Christian monks. Curiously, self-mortification was historically ridiculed by Christians as a Jewish practice: witness the Early Modern appetite for images of Jews whipping one another in preparation for Yom Kippur. But before we get carried away with judging religious practices, it is worth noting that there is renewed interest in intense fasting and ice plunges in secular Western culture. Religion need not be involved in self-mortification at all.

The reason for this underground cross-cultural appeal is one which T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) considers with care in his memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Despite its secular nature, the memoir has a relationship to pain which is oddly parallel to that which we find in Sefer Hasidim, the book at the heart of Hasidei Ashkenaz. Both texts present high-minded rationales for deliberate pain, yet both slip into disclosures that reveal impulsive rather than intellectual roots. Pain is “a solvent, a cathartic,” writes Lawrence, jolting the practitioner out of rumination or an emotional rut. Under the right conditions, it can release the mind from captivity, wake it up, and allow it to pursue something new. This simple physical cause and effect explains why self-mortification practices show up across cultures.

Lawrence in Miranshah, 1912 | Photo by Flight Lieutenant Smetham | Wikimedia Commons

That said, it is not unreasonable that one would wince when encountering descriptions of what Hasidei Ashkenaz were up to in medieval Germany: rolling naked in the snow, lying in nests of biting insects, freezing body parts in ice blocks, intensive fasting outside what is mandated by the religious calendar. These are challenging images. The problem is that the form their objection takes—this can’t be Jewish—is simply inaccurate.

Hasidei Ashkenaz, despite being a self-consciously small counterculture of pietists, cannot easily be quarantined as unrepresentative freaks. On the contrary, self-mortification is a subject that occurs not infrequently in mainstream Jewish texts. Foundational mystical works such as Sha'ar Ruah HaQodesh contain the snow ritual, and classical Lurianic kabbalists record their engagement with a vibrant array of austerities: dressing in sackcloth, sleeping on stones, restricted eating. But self-mortification is also found in the Talmud, medieval halakhic authorities, and the Shulhan Arukh. Broadly, it is tolerated. Surprisingly often, it is permitted without reservation. Sometimes, it is even praised.

Given asceticism’s presence in mainstream rabbinic works, why are Hasidei Ashkenaz met with such surprise? Perhaps the Jewish reading public contains two types: a majority, who screen out material of this sort, and a minority, who are energized by it and seek it out.  This is illustrated in the Talmud (Masekhet Sanhedrin 101a), when a dying R. Eliezer is visited by four of his colleagues. Three weep, but the fourth, R. Aqiva, cannot stop laughing. The weepers try to comfort R. Eliezer by praising him as nourishing rain, as the sun, as father and mother to his people. To their shower of affection, R. Eliezer does not react at all. But when R. Aqiva suggests instead that it is good to suffer, he immediately sits up and asks to hear more. In a domestic setting, where their jarring responses make them stand out awkwardly, R. Eliezer and R. Aqiva recognize something important about each other. Like salmon, they are able to swim against the current of conventional wisdom about pain.

The current is, admittedly, a strong one. “Do not incise your flesh for the dead, or cut any marks into yourselves,” warns Vayiqra (Leviticus) 18:29. “But I will require a reckoning for your lifeblood,” says Bereshit (Genesis) 9:5, understood by the Jewish tradition to mean that God does not permit aggression against the self. “Just watch out for yourselves, and be extremely careful,” urges Devarim (Deuteronomy) 4:9, followed shortly by 4:15, “Be extremely careful with yourselves”—verses taken by the rabbinic tradition to command excellent custodianship of one’s own health and safety. In Hoshen Mishpat 27:3, for example, the Tur pinpoints the latter verse as the reason why the Talmud says one should not even curse oneself verbally. The caution one is expected to exercise is clearly extensive.

But in Masekhet Makot 20b, we find an unexpected turnabout. The Talmud narrows the scope of the prohibition on incising one’s flesh dramatically:

The rabbis taught: “And one who makes an incision, etc.” We might have thought this meant even one who makes an incision over one’s fallen house or foundered ship. That’s why the Torah teaches us explicitly that one has not transgressed until one has done so for the dead.

Surely, we might think, the Talmud is saying that although the specific commandment in Vayiqra has not been violated, the behavior remains less than ideal. But many readings push Makot’s argument even further. The Ramban considers it entirely permitted, and in his work Torat HaAdam, specifies that self-injury is permitted even in a mourning context , so long as it is done with one’s hands alone. To prove his point, he cites the behavior of R. Aqiva when he learned that R. Eliezer died, described in Masekhet Sanhedrin 68a: “He beat himself until his blood flowed down to the ground.” We should pause to consider the force required not only to break the skin with one’s hands, but to cause heavy bleeding. Yet R. Yosef Karo, author of the Shulhan Arukh and thus the very same authority to prohibit unhygienic activities on safety grounds, concurs with the Ramban that what R. Aqiva did was entirely permissible, and illustrative of a normative standard.

Before attempting to resolve this tension, it is worth noticing who else is buffeted by the opposing forces. Sefer Hasidim is the central text of Hasidei Ashkenaz, and strongly advocates for self-mortification, but it is simultaneously one of a minority of rabbinic voices to consider that self-injury violates a Torah-level prohibition (s.5676). In fact, it does not even want guilt-ridden people to go up on roofs or into the wilderness lest they meet with misadventure. In other words, neither side of this fraught debate is free from contradiction.

But Sefer Hasidim knows it. When it prohibits self-harm, it cites Bereshit, “I will require a reckoning for your lifeblood.” In one of the book’s most fascinating passages, it wields the very same verse against its own practice of self-mortification:

There once was a pious person. In the summer, he would lie on the earth among biting insects, and in the winter, he would put his feet in bowls of water until his feet were stuck in the ice. His friend said to him, “Why do you do that? Isn’t it written ‘But I will require a reckoning for your lifeblood’? Why are you endangering yourself?” He responded, “I haven’t sinned all that severely. But it’s impossible that I haven’t violated some minor transgressions. Because of this I need to manufacture great sufferings for myself, or else the Messiah and truly righteous people will suffer instead. I don’t want that anyone should have to suffer because of me. Also, I’m doing a kindness toward the community, because when a righteous person [such as I] suffers, it benefits them directly and concretely, as it is written in Yeshayahu 53:12, ‘And so I will give the many as his portion, and their strength as his prize, [for he bared his soul to death and was counted among wrongdoers, and took away the sin of the many, and intervened for wrongdoers]’.” His student said to him, “Even so, I fear that you will be punished for this.” He did die, and his student secretly wondered if it was because of these very same sufferings. In fact, he had seen him sometimes burn his flesh. [The pious man] had been driven to his deathbed and the student said to him, “Just look, you are wasting your ability to learn Torah. Now that is a sin!” (s.628)

This story from Sefer Hasidim ambushes the reader with its self-awareness. It knows exactly how bad self-mortification looks to others. It knows by heart their excellent arguments against it. It even knows it is giving up some level of meaningful engagement with beautiful and nurturing spirituality in order to pursue its dark circle around and around. Still, it persists. The ability of Hasidei Ashkenaz to open themselves to serious intellectual attack is, perhaps, not unrelated to their ability to hold their hand in a candle.

Beneath the scriptural justifications lies a sense of unease. A roll in the snow to expunge a specific sin may or may not be appealing, but at least it is a ritual. Furtive, uncontrolled burning in response to overwhelming but ultimately ambient guilt is another. That feels like a person in trouble, not a sage enlightened beyond common understanding. Sefer Hasidim is consciously presenting asceticism at its most disturbing as it slides into the self-harm of an unhappy individual. Conversely, the student is portrayed as articulate and perceptive. At least half the narrative is siding with him, but not the whole: the narrative ends when the student, distressed by the entire experience, speaks with the departed spirit of the pious person in a dream. The spirit tries to show him the glorious reward he has received after death, but only to partial avail. The student can smell the beautiful fragrance of the pious person’s place in heaven, but he cannot see it.

Sefer Hasidim’s story signals that it understands its opponents, but can neither explain nor surrender its behavior. The student’s ability to at least smell perfume of an unseen source expresses hope that non-ascetics, in turn, can intuit benevolent intentions behind their friends’ actions. Taken as a whole, the story seems a plea that others think well of the ascetics even when they see through their eloquent justifications to a troubled and unspeaking core. What it is telling us, I believe, is that people have a gap in their experiences of being hurt which language cannot bridge.

It is tempting to imagine that someone who rubs themselves raw with sackcloth is relegated to medieval history, beyond our understanding or interest. But the difference between then and now may be as slim as claiming a spiritual benefit (the health of one’s soul) instead of a physical one (the health of one’s skin, which today can be deeply abraded by laser). Whether a spiritual or a physical benefit is claimed may be of small import, but it greatly changes how it is possible to digest its consequences.

Like the modern skeptic, Rambam (more widely known as Maimonides) is wary of trends and is alive to the slipperiness of motivation. In his work Shemoneh Peraqim, he raises the spectres of misunderstanding and superficiality, and argues that there are, in fact, right and wrong reasons to engage in discomfort. Rambam seems to suggest that the right reason is when one is so unwell that nothing else can shock them back into an integrated self. Some people, he writes, need “a little” dangerous extremity “as a type of healing,” but he cautions that fools misunderstand and imitate self-injurious behavior when it should not be undertaken by them. Rambam—a doctor himself—knows that a person with a life-threatening disease sometimes needs harsh medicine. But this does not mean that someone without that disease should take the medicine, no matter how much they may admire the patient or feel in other ways similar to them. Rambam casts self-mortification as palliative care for an endangered psyche, which cannot reason with its opponents because the very source of its trouble is beyond the reach of reason.

traditional portrait of Maimonides

One of the most striking characteristics of the Hasidei Ashkenaz was its warm openness to a world which preyed upon them with intense and unpredictable violence. For instance, Sefer Hasidim speaks casually of the commonality of being kidnapped when stepping foot out of the Jewish community, not to mention the brutality that came with the Crusades. Despite this, Hasidei Ashkenaz believed that virtue, as well as vice, lay in the wider world. They were interested in learning new ways to do good, even from the non-Jewish rulers they easily might have despised. If they appear at times neurotic, perhaps neurosis is the defining feature of a mind that can endure pain without transferring it to a new victim. Self-mortification does not exist by coincidence in persons, like Hasidei Ashkenaz and R. Aqiva, who can suffer violence at the hands of others with meditative equanimity.

This rhymes with contemporary ice plungers who seek to regulate their nervous system and lift themselves out of reactivity. To Rambam, the “fools” would be those who take a polar bath to gain 15% greater longevity; the wise would be those who take it to avoid taking out their anger or anxiety on their families. In the same passage of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom where he calls pain a “solvent,” Lawrence notes that conscious engagement with pain frees people to love where once they were paralyzed by fear:

Fear, the strongest motive in slothful man, broke down with us, since love for a cause—or for a person—was aroused. For such an object, penalties were discounted, and loyalty became open-eyed, not obedient.

Elsewhere, Lawrence notes pain’s ability to break through rumination, ambient guilt, and liberate the mind:

I lay in that tent, suffering a bodily weakness which made my animal self crawl away and hide till the shame was passed. As usual in such circumstances my mind cleared, my senses became more acute, and I began at last to think…

Once inner violence has been externalized, what is left is tenderness. Lawrence’s observation articulates why Sefer Hasidim can rule so strongly against self-harm at the same time it speaks admiringly of it: the process of shock and relief enables someone whose sense of worth has been numbed to let it come alive again, feeling a renewed sense of love not only for the world but for the wounded self, now tinged with regret.

That such different works as Seven Pillars and Sefer Hasidim can illuminate one another demonstrates that self-mortification is not a contaminant from any particular alien theology. It is a response to material, sensory cause and effect, seized on by people whose challenges exceed their capacity to cope in other ways. This means that a long (if restrained) history of asceticism in Jewish practice does not have to horrify us as evidence of a primitive or perverse mindset—only as evidence of survival through harrowing circumstances, the fallout of which caused some to reach for extraordinary medicine.

Not everybody, in Rambam’s language, is ill, so they would be a fool to be taken in even by Lawrence’s rationale about actively seeking pain. But that said, there is something broader to be learned about pain of the unsought variety, common in everyone’s life. So many modern approaches to dealing with that difficult fact revolve around the induction of numbness, like scrolling and binging on entertainment. These are indeed effective techniques for dulling the emotions we do not consciously wish to feel. But by sidestepping the encounter with discomfort, perhaps we also avoid the emotional opening which can follow in its wake. 

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 Rabbi Yonah Lavery-Yisraeli learns and teaches at Yeshivat HaHakshava. Currently living in Queens, NYC, Lavery-Yisraeli is a writer, a Senior Editor at Marginalia, and an internationally exhibited visual artist. She can be reached at yonah.lavery@gmail.com.