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Translated by Rabbi Émile Ackermann
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This question is taken from a WhatsApp group in which Rabbi Linzer answers halachic questions from rabbis and community members.
QUESTION—Houston, TX
A woman in my community has the following problem with fasting:
Although she is fine during the fast, only experiencing headaches, she becomes extremely nauseous when she eats after the fast, and cannot keep any food down for a few hours. What should I tell her regarding the Tisha B’Av fast?
ANSWER
This is a tricky question, because it’s not the fasting that makes him nauseous, but eating afterwards.
One way to approach the question would be to say that she is a cholah (sick person), since if this nausea occurred on Tisha B’Av due to fasting, she would qualify as a cholah, at least that is what your description suggests (see SA OH 554:6 , MB 554:11 ). The argument is that the cause of the nausea is ultimately the fast, not the eating, since eating is a necessity and will occur regardless.
Consider the following analogy: The fast of Tisha B’Av causes a person to faint all day the next day, as soon as he takes a deep breath of air. I think in such a case we would agree that this is a choleh who may eat on Tisha B’Av, even though nothing happens on Tisha B’Av itself. This is the approach I would take, and certainly in a year where Tisha B’Av is a nidcheh (pushed back to Sunday). ( MB 554:14 )
It is understandable that some are hesitant to define her as a cholah , given that no symptoms are present on Tisha B’Av (what would they say about the fainting example, above?) and the immediate cause of the nausea is the eating. Based on this, one can still take the shiurim approach . We do not normally do shiurim on Tisha B’Av – if there is a reason to eat or drink, one should do so (see Arukh HaShulchan OH 554:7 , Nishmat Avraham 1:554:6) – but here, perhaps it is different. Here, the person is not, according to this approach, a choleh (which would allow one to eat without shiurim ). Nevertheless, he will become a mitztaeret (sick person) as a result of the fast. It could be argued that since the reason for mitzta’eir is a matir (reason for leniency) in many derabanan cases (see Ketubot 60a MB 328:90 , etc.), here too we can permit eating/drinking less than a shiur (much like a trei derabanan ) to prevent mitzta’eir (also recognizing that the matir is usually to mitigate mitzta’eir now, not to prevent it in the future).
Ultimately , my pesak would be that, although the symptoms only manifest after the fast, the woman is a cholah now – in the sense that she has a condition that will cause severe nausea if she fasts – and therefore should not fast.
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