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Translated by Balbino Cotarelo Núñez
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This question was taken from the WhatsApp group where Rabbi Linzer answers halachic questions from rabbis and other members of the community.
QUESTION—Houston
A woman in my synagogue has the following problem when she fasts:
Even though he has no problems while fasting, only a slight headache, when he eats after fasting he gets very nauseous, and he cannot keep food down for a few hours. What should I tell him about the fast of Tisha b’Av ?
ANSWER
This is a difficult case, since fasting does not create nausea, but eating afterwards does.
One way to address this might be to say that it is a cholah (sickness), since if this nausea were to occur on Tisha B’Av as a result of fasting, then it would qualify as a cholah, at least that is how it seems to follow from your description (see ShA OJ 554:6, MB 554:11 ). The argument is that the cause of the nausea is ultimately the fast, not the food, since eating is a necessity and has to pass in any case.
Consider the following analogy – fasting on Tisha B’Av will cause a person to faint the entire next day when he takes a deep breath. I think in such a case we would agree that it is a choleh that he may eat on Tisha B’Av , even if nothing happened on Tisha B’Av itself. This is the approach I would take, and certainly in a year in which Tisha B’Av is nidchah (moved to Sunday) ( MB 554:14 ).
Understandably, some may hesitate to define it as a cholah , since there are no symptoms on Tisha B’Av (what would you say about the example of fainting above?) and the most proximate cause of nausea is the ingestion of food. According to this, one can always address the problem with the solution of shiurim . Normally we do not use shiurim on Tisha B’Av – if there is a reason to eat or drink, then one does so (see Aruch HaShulchan OJ 554:7 , Nishmat Avraham 1:554:6) – but in this case it may be different. Here the person is, according to this argument, a cholah (which would allow eating without shiurim ). Despite this, he would be a mitztaeret (a person in pain) as a result of fasting. The argument could be made that since a mitztaeret person is matir (the reason for leniency) in many cases of derabanan (see Ketubot 60a , MB 328:90 , etc.), here too we may permit eating or drinking less than a shiur (akin to a tre derabanan ) in order to prevent mitztaer (also recognizing that the matir is usually to alleviate the mitztaer now, not as prevention in the future).
Conclusion : My pesak would be that even though the symptoms do not appear until after the fast, the woman is a cholah now – in the sense that she has a medical predisposition that will give her severe nausea if she fasts – and therefore she should not fast.
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