(Author: Sheila Saffer, Vol. 66, #2, Rosh Hashanah 2011)
It has always puzzled me that Kol Nidrei occupies pride of place in the whole line-up of prayers of our High Holy Days – Yamim Nora’im – the period from our Jewish New Year to the Day of Atonement. Why is this prayer perceived by most to be the focal point of the whole season, one defining and highlighting the awesome moment that ushers in Yom Kippur?
While many of our Jewish community in Johannesburg may not be regular worshippers, the one night they will be sure to come to shul is the eve of Yom Kippur. They would not dream of being absent on this night of all nights. The majority of the community presents itself precisely and punctually for the chanting of this prayer of all prayers.
I remember going as a child all the way up Harrow Road and beyond to the Berea shul for Kol Nidrei night. Of course, those were the days when it was full to capacity – standing room only for me – but no matter. Everyone had to stand for the full hour that Kol Nidrei lasted – with Chazan Mandel (z”l), the cantor, giving forth to the total enchantment of all, especially the ‘mevinim af chazones’ – the cantorial cognoscenti.
Three times the prayer would be intoned, with the full choir’s backing and the tension mounting with each repeated haunting rendition. One could almost sense everyone holding their breath throughout the ‘performance’; an almost electric experience – the shul overflowing and all standing silent with suppressed excitement and awe.
I remember the ladies in the front row – the ‘ringside seats’ – where my mother and aunt always were, together with everyone else, bedecked in their Yom Kippur finest. If you weren’t wearing a mink stole, you probably didn’t have one. Nothing was too smart for this occasion, the pinnacle of the shul year, Guipure lace and at least pearls, if not your very best diamonds. And of course, there was not a thought in those days about any crime threat outside.
For some perplexing reason, the younger, more attractive women saw this night as a challenge to look their sexiest – toss out all classic notions of any prescribed pristine white! Casting all concepts of tzinius (modesty in dress) to the winds, they would present themselves in drop-dead little black numbers with the most daring décolletages – as in later years they would tantalize in the mini-est of minis. Fortunately or unfortunately, there was in those days no mechitzah – no dividing screen to obstruct the viewing of the magnificent ladies’ gallery by the men below, standing resplendent in their shiny white taleisim.
When the congregation finally sat down after the full hour, it was for once almost a relief just to listen to the rabbi’s sermon and to breathe normally. It was as if Yom Kippur was now officially ‘open’.
It seemed clear then that Kol Nidrei was the unquestioned leitmotif of Yom Kippur. What did that mean? And what does it mean? After all, none of us standing there had come to renounce any vows. Did we even notice that Kol Nidrei was being recited before nightfall, before the usual time of evening service? This is because it was in the day, during official business hours, that the judges of old sat in office to do their work, including the annulment of all types of oaths that people had made.
Incidentally, as we stood reciting Kol Nidrei, who knew or even cared what the difference was between oaths, vows, prohibitions, ‘konam-vows’, or konas-vows’? Well, maybe a few in our shul assembly did – Talmudic scholars like my father praying in the men’s section below and his counterparts. For the rest of us, the majority, the relevance escaped us. Why was the Kol Nidrei prayer the central focus of the evening’s service when the literal meaning (that is about the renunciation of our vows), if we thought about it at all, was not regarded as applicable?
Predictably, our ever-present detractors have liked to seize on the literal meaning of the prayer to offer it as proof that Jews cannot be trusted to keep their word. Not so, according to our rabbis and sages, who explain that the prescription contained in this prayer for the cancellation of vows refers exclusively to vows made between man and G-d, and is certainly not a formula for reneging on vows made between man and man.
Furthermore, the commentators stress that the recitation of this prayer is to emphasise the extreme gravity that the Torah attaches not only to formal vows and oaths, but to the general concept that one must keep one’s word. The prayer, say the rabbis, is to remind us of the importance of scrupulously honouring our commitments.
Others explain the prayer as harking back to some of the darker times of our history, preserving vestiges of the Spanish Inquisition. They refer to the forced converts (variously called anusim, Marranos orconversos) – members of the Jewish communities of Spain and later of Portugal who were compelled, on threat of death, to take on vows of allegiance to Christianity. Kol Nidrei begs absolution from such forced oaths.
However, the clear inclusion of the Kol Nidrei prayer in the ornately beautiful Nuremburg Machzor (prayer book) of 1331, recently exhibited for the first time at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, is proof that this prayer certainly predated the persecutions and final expulsion from Spain of the Jews by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand in 1492.
According to Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo, the scholar Joseph Bloch proposed a theory in 1927 suggesting that Kol Nidrei was already instituted in the Seventh Century, when the Visigoths forced Spanish Jews to convert to Christianity. In secret services organised by such Jewish converts on Yom Kippur eve, they would beseech G-d’s forgiveness with the recitation of Kol Nidrei to renounce the vows forced upon them.
If the latter were indeed the first group of anusim, Marranos or conversos, we are at present a long way from those days and even from the times of the victims of the Spanish Inquisition. Why, then, are we still reciting this prayer? Is it not an anachronism?
For this reason ostensibly, there have been some rabbis who have condemned its rendition; furthermore, there have been lengthy periods of time when Kol Nidrei had been suspended from the liturgy, only to be restored later to its pride of place in the Yom Kippur machzor.
Developing the Marrano line of thought, Rabbi Cardozo accounts for the retention of the Kol Nidrei prayer in current times by proposing that many of us are akin to Marranos even today, in the sense that we adopt false gods or ‘take vows’, as it were, to strange ‘isms’ – Socialism, Marxism, Ethical Humanism and other ideologies and philosophies foreign to Torah Judaism. For these sins, he suggests, we come to atone on Yom Kippur when we recite Kol Nidrei and renounce all these oaths of foreign allegiance and return ‘home’ to the true G-d.
Quite a different perspective on Kol Nidrei was held by Rabbi Shimshon Pincus (z”l), who taught in South Africa over several years. His explanation was drawn from Kabbalistic sources. Just as we are renouncing our oaths, we are petitioning the Almighty to follow suit and declare null and void any promises He has made to destroy us for our iniquities. Here, we put forward a different answer to the riddle of Kol Nidrei.
Kol Nidrei is at the beginning of the Day of Atonement. We have come to be forgiven in the event of our having committed any sins, and because we are hoping and praying for our names to be inscribed and sealed in the heavenly books for a Good New Year. We are assured that Repentance, Prayer and Charity will see us through to such a Year. That is what we are busy wishing everyone else and that is what they are wishing us.
Repentance means acknowledging what we did wrong, regretting it, and undertaking not to repeat it. So what are we thinking? Have we all just come to keep the ‘real sinners’ company? Clearly, all the material in those long lists – each line beginning with “and for all the sins we have committed by ….” that we recite with the beating of our breasts – would hardly seem to apply to us!
But, are we not supposed to be more conscious, awake, attentive and active about identifying all the things we have done wrong in the previous year, to have pondered over it in the last forty days, starting at the beginning of the month of Elul? Has it not been incumbent upon us to expose any bad habits we may possess; to remember when we said the wrong thing or when we hurt others; where we failed to help when we could; where we ignored the needy, and forgot the old, the bereaved, the sick and the lonely; when we were tactless, disrespectful, aggressive or nasty, or when we were just a tiny bit lazy or greedy, wasteful or perhaps even lustful?
And what are we supposed to do about it anyway? That is how we are, how we are made, how G-d made us in fact.
So here’s the rub: having identified and acknowledged our sins and shortcomings, should we not, in fact, be undertaking to change, seriously, by making a strong commitment to do so? Should we not perhaps be taking a promise to change?
Did we use the word “promise”, thereby going to the level of taking an oath?
Yes, indeed, and that is the idea. Maybe we should be making promises, oaths and vows to change specific behaviour patterns, things we have been doing wrong that we have identified, especially over the last ten days of repentance, and in the month preceding that. We have been thinking about all the behaviour that needs fixing. Now is the time to promise to fix it, to reform, to behave properly and to begin to do the right thing.
Can it possibly be that just before sunset Erev Yom Kippur is the exact moment in time that has been designated for us to swear to G-d that we will change for the better; and that Kol Nidrei is the exact mechanism for doing so? This discussion raises two questions: Why do we need to make oaths to change, and if Kol Nidrei encapsulates the formula for change, why is it about the cancellation of vows, and not about making them?
The Ten days of Repentance starting with New Year, brings us to Yom Kippur, which presents us with the final challenge for change. After reviewing our behaviour of the past year we may have identified a problem and decided, ‘I really have to go on a diet; or stop smoking; or beating the children; or committing adultery. I really must.’ But how do we do it? It is clear that talking or accepting an obligation to do something, or having the best intention, or trying one’s best, doesn’t necessarily work.
But do we really need to make oaths to modify our behaviour? Surely there are simpler methods, not so radical? Indeed there are numerous schools of psychology and a multitude of systems and techniques developed to address exactly this issue of how to bring about change; so does the concept of taking an oath do anything different or better than can be achieved by all those other approaches?
What is different is that an oath is to G-d, and that makes it serious business. Breaking the oath carries consequences. On a mundane level, we know that in court there are penalties for perjury. On a religious or spiritual level, we can likewise understand there will be consequences for breaking an oath.
The Torah (Numbers XXX, 2, Mattos) tells us, “This is the thing that Hashem has commanded. If a man takes a vow to Hashem or swears oath to establish a prohibition upon himself, he shall not desecrate his word; according to whatever comes from his mouth he shall do”. The subject of oaths has been addressed by commentators such as the Rambam. Suffice it to say for our discussion here that we are given to understand that the penalties of breaking a promise are extremely severe.
The threatened consequences are dire – such as to cause our Rabbis to warn us not to go there.
I remember that as a young girl (probably just before Batmitzvah age) my father came to request of me never to make a promise. I hadn’t thought about oaths at all at that age, but I seemed to grasp intuitively the seriousness of his admonition. Whatever way I understood it, I certainly respected the solemnity of the injunction and I have never to this point in my life made a promise. This does not, of course, mean that I don’t take on and keep commitments just as anyone else does – but I have always taken care not to verbalise anything in the form of a promise.
Similarly, when a religious Jew takes an obligation upon himself that might be viewed as promising something, he qualifies his declared intention with the words “bli neder”, literally “without a promise”. Nevertheless, he is totally committed to carrying out what he said and fully intends to do it. The bli neder formulation is used as a caveat to avoid the awful consequences alluded to above, that are not generally spelled out.
To put it more simply, what is being suggested is that the Kol Nidrei prayer is a safety net that we are setting up in case we fail at the important task we are meant to be undertaking. It is about making New Year resolutions as it were, but with one big difference – we are clapping an oath on them.
The cynical may say, “What’s the point? You promise and then say ‘bli neder’, without a promise. You are making vows to change and you say, ‘I cancel all vows I may make.’ Who are you kidding?”
We answer that the intention is to make a serious and proper oath to G-d, and the Kol Nidrei prayer may be viewed as a protective ‘bli neder’ format. That is, I solemnly swear to G-d that I will do X, thereby becoming bound to do it, without considering that I have said Kol Nidrei. I have to treat my oath as if there were no Kol Nidrei, no bli neder, no safety net. I must take it with the integrity that befits a real and formal oath. I cannot claim that I did not do the action X because it was too hot, too cold, too wet, too late and the like. Nothing short of an act of G-d should stop me.
The Kol Nidrei prayer may be viewed as representing the intersection of the challenge to change with an affirmation of our Faith.
On Rosh Hashanah, we acknowledge G-d as the King of the Universe: all-seeing, all-knowing and – what we want here – our all-forgiving Father. During theAseret Y’mei Teshuva – Ten Days of Repentance – we are encouraged to hone in on our sins and identify what needs repair or reform. Finally, on Yom Kippur we should be making oaths to G-d to change any behaviour that calls for it.
Viewed in this context, the Kol Nidrei prayer is not something nebulous, nor is it just a nostalgic remnant of times gone by. In truth, it is an eternal gift, a formula that offers a solution to the question of how to succeed in changing one’s errant ways in real repentance.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Sheila Saffer has a M.Sc. from the University of the Witwatersrand, and worked for many years in its Department of Physics research unit. She also holds an M.A. from Harvard University.
