One of the most moving prayers of Yom Kippur is “Kol Nidre.” Yet it’s a rather boring description of how we are nullifying our vows from the past year. Shouldn’t the highlight of the Yom Kippur eve service be something more along the lines of repentance, forgiveness, or supplication? How did vow nullification get such prominent status?
The centrality of Kol Nidre, as you note, is a bit of a puzzle. I think historians suggest that it stems from times when Jews were forced to convert and live their ordinary lives as Muslims or Christians. Once a year, they managed to slip away and hear the nullification of that vow, which reminded them that they hadn't really abandoned their religion, and their statements about accepting those other religions were not, in fact, binding or legally real. To a forced convert, that would be very powerful. For the rest of us, I think, personally, that the tune helps as well-- it is haunting, and carries with it, whatever the words it is attached to, the sense of reaching out to God, recognizing the depths from which we are striving to get back, and the hope that God will hear us and rejuvenate us.
It might also help that it is, really, only 15 minutes long, a short enough time that most of us can focus on the music, focus on the solemnity of the occasion, right at the beginning of the fast when we're not yet tired, hungry, or headachey.
Fundamentally, though, I agree with you; I wish all the energy put into Kol Nidre were applied instead to the articulations of sin we recite, or, even better, the hard internal work of trying to change ourselves to be closer to the kind of people God is hoping for us to be.
One of the most moving prayers of Yom Kippur is “Kol Nidre.” Yet it’s a rather boring description of how we are nullifying our vows from the past year. Shouldn’t the highlight of the Yom Kippur eve service be something more along the lines of repentance, forgiveness, or supplication? How did vow nullification get such prominent status?
Kol Nidre is one of the strangest passages in our liturgy. It is often pointed out that it is not a prayer but a statement in which we renounce all vows and promises which we might make during the coming year (not the past year, as stated in the question). You correctly point out that Kol Nidre does not appear to relate directly to the major themes of Yom Kippur such as repentance or atonement. Kol Nidre is especially troubling because we ask to be let off the hook for future vows rather than the ones we have already made during the past year. Even if we assume that Kol Nidre only applies to promises made to God (and not to our fellow human beings) this is still troubling. How can we be forgiven before we perform an act or make a statement which we can't live up to? What does that say about the reliability of anything we say? In effect, we are saying, "If I make any promises during the coming year, God, just ignore them!"
We don’t know much about the origins of Kol Nidre. It has been around at least since the Gaonic period (the eighth or ninth century C.E.) and most likely it was composed even earlier. Rabbis have wrestled with this passage for centuries. Amram Gaon, one of the first editors of the Jewish prayer book, called the custom of reciting Kol Nidre a foolish custom. In the nineteenth century, there were rabbis who advocated removing it from the liturgy. Originally it was written in the past tense, for vows we have already made, but in the eleventh century Rabbi Meir ben Shmuel, grandson of the famed commentator Rashi, changed the language from the past tense to future tense. There might be two reasons for this change of tense. First, Rabbi Meir may have felt that a vow once stated is irrevocable; therefore you cannot ask to be 'forgiven for vows already made; only for those not yet stated. By changing the tense of the statement, one begins the year by asking God to excuse us from any rash vows we might make in the year ahead. Second, Rabbi Meir ben Shmuel lived during the aftermath of the Crusades. It is possible that he changed the tense in consideration of people who were forced by the Church to declare their allegiance to Christianity. Kol Nidre might have become a way of assuaging the guilt of those who now returned to the synagogue but felt guilty about having made a false oath to God or fearful of being coerced to make such a statement in the year ahead. That might explain why Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg added the introduction statement: "In the tribunal of Heaven and the tribunal of earth, by the permission of God and by the permission of this holy congregation, we hold it lawful to pray with transgressors."
Whatever the reason for this passage might have originally been, Kol Nidre took on a life of its own. It remained a beloved liturgical statement in the minds of the Jewish people.It wasn’t so much the content of Kol Nidre as it was the melody and the mood that are created by this declaration that made it an important part of the liturgy. It also focuses on one of our chief weaknesses: the misuse of language. This is a leitmotif of the Yom Kippur liturgy. A significant percentage of the transgressions we confess in the Vidui, the confessional prayer, have to do with sins of the tongue. What is more, we are about to spend an entire day in prayer and supplication. We might make rash promises to God over the course of the day to which we cannot live up. Therefore, we begin with a nullification of promises as a not so veiled warning against making such promises.
There is a passage in the Harlow Machzor of the Conservative Movement which captures and the real intention of Kol Nidre. It was written by a Hebrew poet,Zeev Falk, and it begins by echoing the language of Kol Nidre. I include this lovely translation of the poem by Rabbi Stanley Schachter here:
Let’s start with a technical note. The version of “Kol Nidre” that most of us (at least, most of the Jews reading this post) recite today does not nullify the vows we have made during the past year. Rather, it annuls in advance the vows that we might make during the coming year (“from this Yom Kippur until the next”). This version is attributed to R. Ya`akov Tam, a towering Talmudic scholar of the twelfth century, who raised some important legal objections to the then-existing text, which did in fact refer to the vows of the past year. (His point, to oversimplify, was that the “Kol Nidre” formula has no force in Jewish law to undo vows already taken. To enjoy any efficacy, it must refer to vows that one might swear inadvertently during the coming year.) To be sure, not all Jewish communities accepted R. Tam’s criticism of the “Kol Nidre” text. And to make matters even more complicated, many Sefardic prayer books feature a “combined” version of “Kol Nidre” which refers to vows taken during the past year and to those one might take during the coming year!
Either way, of course, “Kol Nidre” is, as you put it, a “boring” legal text. Your question, therefore, is a very good one: how did such a text achieve such a prominent status in our Yom Kippur liturgy? The truth is that, as a historical matter, we don’t know. Over the centuries, thoughtful Jews have tried to come up with an explanation. For example, some have suggested that “Kol Nidre” originated among communities where Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity, as a means of addressing their guilt over vowing to forsake their Judaism and to enter the Church. That’s a powerful story, but, alas, it isn’t accurate. “Kol Nidre” entered our prayer services at least as far back as 10th-century Babylonia (Iraq), and the contemporary rabbis who mention it - and who mostly oppose its recitation - never associate it with forced conversion to another religion (which at that place and time would have been Islam, not Christianity). All we do know is that over time the “Kol Nidre” formula won the fierce loyalty of Jews around the world, a loyalty that has resisted the occasional attempts of well-meaning rabbis to remove it from the prayer book. Some say that this may have to do with the beautiful, haunting melody to which the formula is traditionally chanted. Others point to the dramatic setting of the “Kol Nidre”: the removal of the Torah scrolls from the ark, the arresting language of the surrounding liturgy (“by authority of the heavenly court…”), which evokes the image of our standing before the bar of judgment on the holiest day of the year. Whatever the reason or reasons, it is no longer possible for us to imagine the onset of Yom Kippur in the absence of “Kol Nidre.”
The truth is that “Kol Nidre” has long since become more a symbol than a legal formula; its meaning for Jews transcends the literal import of its dry Aramaic text. For me, it evokes the spiritual longings of Jews in all ages who face the uncertainties of the new year. We seek to live in harmony with God, yet who among us can know what the future will bring? Who can say for sure whether she or he will successfully overcome the challenges that life, in all its unpredictable complexity, will place before us? When I chant “Kol Nidre” quietly, along with the chazzan, I join my own uncertainties concerning the future to those of my brothers and sisters throughout the centuries. They saw in “Kol Nidre” a way to plan for their future, to avoid the pitfalls that might lead them inadvertently to make promises they could not keep; they sought by this means to exert a measure of control over the chaos of life that leads us to sin. When I say “Kol Nidre,” I stand in their shoes and join my experience to theirs. It frequently moves me to tears. But it never fails to leave me with a sense of spiritual strength.
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