On this solemn night we began our final advance toward atonement and spiritual cleansing with the haunting strains of Kol Nidrei. The melody pulls at the strings of our hearts. Its power seems to come from a place beyond words.
Perhaps this is fitting. What, after all, are the words of the Kol Nidrei prayer? “Kol nidrei – Let all vows that we may utter this year be void and cancelled.” We intone this text three times so as to officially cancel any obligations that we will undertake through oaths, vows, promises or imprecations. The superficial reading of this prayer has elicited puzzlement or even scorn. Is that really the most important prayer of the Jewish people?
The short answer is “No.” There are other prayers, meant to be recited daily, and not just once a year, that are far more important and sacred. But, of course, context makes a big difference. Giving this prayer the spotlight at the onset of Yom Kippur surely enhances its aura. Yet this simply begs the question. Why should this text merit its headline status? There must be something more to it.
The answer is that, in its way, Kol Nidrei points to a fundamental factor of our existence as humans. It is a mournful, yet clear-sighted declaration about the futility of trusting in words. We make oaths and promises. We say that we believe in this or that value. We declare that our word is our bond. If we have children or we teach others or in our conversations about matters large and small, we stand for truth. We are insulted if we are not trusted. And then we compromise and make excuses, find loopholes or claim fatigue, or we conveniently forget or look the other way. When Kol Nidrei comes around, we can no longer hide. We are warning our Creator and ourselves that our words cannot be trusted. As we hold up our most precious gift of speech before God, we offer a prayer of nullification, cancellation and utter regret. “Kulhon, iharatna b’hon – I regret them all.”
In saying that, we say something about words, and we say something about all human beings, and about our own selves. About words: because, indeed, the very form of Kol Nidrei, as a text and as a ritual, expresses, in non-verbal ways, the utter malleability of words, their vulnerability to reinterpretation and manipulation. The formula of Kol Nidrei is an ancient Aramaic pronouncement. Its roots are in the folk-life of the community, from a time when Aramaic was the vernacular of the masses. Today, for most of us, part of its power surely stems from the poetic, but indecipherable sounds we hear, as we dimly grasp a couple of words – “Oh yes, there’s mention of Yom Kippur!” – within the rolling cadences of a foreign language. And those mentions of Kol Nidrei are the only words in this prayer that have anything Jewish about them. No, this most famous Jewish prayer is not a prayer about Jews; it is a prayer about humans, or, more accurately put, it is a prayer about being human.
Did I say it was a prayer? Here, too, we see how our words can take on multiple lives. Kol Nidrei is not composed as a prayer. It is composed as a legal formula. We recite it with the trappings of a court of law – three judges, and the Torah scrolls for extra weight (literally). Kol Nidrei is a bit of legal business; it was not originally a prayer. It is the equivalent of the tiny print at the bottom of a contract or of official email correspondence. It is equivalent to the statements offered at the end of commercials that are spoken at a super-fast clip. We ignore them or laugh at those feats of official, yet meaningless speech. Would we cry over them if they were set to the slow melody of Kol Nidrei? (“Some exceptions may apply” “Results may vary.”) Yet, we have transformed this simple legal statement, at this moment, with these rhythms, into a prayer, a plea, a confession, and, hopefully, an embrace.
We seek God’s embrace although we acknowledge our frailties and failings. In fact, we seek God’s embrace precisely on that condition. Just as we should not try to lie to ourselves, we should not be trying to fool God into accepting us under false pretenses. A poem by Merle Feld, found on page 204 in our mahzor, says it well:
I am grateful for this,
A moment of truth,
Grateful to stand before You In judgment.
You know me as a liar
And I am flooded with relief To have my darkest self Exposed at last.
Every day I break my vows –
To be a dutiful child,
Selfless parent, caring friend, Responsible citizen of the world.
No one sees, no one knows,
How often I take the easy way,
I let myself off the hook,
Give myself the benefit of the doubt – Every day, every day.
On this day, this one day,
I stand before You naked,
Without disguise, without
Embellishment, naked,
Shivering and ridiculous.
I implore You –
Let me try again.
This is the goal of Kol Nidrei and of the entire day of Yom Kippur – on this day we are to stand before God naked. But in order to strip ourselves naked before our Maker we must divest ourselves, not of our clothes, but of our words. Kol Nidrei proclaims that we will not hide behind our words; we will not wrap ourselves up in our words; we will not use our words to disguise ourselves. And yet, what are we, who are we – without our words? Shall we seek silence? The Psalmist says to God – “l’kha duniah t’hillah – To You silence is praise.” (Ps. 65;2) Many of you know that I believe in that deeply. How I wish that I could better teach our community the power of the silence we maintain throughout the silent Amidah!
Nevertheless, this psalm that opens by saying that silence is God’s praise ends by celebrating, “The hills are dressed in flocks of sheep, the valleys enwrapped in fresh grain; they arouse themselves and they even sing!” (Ps. 65;14) Nature gets dressed and bursts into song! We simply cannot keep silent, nor should we, for, as the Psalmist also tells us, silence is as good as death – “The dead cannot praise God, nor those who sink into silence – yordei dumah.” (Ps. 115;17) And, at the same time that Nature sings aloud, it dresses itself in life. Even the dead are not buried naked. We must garb ourselves.
The holy repository of wisdom, the Book of the Zohar, states simply that it is impossible for any creature to exist in this world without a garment. The hills get dressed. Our souls require a garment. The angels require a garment. Our garments express who we are. And our garments also shield us and protect our private selves from scrutiny. Our words are our most effective garments. And, when, on this Day of Atonement, we seek to strip ourselves of our garments of words, we cannot do so except through words – through the chanting of Kol Nidrei, itself.
Yom Kippur is the day of the mouth. With Kol Nidrei we begin a day inundated with words. We bathe ourselves with words so as to emerge cleansed and naked as a newborn baby, a creature who knows no words; yet, a creature who, suckling at the breast and sucking on anything within reach, comes to know the world – the world of sustenance and affection, of things, and of one’s own body, fingers and toes. She comes to know the world most directly by stuffing it into his mouth.
We nullify our words on Yom Kippur but we do not abstain from them. What we relinquish is food. We use our mouths to speak and sing, but not to eat or drink. Why this focus on the mouth? Why, as Moses prepared to leave the Jewish people behind, to ascend the mountain and die, did he tell them:
This commandment that I charge you this day to perform –
It is not too mysterious for you, nor too distant from you…
Rather, this matter is so close to you;
It is in your mouth and in your heart to do it. (Deut. 30;11,14)
A strange combination – your mouth and your heart. Long, long ago, a serious attack was launched against the idea that what you do or do not put in your mouth makes any difference to God. Jesus is reported to have abolished the dietary laws by saying: “Nothing that goes into a person from the outside can defile him [because it does not go into the heart but into the stomach]. No, it is the things that come out of a person that defile him.” (Mark 7;14 -19) He understood the heart part, but not the focus on the mouth. It is sad to me that most Jews today have been persuaded by his rejection of kashrut. For our community, then, the question arises: if it does not really matter what we do or don’t put into our mouths, why is this food taboo of fasting on Yom Kippur taken so much more seriously in our community?
Perhaps it is that, for once a year, we catch a glimpse of the fundamental message that all these “what goes into the mouth” rules strive to teach us. Perhaps the answer lies in a Biblical verse that may, at first, sound quite similar to Jesus’ words, a verse that he may have had in mind, but which is really trying to say something very different. This verse, too, is spoken by Moses before his death. He recalls God’s gifts to the Israelites in the wilderness and explains: “He [God] afflicted you and made you go hungry, and He fed you the manna, which neither you nor your ancestors knew of, in order to make you know that it is not by bread alone that a human lives, but it is from all that issues from God’s mouth that the human will live.” (Deut. 8;3)
We had to learn that we live from what issues from God’s mouth. In order to learn that, God had to make us suffer and go hungry. Just like on Yom Kippur. Then God gave us bread from heaven. We called it manna. Why did we give it that name? Because we had no words to name or describe it. The name “manna” means “what is it?” To learn our lesson we had to mortify ourselves by way of our mouths. We groped for words. We made up new words to express the impotence of our words. Just as we do at Kol Nidrei. We did this in the wilderness and we do this today so that we might learn that we live from that which comes from God’s mouth, not our own.
From God’s mouth. I am old enough to still remember that time when baby food was a scarce commodity and of limited variety, especially if one cared about what went into one’s mouth and wished to keep a kosher home. I remember that mothers would chew the food for their babies. Their children literally ate that which came from their mother’s mouth.
What nourishes us? What comes from God’s mouth?
Among the many names that our tradition has created for God, one name is used to start us off in our morning prayers, every day:
Barukh she-amar v’hayah ha-`olam
Blessed is the One Who spoke and the world came into being!
God’s Name is “The One Who speaks forth the world.” What comes out of God’s mouth? The entire world comes form the Holy Blessed One. We do not live by bread alone, but by “all that issues from God’s mouth does the human live.” We are not nourished merely by this slice of pizza or that chicken casserole; we are given life by the entire world. God has chewed it for us and calls us to open up. As we quote the Psalmist in our daily prayers:
Anokhi H’ Elohekha ha-ma`alkha me-eretz mitzrayim –
Harhev pikha va-amal`ehu;
“I am the Eternal, your Almighty God Who raised you up from the land of Egypt
– open your mouth nice and wide, and I will fill it up.” (Ps. 81;11)
So the first lesson is to appreciate God’s generous abundance, to be conscious of when, why and how we open our mouths, so that it will be for the sake of living from Gods bounty.
And there is a second lesson, a lesson about words. God is the One Who speaks the world into being. The connection between God and the Divine Word is continuous and constructive. Barukh ‘omer ve-`oseh! Blessed is God who is the One Who speaks and does – for God’s speaking is identical with God’s doing. We, who are created in God’s Image, who stand before God and open our mouths every day to have it filled with God’s sustenance, straight from God’s mouth to ours – peh `el peh – mouth to mouth – we are different. Kol Nidrei highlights the tenuous and contradictory connection that exists between our necessary use of words and our willful, unnecessary abuse of words – in our relationships, in our political discourse, in our thoughtless, let alone malicious, speech – magnified and solidified by ever more powerful social media.
Let us bathe ourselves in the flow of words of this Yom Kippur. Let our words be words of compassion and forgiveness. As we concluded Kol Nidrei we proclaimed three times:
Va-yomer H’ salahti kid’varekha
And God said – I have forgiven in accordance with your speech.
Let our prayers rinse our mouths and then open them up again refreshed and reborn, so that this coming year we will be prepared to wrap ourselves in a new outfit of words of truth and caring. And may we begin this new year eager to suckle from El Shaddai – the God of Nurturing Breasts, to open our hungry mouths so that they may be filled with all that issues from God’s mouth. So that we may live.
Shanah Tovah!
- Toby Stein: In Memoriam - Thu, Feb 8, 2024
- Faithfulness and Hope: Parashat Sh’lach - Thu, Jun 23, 2022
- Past Their Prime: Parashat B’ha`a lot’kha - Thu, Jun 16, 2022