Student Rabbi Naomi Goldman

Kol Nidrei 2014

A good friend of mine once said to me: what is the point of Yom Kippur? Every year we say what our faults are, how we’re going to do better, and every year we come back with the same list. Nothing changes. It doesn’t work. She had a point. Every year I hear myself say I’m going to lose weight, stop shouting at my children, do more housework, do more exercise, look after the planet better….and every year I seem to come back with a very similar list. So is there any point to this annual spiritual spring-clean?

I’ve already mentioned a couple of times that I’m not keen on the words repentance or sin. Neither of them are particularly Jewish concepts.  The Hebrew word usually translated as repentance, is Teshuvah, which actually means to return, from a root which also means a circle. So we travel in a circle to return on this day.

And, as I said on Rosh Hashana,  the Hebrew word translated as sin, is chet, which literally means something that has gone astray. It is a term used in archery to indicate that an arrow has missed its target. It’s a beautiful concept because it’s so real for so many of us.

We intend to live a certain kind of life, we do our best to keep to whatever we consider to be the right path and somehow we lose our way.  We know where we should be going, and we aim in the right direction, but somehow we misfire and without even realising it, friends get neglected.  Family feuds continue to smoulder.  We fail to make time for those things we thought were the most important to us, whatever they are – our children, making the world a better place, art, whatever. We miss the mark.

And every year this is the case. But I don’t think that’s because this process of reflection and inward searching is meaningless. I think it’s just that every year we change a little bit, so that the target is slightly different and we miss it in a slightly different way.  The seasons may bring us round in a circle,  but our lives also evolve in a linear fashion.  Life isn’t a circle exactly, more a spiral, where we reach the same point every year but from a slightly different perspective. As Samuel Beckett puts it; “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Perhaps every year that’s our goal – to fail better this year.

This acknowledgement of our fundamental human frailty should be dispiriting but it isn’t.  Yom Kippur is known as the white fast.  The Talmud calls it one of the happiest festivals of the year.  Why? Because the real theme of Yom Kippur isn’t judgement, or sin, or repentance. It’s forgiveness. Yom Kippur is the day when we are forgiven, when we try to forgive others, and, crucially, when we forgive ourselves.  We are often our own harshest critics. It is often we who judge ourselves and find ourselves wanting. And it is we who are forgiven today.

Of course if all we had to do was forgive ourselves I guess we could just stay at home.  But tonight’s service, is all about the power of speech, of articulating what’s going on.  We call tonight’s service, Kol Nidrei, all our vows, and a vow, in this context anyway, is something we need to say out loud.

We began tonight with the Kol Nidrei prayer.  Its written in  Aramaic,  and we think it was composed in the sixth century in Spain. It lists different kinds of sacred vows that you might make to God, nidrei, esarei, charamei, konamei, kinusei and sh’vuot, oaths, and says “All the vows that we have vowed sworn and declared upon ourselves from this Yom Kippur until the following one – may it come upon us for good – all these we regret. They shall be allowed to be abandoned, put to rest, made void, invalidated and non-existent. Our vows are not vows, our esarei are not esarei and our oaths are not oaths.”   So we release ourselves in advance of any promises we might make in the coming year.

Generations of rabbis have wrestled with this, rewritten it, dismissed it as illogical and engendering anti-semitism by suggesting that Jews can make a vow which has already been rendered null and void.   It has been suggested to me that the only reason it is still in our liturgy is because of the beautiful tune. I disagree profoundly.

It’s a powerful prayer on several different levels.  It talks about the gap between our words and our actions.  It acknowledges the power of the spoken word.   The great rationalist philosopher of the 12th century Maimonides,  said that once you have repented, you need to “say these things out loud that we have resolved in our heart”.   If you’re sorry you have to say so out loud and the verbal confession has to be sincere, specific and public. The idea is echoed in tomorrow afternoon’s Torah reading: “The word is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart so you can do it.”   The words are in your heart and you have to say them. Part of what we are doing today, this Yom Kippur, is to become aware of what is going on in our heart. But we must also speak about  what we find there. We need to move our consciousness from our hearts to the world outside and speak our truth.  Speech turns our inner world into outer reality. It is time to speak of those thoughts that haunt us. We must speak it in private and in public.  Talk to each other in the breaks. Find someone to confess to.  Or speak it out through our communal confessional prayers that we will recite again and again over the next 24 hours.  It is inevitable that our words are going to be out .of line with our deeds over the next year. We may as well forgive ourselves in advance.

In the Kol Nidrei prayer, we talk about the promises we will make that we will not be able to keep.  It seems self-evident that whenever we make a promise we can only keep it if we are still around to do so. Everything we promise is always conditional on us being alive to fulfil it, and maybe that’s not something we should take for granted.

And the prayer talks specifically about the promises we make to God. We’ve talked a lot about God tonight and we all mean different things by the concept. I think what we are really talking about are  the promises we make to ourselves, that we cannot possibly live up to.  Tonight gives us a way of abolishing all our unfulfilled obligations to ourselves as a prelude to forgiveness.   Kol Nidrei releases us from all that binds us to our imperfect selves – the limitations that keep us from fulfilling our ideals of who we would like to be.  Tonight we leave the world behind and hover between life and death. And as we enter this sacred time, we free ourselves from our daily commitments, and in so doing, become closer to the people we once hoped we would be.

There is one more important thing about the process of teshuvah that we are engaging in tonight. It is that we stand up as a community, we confess collectively, admitting things that we personally may not have done, but someone somewhere probably has, because tonight we are each responsible for the other. Tonight we need to put aside our individualism, that is so highly prized by our society today, and stand as a community and say we, humanity, as a collectivity, are frail and have done wrong, and we collectively, can find forgiveness within us.

Just before we sing Kol Nidrei we say that we are permitted to pray with those  who have sinned, in Hebrew, the avaryanim, literally the ones who crossed the line, who have transgressed.  Who are these people?  Of course it is all of us – the imperfect and the incomplete, the ones passing through – not only are we permitted to prayer with them, we are required to, because there is nobody else to pray with.  We are all a bit imperfect, so it is only in community that we can begin to find a sense of wholeness, where what we lack is provided by somebody else. This is what drives spiritual community – we instinctively know we need to be part of something larger than ourselves.

In my experience forgiveness, whether of oneself or somebody else, is by far the hardest thing to do. It is much easier to admit my own faults  and say sorry than to forgive someone who has hurt me. The idea is that in the humility of confession, we remember that we are all flawed and therefore perhaps we can find compassion for those who have hurt us. It is no easy task. That’s why we return to it year after year, in layers of teshuvah, in layers of returning to the same place in time, but a year older, perhaps a little wiser or at least a bit more bruised by life.

We spend a lot of time tonight and tomorrow asking to be written in the Book of Life, of Blessing and Peace. Of course these are metaphors for what we hope for. In the Avinu Malkeinu  we ask to be inscribed for a good life,  besefer chayim tovim.

What would a good life look like for you? If you are indeed inscribed for a good life next year, what might than mean?    There is a very deep yearning in the Kol Nidrei prayer that many find hard to articulate – it goes beyond the language used. I think it’s a prayer, and I think tonight is a night, which calls the soul home to itself.  Our souls  need spiritual community to help make us whole, to receive and also to give.  Tonight we are home. Tonight we can stop.

There is a  tradition is that this service and tomorrow morning’s are inextricably linked.  That all we are doing overnight is pausing before resuming the same service, the same set of prayers in the morning. One seamless day of atonement.  So I invite you to think about this as a way of connecting tonight to tomorrow. What would a good year be for you? What promises need to be annulled before that can happen? And what needs to be forgiven?

We spend the year aiming at our goals and failing.  But today is a day of return, when the gates of heaven are wide open, and our hearts swing open accordingly and we can put ourselves back together again. Ken Yehi Ratson.

 

 

 

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