Kol Nidre

This episode of Ways of Awe features the Kol Nidre (“All Vows”), the prayer that opens Yom Kippur as the sun sets.

Show Notes

Ways of Awe was written by Maia Brown and Shelby Handler, based on translations originally shared with the Kadima Reconstructionist Community in Seattle, WA on unceded Coast Salish, Duwamish land. All episodes edited by Maia Brown. Audio engineering by Daniel Guenther. Thank you to Ross Kirshenbaum, or Levoneh, and Peter Lippman, and Jimmy Austin for our show music, and to Jenny Asarnow for their field recordings. Thank you to the Jack Straw Cultural Center Artist Support Program and the King County Office of Arts & Culture, Smart Ventures Program, and Signal Fire Coop. Thank you to Hannah Epstein for designing our promotional images.

Thank you to those who lent their prayer-voices to this episode: Noraa Kaplan, Sharone Sayegh, Moyshe Oysher. Thank you to Jeannie Wells-Yablonsky from the Seattle Symphony for sharing her rendition of Kol Nidre. Excerpt from ‘Kol Nidre,’ performed by Sharone Sayegh in the Iraqi Sephardic tradition. Produced by Reboot in partnership with Hillel International for Higher Holidays 2020. Used by permission.

Thank you to our guests for this episode:

Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg is a writer, educator and organizer and calendar-maker based on Dakota land in Minneapolis. She became a rabbi in order to learn diverse and nuanced histories, tell stories, and create spaces, ritual, and organizing that helps transform our relationships to past, present and future. She is co-author, alongside Rabbi Ariana Katz, of For Times Such As These: A Radical’s Guide to the Jewish Year, authored an Introduction to Trauma, Healing and Resilience for Rabbis, Jewish Educators and Organizers. She is a founding collective member of  Signal Fire Radical Jewish Artist Cooperative, and a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council.

Rabbi Xava De Cordova is a disabled, Sefradi, Mizraxi trans woman and co-host of the world's first Queer Talmud podcast, "Xai, how are you?". She is a long-time SVARA-style Talmud learner and SVARA teaching kollel fellow who got her start as a teacher by creating Beit Midrash Behind Bars, an organization that facilitated Jewish learning opportunities for incarcerated people in Washington State. She is also the co-Rosh Yeshiva of Shel Maala, which she co-founded with her incredible co-Rosh, Binya. She lives in Providence, RI, where she regularly produces Jewish ritual theatre (or did, before the pandemic) and does her best to steward the radical tradition she's been blessed to inherit.

Some sources that informed this episode: 

• Jewish Emptiness: Kavannot for Kol Nidrei by Rabbi Xava De Cordova
• The Case Against Kol Nidre by Adam Soclof
• Kol Nidre: Past, Present, and Future by Richard-Steiner
• Kol Nidre entry in the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia 
• A Brief History of the Kol Nidrei Prayer by Cantor Deborrah Cannizzaro
• Exploring Kol Nidre by David Schwartz
• The Geonim by Eli Barnavi
• Kol Nidre Wikipedia Entry
• This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared by Rabbi Alan Lew

Connect with Ways of Awe: 

https://www.instagram.com/waysofawe/
https://signalfirecoop.org/ways-of-awe/
waysofawe@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_06 0:09

I think it like to think of it as one of the hinges of the Jewish year, right? Or things sort of turn into a new direction.

SPEAKER_07 0:16

Like actually, our goal is something much bigger and more beautiful.

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So we're taking part in creation by speaking these words. In the body.

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Heartbroken. Rage. Full blessing, full connection. For whatever that's possibly worth in this moment.

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By reinterpreting a text, we have the power to heal a wound that's actually in the past. And our ancestors are already in the future healing the wounds of the foolishness that we're saying now.

SPEAKER_11 1:03

I'm Maya. I'm Shelby. Welcome to Ways of Awe, an audio companion to the prayers and rituals of the Jewish High Holidays.

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And also we want to agitate the living, give the living practices that will allow us to embody grief and move towards courage.

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We've been studying together for years, and Ways of Awe shares some of our translation experiments.

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Woven together with research and soundscapes from where we live and pray. All with the help of mentors, friends, and ancestors, known and unknown.

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Sound is touch, sound as touch. Sound is touch. And our ancestors knew it. All these things are trying to access you in every possible way to break you open.

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Come on in.

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The harame the queen the kinus.

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Let's go inside Kol Nidre, the prayer that opens Yom Kippur as the sun sets.

SPEAKER_08 3:25

Kol Nidre translates to all vows. It is the haunting and solemn prayer centered on the annulling of personal vows, oaths, and promises. It's iconic. Maybe it was the only service your family made sure to be on time for.

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Maybe you remember that moment of everyone donning a Tallit before the melody began. The only time that happens at night in the entire year.

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Maybe you can hear the tune in your head, in your heart, right now. Whatever tune your family, your people, your community used. Maybe you've never heard of Kol Nidre before. However, you're arriving to it.

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You'll hear Kol Nidre played and chanted in different spaces and in different voices, only a fraction of the traditions and melodies of this prayer. You'll also hear our interpretive translation, and we'll be joined by a few of our mentors. Rabbi Javede Cordova, queer Talmud podcast host, and co-Roshishiva of Shaumala, Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, a writer, educator, organizer, and calendar maker. And Jeannie Wells Yablonski from the Seattle Symphony on Violin.

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Let's step deeper into this prayer together.

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Also rehearsing for birth, in the sense that those two are fundamentally connected and the same. Pure emptiness before we can sort of go into the next round of somethingness.

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Whether you show up or not, the court's happening. It doesn't matter where you are, where you've been.

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We're taking off our individuality and we're also taking off our claims to rightness or our shame of wrongness. It wouldn't work unless we were all a part of it.

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It's a reminder that we are breathing the same air. I'm not a different species than anyone perpetrating any kind of villains.

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How do we hold that truth in our bodies? We're all here. That beautiful and terrible fact, we're all here. Our ancestors had their way and left it behind for us to try each year at the sundown of Yom Kippur.

SPEAKER_11 8:18

But before the Kul Nidre prayer can begin, taluses are draped over our shoulders, the Torah scrolls are brought out of the Ark and carried around the sanctuary. And then the Chazan, Chazanit, Chazan, the chant leader, recites the introduction, where we collectively ask permission to pray with the transgressors.

SPEAKER_08 8:40

This preface primes us for the uncomfortable kinship that Col Nidre and much of our high holidays liturgy requires of us. Take a moment to breathe. Without opening your eyes, look above you. Uncle Nidre, there is a heavenly court hanging directly above us, dazzling and haunting and staring, seeing all of what you did this year, what promises we kept and what promises we didn't. No, it's not that tidy panel of angels dressed in vanilla frosting and fluffy cloud scarves with harps. No shame if you saw it, I saw it too. But look again, inside and above your mind. The tribunal convened above us is alive, beaming, visible only on Col Nidre. Sure, we can say it's a court made of angels, but there is an immense gaggle of them, picture them, a congregation so wild and numerous they are piled upon one another. And oh, these angels are mostly made of eyes, many, many eyes, and their eyes are comprised solely of stars. So many stars packed tight into the seams of their alien pupils, eyeballs of entire galaxies witnessing us in our exhausted daily attempts at wholeness. These strange constellation creatures have seen us in a kind of seeing we can't imagine. Perhaps it shouldn't even be called seeing, more like a thrumming, reaching, sensing. They have been awake all this time. They watched you make promises and break them, watched you make promises and keep them, and they know what keeping them cost you. They watched you fail, flail, recommit, get fired up, feel rootless, ruthless, selfish, feel holy, true, connected. They're above us in all that knowing. And now, still inside your mind, look around you and see that an earthly court too has sprung up between and among us, and it too glitters. When we say court, it is not that supremacist and bureaucratic apparatus downtown designed to declare humans individually guilty for how the system failed them in the exact way power designed it. Erase those halls. This is a different kind of earthly tribunal. Inexplicably, it's covered in moss. Can you see it? It's everywhere. Rolling bright green softnesses, and it's between all of us right now. We're sitting on the downy green seats of the earth. Oh, and it's completely spangled in dew. But so are we. We are warm and shaking like petals in the morning. Some of us are wearing white, dressed in the garment in which we expect to be buried in, and this isn't a horrible thought, but a sacred one, a deep breath one we take together in this place where we have a future, and we also don't have a future. We are all here in the betweenness, in this meadow courtroom forest. We gather in electric lush wildness, and a cedar frond skitters your elbow as you sit here shuddering.

SPEAKER_11 13:47

Colnidre's prelude, which you will hear a more direct translation of in a moment, tells us we are witnessing each other in this place. We are the people beside the earthly court, and our consent is needed for the proceedings to continue. The angel star creatures have already given their sequined nods. Hamakom, the place where God resides, which is itself God, has given their go-ahead. And now it's our turn. Your turn to affirm yes, we long to be here together. Yes, we will consent to the anti-contract contract we are signing. Yes, we will pray among the transgressors. What is about to happen is not what you assume. This is not a prayer. This is about border crossing. By arriving at Kol Nidre, we have given permission to take part in this mournful and magical legal proceeding, and we have agreed to do so amongst, alongside, with the Avarianim, often translated as the transgressors or the sinners. The root of this word avar means to pass, to cross a border, to swell, to run over. It can also simultaneously mean to transgress and to forgive or pass over a transgression. Border crossing is an activity of harm and healing. We have the capacity to transgress boundaries in harm as well as pass over, Angel of Death style, the mistakes we make. This is the same route as the word ivri, the Hebrew word for Hebrew. So our language, our collective, is at its root defined by our penchant for crossing national borders. We, the people of passing over borders, come together tonight to pray amongst ourselves.

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Feel free to open your eyes.

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Or don't Shiva Shemala in the court of earth that belongs, bent below, beneath what we hold, with the consent of the place, knowing the sacred substance of existence, are everywhere and wherever Godness.

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With the consent of the people, this gathering, all of us calling out to each other tonight, the yearning towards the togetherness makes us togethered. We, this precise particular plural of eyes, loosen ourselves enough to permit release.

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Tonight we grant permission to pray with the transgressors. With. From the root meaning a crowd of people. The with you feel in the sway touch of shoulders. And who among us are they? The border crossers, the boundary swellers, perpetrators or the passoverers of errors, simultaneous sinners and forgivers, crossing between flawed and faultless.

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Who of us or all of us? We are saying these words so that we can pray together. Even though, because we have done harm, I agree to pray with you if you agree to pray with me.

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And it is really sunset. The first time that I learned it to chant it was when I was leading services at a prison, and so the men there like raised money, and they like went to the rabbinical school and they were like, we have a few hundred dollars. Can someone come lead services? We want to pray all together.

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That essential wholeness, this group of prisoners fought for it.

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They felt that the day and the time and like being in sync with the rest of the Jewish community was very meaningful.

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And that being in sync isn't some easy harmony, some happy chorus. When we chant Kol Nidre, a space is created where we are togethered in unfathomable ways.

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To know we are saying the same words as settlers. We don't get to believe we're so separate. There's a specificity to Jews and Palestine, and we wrestle with how that impacts our tradition.

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To have kinship with people who are capable of horrific violence. Which we would have whether or not we're saying Kol Nidre, and non-Jews also have, and yeah, it's specific and it's mundane.

SPEAKER_08 20:15

Kol nidre means all our vows. These are reflexive vows, voluntary ones. They are ours because we made them, took them upon ourselves, not because someone else made us hold them. They are not the mitzvot that we are rarely unobligated from, deeds that hold up the world and tether us to our tradition. No, we authored these commitments, not Torah, and now we try to author our release from them.

SPEAKER_11 21:11

So, how old is Kol Nidre, and where does it come from? Are you surprised that there is disagreement on this score? All we are certain of is that it existed in the time of the Geonim, the rabbinic leadership in Babylonia, the largest and most influential Jewish community in the world at the time, between the 6th and 8th centuries. We would not be able to date Kol Nidre as far back as the Geonim if it hadn't been so fundamentally controversial. Fundamentally, not only because of its content, but because it grew up in controversial times. You know, like all of us. Used as fuel for the fiery debates over what Jewish tradition would look like as we stumbled out of the temple period, and a barometer for that question. Even now. The Geonim actively rejected Kol Nidre. Rabbi Amram Gaon called it a foolish custom, warning that people would take their vows lightly if they knew they could be released from them. Other Gaonim tried to change the text, so it read not as something with legal authority, but a plea for mercy. But the custom spread anyways, to Palestine and Europe. Medieval French rabbi Rashi tried to shift cultural understandings of Kol Nidre as a formula that only breaks forgotten vows. Then his son-in-law shifted the text to the future tense so that it would not release us from our vows, but allow us to cancel future vows, a practice with Talmudic standing.

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The grandson of Rashi, Rabbeinu Tam, reinforced this change by trying to change the tense from the perfect to the imperfect. By the time the text was finally included in the Moksor in 1565 by Rabbi Yosef Karo, author of the Shulhanaruch, the most widely consulted legal code in our tradition, only some of these changes had stuck, and many communities had continued to use the older text in Aramaic or a Hebrew version. In Europe, an Ashkenazi, Turtle Island, we are accustomed to a text that reads partially in the perfect past tense to begin, and then orients us to the releasing of vows we make from this Yom Kippur to the next, ending with a litany of imperfect verbs.

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Colnidre is said to have been used by our ancestors in Spain as a way of annulling forced conversions during the Reconquista. It was used later by Christian authorities as proof that Jews couldn't be trusted to keep their word and trade or pay back their loans, justifying violent and debilitating strictures on European Jewish life. And internal Jewish debate over Kol Nidre has never stopped. In fact, in 1927, Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, lobbied successfully to have the movement replace the text of Kol Nidre with Psalm 130 in the Mahsor. But now it's back. Folks have always loved it, found ways to say it despite threats from within and without.

SPEAKER_05 26:12

When we were chanting in Hebrew, and then when I was chanting Kol Nidre at Greaterford and then Phoenix was a a ritual for me of like, of course I don't have what to say here. And I'm gonna say something. And the millennia plus old words are actually gonna say more than I can ever say. Let me try to channel more than teach. Let me open myself to offering.

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To be a channel, which means being kind of empty.

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The ability to choose to do things and then to make that choice mutual by making it an agreement, and to keep that agreement, even when challenges come against it, feel like the most fundamental aspects of human experience, which is why we don't have col nidre every day of the year. The difference between poison and medicine is dosage. Too much col nidre would be poisonous. But at the same time, some vows are unkeepable, you know, some vows are too powerful, and needing the power to make agreements and also needing the flexibility to live in reality where agreements can't always come to fruition. Kol Nidre sort of infuses that flexibility into the year and hopefully into ourselves. It really is work to let go of all of those things to enter the space of Kol Nidre, to unclinch those internal fists, both the shame around agreements that I've broken and resentment around agreements that weren't kept to me. God joins us too in that space for a reason. God has plenty of broken agreements each year to make up for.

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One potential hyperliteral translation of this line is the future, we come up for good. Alainu is plural, the nu at the end means we, and the root in this case can mean that we come up, that we arrive, that we are put on the altar, that we are counted or offered or made void or promoted. Le Tovah, the Lamid, is a prefix that can mean two or four. Tova, good, handsome, valuable, fit, or goodness, happiness, mercy, much, many, very. Finally, Habah, the future. Bahir can mean coming, future, the world to come, futurity, the possibility of a future. It comes from the root betvale. To enter into, to come, to have sexual connection, to bring, to offer, to bring about.

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So we come up to the coming. We arrive to the offering. We come to what we bring about. We are offered as an offering. We are put on the altar of the future. We are counted in the world to come. We are made void by futurity. And all of this for goodness, for mercy, for muchness, may it be a good time to come up. It made us wonder: does the future arrive to us or do we arrive to the future? Are we offered the future or are we offered up to it? Maybe goodness happens when we are moving towards each other, arriving simultaneously, each with something to offer. We finally settled on. May that future arrive to us anointed in goodness.

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Whatever forbiddings we were under the spell of, all bands, excommunications, renunciations, even our most sacred separations, and what we set aside in old temple ways.

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All our firmly planted oaths, all sacrifices spoken in solemn tones, all our obligatory promises, those half-uttered assertions that we hardly hope to keep, so too all the vows with penalties attached, all our punishable pledges.

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Every single utterance, contract and bond that we vowed, that we swore, that we declared, that we placed upon our soul selves from this summer season of returning and bending until the next.

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From this Yom Kippur to the next Yom Kippur, may we be counted in the world to come.

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May that future arrive to us anointed in goodness.

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All our vows we regret. May they all be untied, unharnessed, and set free. May they all be unbound, abandoned, and let be.

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May they all be abolished and unseen. May they all be hollowed and put to sea, null and cast back into the void.

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Invalid and without standing. We vowed no vows. We forbid no forbiddings. We oathed no oaths.

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Kol Nidre puts us in that tension between the perfect and imperfect, grammatically and philosophically. And it is precisely Kol Nidre's disorienting record of our wrestling with time that throws us back into the whirl of time, giving us back the future, whether we want it or not.

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We are in the finished and unfinishedness of our actions because we are moving together. We are getting unstuck. We are realizing that the future and us aren't done with each other. There are still things to offer. It's not a safe meeting as we walk towards each other. But please, may we still keep arriving there.

SPEAKER_11 34:36

Kalnedre is a formula for bringing us into motion again. The fact that we have to break promises betrays the fact of change. Yes, we sigh. The only constant is change, we know. It's dizzying, it's hard. It means we die and those we love die. But also it means that even when we believe that everything is stuck, halted, and narrow, there is still movement. We are still moving. It is no mistake that the Chazan's afterword to Kol Nidre that we are about to hear at the close of this episode reminds us of Mitraim, that narrow place from the Passover story. Reminds us of the transformation from slavery to freedom. If that movement could happen, surely we can move now. The Chazan chants that it has always been this way. We know that keeping a promise is difficult, but it's hard to break a promise too, even if it's one that needs breaking. Because the future has changed around us. It became the present. Kolnidre is not ensuring that we can break our promises and still be forgiven. Kolnidre tries to give us just enough space to feel able to keep making promises, despite not knowing what narrowness or wide openness lies ahead. Kolnidre doesn't invite us to be sloppy and careless, but rather nudges us to be bold, knowing that we can be held if we falter. And that brave stumbling may be the only way to keep approaching the world to come.

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The main part of Kol Nidre is repeated three times. It is then followed by a few closing verses that form a bridge to the rest of the service. This conclusion ends with an echo of God's words, but vocalized through the congregation itself.

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All of the children and the strangers.

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Every one of us who errs, every one of us who needs pardon. What is biggest is kindness. The rest is narrow. It has been like this since Mitraim until now. Suddenly we hear God's reply from our own mouths. Adonai replied, I have forgiven just like you asked. Adonai replied, I have forgiven just like you asked. Adonai replied, I have forgiven just like you asked. All episodes edited by Maya Brown, Audio Engineering by Daniel Gunther.

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We're indebted to each of our interviewees for their brilliance and generosity, and we're grateful to the community who lent their prayer voices to these episodes.

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Thank you to our friends Ross Kirshenbaum or Lavona, Jimmy Austin, and Peter Lippmann for our show music, and to Jenny Asarno for their field recordings.

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Thank you to the Jackstraw Cultural Center Artist Support Program, the King County Office of Arts and Culture Smart Ventures Program, and the Signifier Co-op, without which this project would never have made it into your ears, dear listener.

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Thank you to all of our mentors and teachers. Thank you to our ancestors. We feel you with us. We're hoping the feeling is mutual.