Kol Nidre: A Time Machine

It was Yom Kippur, 1944, toward the end of the Nazi reign of terror. But the Jews imprisoned in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp, most of whom would not survive, did not yet know that the end of the Nazi regime was coming. 

Judy Weissenberg Cohen, a Holocaust survivor and now an educator, recalls jamming herself into one of the long barracks to mark Yom Kippur. She recounts in her memoir, A Cry in Unison, “We were all there, about seven hundred women, risking our lives to say Kol Nidre. Everybody came: the believers, the atheists, the Orthodox, the agnostic. Women of every background. We were remembering our homes and families on this Yom Kippur, the one holiday that had been observed in even the most assimilated homes.” 

Celebrating any Jewish holy day was forbidden in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp because the Nazis knew it would give solace to the prisoners, the last thing they wanted. But this particular year, some older women had asked the kapos, prisoners assigned by the Nazis to supervise their peers, for permission to do something. One kapo, a young Jewish woman from Slovakia, agreed to give us a candle and a single prayerbook, but was simply amazed that anyone still wanted to pray in that hellhole. “You crazy Hungarian Jews,” she exclaimed. “You still believe and want to do this? And here?” Well, incredibly, we did. In a place where we felt that instead of asking for forgiveness from God, God should be asking for forgiveness from us. 

“In the center of those gathered, a woman lit the candle and a hush fell over the barracks. She began to read Kol Nidre very slowly so that we could repeat the words if we wanted to. But we did not. Instead, all of us burst out as one, our prayer the sound of this incredible cry of hundreds of women in unison. I have never heard, before or since then, such a heart-rending sound. It was as if our hearts were bursting. 

Even though no one really believed the Kol Nidre prayer would change our situation, that God would suddenly intervene, we were not that naive, the opportunity to pray and to cry out and to remember together, reminded us in some inexplicable way of our former lives, alleviating our utter misery even for the shortest while. It seemed to give us comfort.” 

What is it about the Kol Nidre prayer that goaded these Holocaust prisoners to want to hear it, endangering what was left of their lives? What is it about Kol Nidre that so profoundly touches people worldwide, including those of us who do not understand its words and might not agree with them if we did? 

Kol Nidre’s importance and even its necessity has been discussed and debated for a thousand years. In fact, in every generation, there have been prominent rabbis who wanted to do away with it all together. Yet it remained nonetheless, creating some of the most spiritual moments over the generations. In fact, Kol Nidre played a meaningful role in my path to becoming a rabbi. But we will get to that later. 

When we rabbis are trying to understand a complex issue, like everyone, we crowdsource. From other rabbis and even from Facebook friends. Through it, I discovered how easy it is on Kol Nidre to be swept away by the awe created when our Torah scrolls in their white coverings are arrayed before us on the bimah and by the beautifully haunting melody that blankets the congregation. But neither the mood nor the music can mask the prayer’s troublesome language. 

Dr. Erica Brown, Vice Provost at Yeshiva University, explains something that many of us may not know: that Kol Nidre is actually an Aramaic legal contract witnessed before our Torah scrolls which are to serve as judge and jury. The legal language declares that “all the vows, renunciations, bans, oaths, obligations, pledges and promises that we vow or promise to ourselves and to God from this Yom Kippur to the next…we hereby retract.” As a legal formula, Kol Nidre preemptively annuls vows we might make in the next year, primarily those made under duress. 

At first blush this appears to be an existential “get out of jail free” card! Or as Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, the Reform Movement’s mystic-scholar suggests, for most Jews who understand, listening to Kol Nidre is like hearing the sound of flipping a silent software switch that anyone who has ever faced a frozen computer has rediscovered with relief: Restore Default Configuration. Kol Nidre resets us to a clean slate. A Fresh start. How amazing would that be!?! When you get together a room full of people, all hoping for that and you have yourself the holiest prayer in the prayerbook. 

But the idea that we simply reset our sins just by hearing a certain prayer flies in the face of rationalism. Thus many Jewish scholars have suggested that our Yom Kippur liturgy deserves a more intellectually authentic prayer here. Yet Kol Nidre persists. Why? 

Perhaps Kol Nidre is the antidote to the “New Year’s Eve” syndrome. How many times, Rabbi Ruth Durchslag asks, have we on January 1st buoyed by champagne and possibility, proclaimed our New Year’s resolutions, believing that this year we will really keep them, even though we have never kept them before? Even with the best of intentions, our vows fall short,  to ourselves, to each other and to God. So the author of Kol Nidre, understanding that we are human and flawed, offered up an opportunity for repentance. 

Others say Kol Nidre’s power derives from something else: From the soulful chant that contains the blaze of light that kindles our connection to each other and persuades us, correctly,  that we have offered personal and collective praise, personal and collective loyalty, personal and collective piety on the holiest night of the year, the day when the courts are closed and the only [pending] business is the mending of our broken lives. 

It is the melody, Rabbi Jack Moline explains, not the words. And if it is the melody and not the words that makes Kol Nidre endure, why has not anyone just rewritten the words to match the holy moment? 

Actually…spiritual journeyman and student of mussar Rick Dinitz did just this. 

Cantor Kyle, would you share it with us? Take a listen. 

All we are All we have been

All we have said

All we have promised

All we’ve forgotten

All we have done

All we earnestly intended yet we did not do.

Help me see

Help me be who I could be

Help me gather up the broken parts

And recreate myself as from the start.

Today we turn back time

Restore harmony and rhyme

Look a year ahead to Yom Kippur

To see our better selves walk through this door. 

Our flaws we own

Harmful habits hard as stone

We repair and we atone

Returning to ourselves and to our home.

Soul-stains need cleaning

Destructive deeds I’ve done demand redeeming

With caring and repairing.

The road we are clearing

The boat we are steering.

Help me know

The direction I must grow

Help me through

The sea between my old ways and the new

Today the gates of change swing open

With renewed hope.

What a fascinating exercise, retaining the melody and transforming the words! And whether this version spoke to you or shocked you or affected you some other way, it does deliver a message that more closely parallels our modern sensibilities about tonight’s purpose: teshuva (repentance). 

[And that is] the hardest part of Yom Kippur, taking the first step of teshuva. It is admitting that there is a problem and the problem is…us. The purpose of Kol Nidre, then, is to bring us this unsettling idea, so that we might move beyond internal inertia and begin to change.

Rabbi Noa Kusher, innovative creator of the Bay Area’s The Kitchen, teaches that “We humans share a natural defensive instinct: How many of us enter the room on Yom Kippur with the illusion that we are only observers? We do not really imagine that the meaning of our lives will be decided over the next few hours. So we sit back, or sit back in our minds, readying ourselves to be witnesses to the service, not active participants. 

But Kol Nidre quickly gets personal…like a good therapist, Kol Nidre directs us in stages. First, from dispassion to engagement. We say, “I am not guilty like those people, but I can still pray with them.” Then from rejection to possibility. We think, “I am not guilty now but might be in the future.” And then, from the protective stance with which we enter the service to the self-implication with which we leave. That this Kol Nidre moment is not about someone else. Oh no, this is about “me” and my life. Yes, Kol Nidre is about us and our need for t’shuvah, turning our lives onto a better path. 

And it is about me. When I was a third year physics major at Trinity College in Hartford Connecticut, I discovered the story of Franz Rosenzweig, a profoundly influential early 20th century thinker. In a series of letters around July 7, 1913, Franz Rosenzweig and his friend Eugen Rosenstock, a formerly-Jewish convert to Christianity who was a lecturer at Leipzig University, argued about truth, philosophy and religion. Through these letters, Rosenstock persuaded Rosenzweig to give up his skeptical relativism and to do so in the name of a religious absolute, more specifically, in the name of Christian faith. 

Rosenzweig had written: “We are Christian in everything. We live in a Christian state, attend Christian school, read Christian books, in short, our whole “culture” rests entirely on a Christian foundation. Consequently, a person who has nothing holding them back needs only a very slight push to make them accept Christianity.” 

Soon, Rosenzweig believed that he too could only make good on his newfound appreciation for religion by converting to the Christian faith. So Franz Rosenzweig decided to attend one more worship service in a small shul in Berlin to take leave of Judaism. He went on this very day, on the 10th of Tishri, Yom Kippur, in October 1913, 110 years ago. There Franz Rosenzweig, intending to convert to Christianity, experienced something profound during which Yom Kippur’s ancient prayers propelled him in a different direction, into teshuva, turning him back to his ancestors’ faith. From that day on, Franz Rosenzweig centered his life on Judaism, eventually authoring the profoundly influential Jewish philosophical tome, The Star of Redemption.

What led this Jewish intellectual who was so far in the non-Jewish periphery back into the Jewish center? From the heights of Western culture back into the heart of Jewish life? This very holy day and these very prayers. 

Then some seventy years later, as an undergraduate struggling to define my life’s path, I was so deeply moved by Franz Rosenzweig’s Yom Kippur decision to return to Judaism that I switched my major from physics to religion and focused my senior religion paper on the Rosenzweig and Rosenstock letters. 

So why is this prayer so profoundly poignant that it has the power to transform us? Because Kol Nidre is a Time Machine. That touches our soul. 

How many of us remember fondly sitting next to a loved one, a parent or grandparent, a relative or friend, listening to the epicly drawn out repetition of the Kol Nidre? 

For me, whenever I hear Kol Nidre, no matter who intones its stirring words, I am transported back to Worcester, Massachusetts, to Congregation Shalom’s Kol Nidre services in the JCC gym of my youth, where I am standing at my dad’s side, braiding the fringes on his tallit or just holding his hand. That time-bending memory is still mesmerizing. Oh, how I long for that sacred moment just once more. 

In the midst of our uncertainty, about our past, our future, our worthiness and our ultimate fate, We, all of us, return to temple, to hear Kol Nidre and perhaps to return to ourselves. 

And like the women in that Auschwitz-Birkenau barracks, we cry out together, hoping we are heard, by the God who needs forgiveness just as surely as we do. 

Whether we are religious or not, whether we believe or do not believe or are religiously unsure about what we believe, whether we understand the words or not, we, like Franz Rosenzweig, return. 

To the communities we share, For words we must hear, Because on the deepest levels we desperately care, About who we have become And who we might yet be. 

And perhaps we think: Sh’ma Koleinu Adonai Eloheinu, Eternal our God, we pray, hear our voices. Amen.  

This sermon owes its wisdom to so many. 

Harry Friedman, Producer of our High Holy Day services, first suggested I focus this sermon on the meaning of this ancient prayer. In countless ways, since he began to help lead us through High Holy Day Covid pivoting, Harry has become an important mentor to me, helping edit my sermons and guiding me to become the rabbi I often dreamed of being. 

Judy Weissenberg Cohen’s story of the women in Auschwitz-Birkenau barracks, edited for delivery, is from her memoir, A Cry in Unison. 

Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman’s encompassing book, All These Vows: Kol Nidre, so deeply unpacks the meaning of this prayer. It provided the primary source for my studies. My sermon draws especially from essays by Dr. Erica Brown, Rabbi Ruth Durschlag PsyD, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, and Rabbi Noah Kushner. 

Rabbi Jack Moline shared his thinking on the power of sacred music which influenced me greatly. 

All We Are by Rick Dinitz puts a prosaic English interpretation of Kol Nidre to the traditional melody. 

The correspondence between Franz Rosensweig and Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy is collected in Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence between Eugen Rosenstock-Huwssy & Franz Rosenzwig, a book that did not exist when I studied the letters. The Star of Redemption by Franz Rosenzweig continues to influence. My senior paper on the Rosenzweig-Rosenstock correspondence seems to have disappeared. 

I am indebted to my Facebook friends, including many non-rabbis, whose reflections on my question about the meaning of Kol Nidre inspired and helped shape core elements of the message. 

Of course my prime editor is and always has been Michelle November MSSW, my wife, who has an unparalleled ability to discern the deeply meaningful from the merely interesting, always ensuring that the messages are clear and engaging.