The first communal prayer service of Yom Kippur actually takes place immediately prior to sunset on the evening of Yom Kippur. These are the first words of a special legal formula that is recited at the beginning of this service and is chanted three times. This legal ritual is believed to have developed in early medieval times as a result of persecutions against the Jews. At various times in Jewish history, Jews were forced to convert to either Christianity or Islam upon pain of death.
However, after the danger had passed, many of these forced converts wanted to return to the Jewish community. However, this was complicated by the fact that they had been forced to swear vows of fealty to another religion. September 17, Cantor Deborrah Cannizzaro. No one knows where this custom originated, but we find this text in the 9th-century High Holiday prayer book, Machzor Vitry : The first time [the hazzan cantor ] must utter it very softy, like one who hesitates to enter the palace of the king to ask a gift of Him whom he fears to approach; the second time he may speak somewhat louder; and the third time more loudly still, as one who is accustomed to dwell at court and to approach his sovereign as a friend.
Here are two different versions of Kol Nidrei , both from Morocco: In the first one , performed by Eyal Bitton, you will hear a melody quite different from the Ashkenazic setting, although the mood and ensemble are similar.
The second version , chanted by Rabbi Eliahou Elbaz, has a noticeably Middle Eastern sound and creates a totally different mood. Regardless of the setting, the words and meaning of the prayer reach out and beg us to reflect on our behaviors and actions during the past year. About the Author Cantor Deborrah Cannizzaro. View All Posts From Author. Related Posts Ten Minutes of Torah. Standing with our Muslim Family. For centuries, the precise content of Kol Nidre likely varied from one community to another, until the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, which permitted the codification of Jewish liturgy, Blatt said.
He explained that Aramaic was the spoken, conversational language of many Jewish communities as far back as years ago. As it happens, Kol Nidre is in good company, as the Kaddish is Aramaic as well, in addition to a few other prayers recited during the Jewish year. As for Donald Herman, he continued listening to his son singing Kol Nidre until , when he had reached his 90s and was approaching the end of his life. Before his return flight the next day, he asked his father if he would like him to sing Kol Nidre there, and he received an enthusiastic yes.
That evening was the last time Donald Herman was out of bed, and after a second visit from his son a few days later, he became unresponsive and later died.
Randy Herman takes comfort in knowing that his father died on Shabbat, which is interpreted by some as God calling the holy to return, and that he died just after Yom Kippur, which can be taken as a sign of dying spiritually clean.
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Allow not your mouth to bring your flesh to guilt. The post-biblical moralists shared this attitude and tried to dissuade Jews from resorting to vows as a demonstration of piety. In the period of the Mishnah, the habit of making vows was held to be a mark of low breeding. Some of the rabbis permitted the use of vows as a means of reinforcing resolutions to replace bad habits with good ones, but others disapproved.
Despite such injunctions, not every Jew could resist the habits of centuries of Oriental vow-making. Thus the legal authorities in the Talmudic period had to cope with the dilemma of preserving the sanctity of the pledged word in a society that continued to make ill-considered vows.
The problems—legal and moral—which perplexed the most eminent rabbis in the matter of the dispensation of the many types of vows, oaths, etc. Two entire tractates of the Talmud Nedarim and Shevuot deal directly with these issues, to say nothing of discussions in other tractates. Chief Rabbi Hertz, in his commentary on the Pentateuch, gives this vivid summary:. Altogether aside from imbecile and rash minds, men in time of danger or under momentary impulse would make vows which they could not fulfill.
In such cases, the rabbis would consider it their duty to afford a man the facility, under certain definite conditions and restrictions, of annulling his thoughtless or impossible vows. Such annulment could never be effected by himself, but only by a Beth Din of three learned men in the Law, after they had carefully investigated the nature and bearing of the vow, and had become convinced that its purpose was not, on the one hand, self-improvement, nor did it, on the other, infringe upon the rights of others.
For not all vows or oaths could be absolved. A vow or oath that was made to another person, even be that person a child or a heathen, could not be annulled except in the presence of that person and with his consent; while an oath which a man had taken in a court of justice, could not be absolved by any other authority in the world [Italics in original].
What prompted the Babylonian authorities to take such a negative attitude? On the surface, the objections appear to be purely legalistic; but the passion, which is only partially hidden by their technical language, suggests that the Geonim were fighting a losing battle against a highly popular practice. Both Salo W. Baron and Cyrus H. Gordon believe that the geonic opposition to Kol Nidre was connected with an opposition to magic.
Thus Gordon points out striking parallels between the Aramaic text of Kol Nidre and texts in the same language inscribed on magical incantation bowls which were popular in Babylonia around C. But the geonic opposition to Kol Nidre was not monolithic. A difference of opinion existed—at least during certain periods—between the two great Babylonian academies, the authorities at Pumbedita taking a more lenient view, probably in response to popular clamor, than those at Sura.
By the time of Hai Gaon son of Sherira Gaon , who flourished in Pumbedita about the year , some form of Kol Nidre declaration appears to have gained general acceptance throughout Babylonia and the far-flung Jewries which accepted geonic authority. Unfortunately, the liturgical writings of Hai, the most influential of the Geonim of Pumbedita, have been lost and the quotations in later medieval writers are often inaccurate.
We do not know, therefore, the exact wording of the Kol Nidre formula approved by Hai. But what we do know is the principle underlying the Babylonian compromise on a permissible Kol Nidre formula. The Geonim rejected the concept that vows might be annulled either retroactively or in advance, a practice which had been permitted in Palestine under carefully controlled conditions. The Babylonian version of Kol Nidre, however, is not the familiar formula which is used in the overwhelming majority of Jewish communities today.
The Jewries of western and northern Europe, which did not recognize the hegemony of Babylonia, also did not accept the Kol Nidre text of the Geonim. These influential scholars, reverting to the original practice of Palestinian Jewry as recorded in the Mishnah, recast the Kol Nidre formula as an anticipatory cancellation of vows, oaths, etc. None of these conditions was required in the Kol Nidre formula accepted by the Babylonian Geonim. One of the most important of the Tosafists, Rabbenu Tam, desired, indeed, to transform all the verbs of the old Kol Nidre formula from the past to the future tense.
Later efforts to remove these contradictions—from R. Mordecai Jaffe of Prague, in the late 16th century, to R. Wolf Heidenheim, in early 19th-century Germany—have been conspicuously unsuccessful. The legal arguments of Rabbenu Tam and his father, R. Meir ben Samuel, were not accepted uncritically by later Ashkenazic authorities. Such distinguished rabbis as R. Mordecai Jaffe, the Vilna Gaon, and R.
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