Then, just when you think you can't tolerate this one moment more, you are called to gather with a multitude in a great hall. A court has convened high up on the altar in the front of the hall. Make way! Make way! the judges of the court proclaim, for everyone must be included in the proceeding. No one, not even the usual outcasts, may be excluded. You are told that you are in possession of a great power, the power of speech, and that you will certainly abuse it -you are already forgiven for having abused it in the past - but in the end it will save you.Read the rest of the excerpt from Rabbi Alan Lew's new book This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared.
For the next twenty-four hours you rehearse your own death. You wear a shroud and, like a dead person, you neither eat nor drink nor fornicate. You summon the desperate strength of life's last moments. A great wall of speech is hurled against your heart again and again; a fist beats against the wall of your heart relentlessly until you are brokenhearted and confess to your great crime. You are a human being, guilty of every crime imaginable. Your heart is cracking through its shell to be reborn.
I googled "kol nidre" looking for something that expressed the essence - as I have been trying to do with my Pintele Yid recommendations - of how Jews experience this cornerstone of the Jewish yearly cycle. Most search results were dry historical explanations of this complex piece of liturgy, or antisemitic distortions of it. Finally, 3 pages in, I found - how about that? - another piece by Rabbi Lew:
. . . .way back in 1970, my first year in California, I was about as distant from Judaism as it was possible to be. How distant? It was Erev Yom Kippur and I had no idea that it was. But the TV was on in the living room of my house in Gualala, California, and I just happened to be walking through the room when a news broadcast caught my attention. They were doing a feature about Yom Kippur. Someone was playing Kol Nidre on a cello. It went through me like a knife. That melody struck a deep chord. It went all the way in. It went straight to my soul.So anything by Rabbi Alan Lew is my Pintele Yid pick for the Yamim Noraim, and, of course: read the whole thing.
When we recite the Kol Nidre, God calls out to the soul, in a voice the soul recognizes instantly because it is the soul’s own cry. You may have come here for other reasons. You may not have come here because you knew your soul needed to hear this. Nevertheless, here you are, sitting in your body and suddenly your soul hears this music and it gives a jump, and it startles you to feel this. [sings:] KOL NIDRE. V’ESAREI. Your soul is hearing its name called out, and its name is . . . pain - grief - shame - humiliation - loss - failure - death, or at least, that is its first name. That is the name the first few notes of the Kol Nidre calls out.
. . . But the thing about the Kol Nidre is that it starts at this moment of heartbreak. This moment is the ground of its being. And it comes on so suddenly, so abruptly. There is no buildup whatsoever. It’s the very first thing that happens. It happens even before we have a chance to sit down. No, excuse me; there is something that happens first. But if you came in even fifteen seconds late you may have missed it. Before we recite the Kol Nidre, we convene a Beit Din, a rabbinical court—these people standing on the Bima with the Torahs—and they give us permission to pray "Im (with) Ha-avaryonim." But what does this mean? Who are the avaryonim and why does a court need to convene in order to give us permission to pray with them?
. . . Rabbi Shimon the Pious . . . said in the Talmud that a public fast in which sinners do not participate is not a true fast. Avar, after all, is a word for transgression. So perhaps the Avaryonim are the transgressors, and the Beit Din is giving us permission to pray with them. In other words, it is giving us permission to pray with ourselves. We are all avaryonim. We are all imperfect. We are all sinners. So perhaps the Beit Din is saying, you don’t have to be perfect to participate in this service, and that’s a good thing, because none of us is.
But I think this word suggests an even deeper reality that all of us share. Not only are we all imperfect. We are all impermanent. In its simplest meaning, Avar means to pass. We are the avaryonim. We are the ones who pass, the one’s who are just passing through, every one of us.
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