Ways of Awe: Kol Nidre

[Reflective opening string music with slowly-building energy]

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

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

Noam: So we’re taking part in creation by speaking these words.

Laynie: In the body.

Jessica: And a slowness.

Noa: And…heartbroken rage-full blessing-full connection, for whatever that’s possibly worth in this moment.

[String music gets stronger and faster]

Xava: 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.

[Horns enter the music with a feeling of both grief and hopefulness]

Maia: I’m Maia.

Shelby: I’m Shelby. Welcome to Ways of Awe.

Maia: An audio companion to the prayers and rituals of the Jewish High Holidays.

Mónica: Um, we want to honor and remember and face death, loss, destruction. And also we want to agitate the living, give the living practices that will allow us to embody grief and move towards courage.

Shelby: We’ve been studying together for years and Ways of Awe shares some of our translation experiments.

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

Shelby: Sound is touch, sound is touch!

Xava: Sound is touch, yeah.

Shelby: And our ancestors knew it!

Binya: All these things are trying to access you in every possible way to break you open.

Shelby: It’s crowded inside these prayers. But there’s room. Come on in.

[Reflective music slows, resolves and stops]

[Sound of rain softly hitting a surface blending with singing of Kol Nidre, mostly in the traditional Ashkenazi tune but with some specific variations]

Noraa (singing): Kohl need-ray veh-eh-sah-rai oo-shvoo-ay vah-khah-rah-may vi-koh-nah-may vi-kee-noo-say vi-khee-noo-yay…

Maia: Shana tova. Anyada dulse i allegre. Gut yontif.  Let’s go inside Kol Nidre, the prayer that opens Yom Kippur as the sun sets.

Shelby: 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.

Maia: 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. 

Shelby: Maybe you can hear the tune in your head, in your heart, right now

Maia: Whatever tune your family, your people, your community used. 

Shelby: Maybe you’ve never heard of Kol Nidre before. However you’re arriving to it, welcome.  

[Sound of violin playing the traditional Askhenazi Kol Nidre tune which has a solemn, haunting and emotionally stirring quality to it—with moments of hearing the violinist audibly breathing]

[Sound of rain returns to join the violin as narration continues]

Maia: In this episode, we’ll turn towards angels, heavenly & earthly courts, and ancient grammar gossip. You’ll hear Kol Nidre played and chanted in different spaces and in different voices…only a fraction of the traditions & melodies of this prayer. You’ll also hear our interpretative translation, and we’ll be joined by a few of our mentors: Rabbi Xava de Cordova, queer talmud podcast host and co-Rosh Yeshiva of Shel Maala, Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, a writer, educator, organizer and calendar maker, and Jeannie Wells Yablonsky from the Seattle Symphony on violin.

Shelby: Let’s step deeper into this prayer together. 

[Violin fades out and sound of rain continues]

Xava: The whole Yom Kippur series of ritual is about rehearsing for death, also rehearsing for birth, in the sense that those two are fundamentally connected and the same…

[Sound of the ocean begins with rain continuing, the following speaker’s voice has some added reverb to it]

Xava: …Pure emptiness before we can go into the next round of somethingness…

[Fade into chant Sharone Sayegh chanting Kol Nidre in the Iraqi Sephardic tradition, which has powerful long, open and dynamic notes and a tone of openness and soaring energy]

Sharone: Kohl need-ray veh-eh-sah-rai…

[Chant continues underneath and in between narration]

Shelby: Does Kol Nidre come for you no matter what? Whether you show up or not. The court’s happening. It doesn’t matter where you are, where you’ve been…

Xava: 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 if we weren’t all a part of it…

Jessica: It’s a reminder that we are breathing the same air… I’m not a different species than anyone perpetrating any kind of violence…

[Sharone’s chanting continues and is joined by the sound of rain]

Shelby: 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.

[Chanting fades, rain continues]

Maia: But before the Kol Nidre prayer can begin, tallises are draped over our shoulders, the Torah scrolls are brought out of the ark and carried around the sanctuary, and then the khazen…khazanit…chazzan (…the chant leader), recites the introduction–where we collectively ask for permission ‘to pray with the transgressors.’ 

Shelby: This preface primes us for the uncomfortable kinship that Kol Nidre, and much of our High Holidays liturgy, requires of us.

[Rain fades into the sound of walking & water lapping at Potlatch Bay on the Hood Canal]

[Maia begins chanting in Hebrew the introduction to Kol Nidre]

Maia (singing): B’yeshivah shel ma’alah, u-v’yeshivah shel mattah, Al da’at ha-Makom v’al da’at ha-kahal, anu matirin l’hitpalel im ha-avaryanim.

[Sound of water lapping continues quietly underneath narration]

Shelby: Close your eyes or cast your gaze downwards or go internal in some way. Take a moment to breathe. Without opening your eyes, look above you. 

On Kol 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 Kol Nidre. Sure, we can say it’s 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 made mostly of eyes, many many eyes, and oh, 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, re-commit, get fired up, feel rootless, ruthless, selfish, feel holy, true, connected… they’ve 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 amongst 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 upon the downy green seats of the earth, oh and it’s completely spangled in dew, but so are we, we are warm and shaking as petals in the morning. Some of us are wearing white, dressed in the garment in which we expect to be buried in–and this is not 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.

[Sound of footsteps walking continues underneath narration]

Maia: Kol Nidre’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 G-d resides which is itself G-d has given their go-ahead. And now it is 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.

[Sounds of water lapping continues with walking sounds]

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 “avar’yanim,” 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 root as the word “Evri”, 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. 

[Sounds of water lapping continues]

Shelby: Feel free to open your eyes… or don’t.

[More walking sounds with bird calls in the background]

[Maia begins chanting in Hebrew the introduction to Kol Nidre]

Maia (singing): B’yeshivah shel ma’alah, u-v’yeshivah shel mattah…

Maia: In the court of earth: that belongs bent below, beneath what we hold.

Maia (singing underneath English words): …Al da’at ha-Makom…

With the consent of the Place: knowing the sacred substance of existence, our everywhere & wherever G-d-ness.

Maia (singing underneath English words): …v’al da’at ha-kahal…

Shelby: With the consent of the People: this gathering, all of us calling out to each other, tonight, the yearning towards the togetherness makes us together-ed.

Maia (singing underneath English words): Anu matirin l’hitpalel im ha-avaryanim.

We (this precise, particular plural of “I”s) loosen ourselves enough to permit release.

Maia: 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? 

Maia (singing underneath English words):… im ha-avaryanim… im ha-avaryanim…

(The border-crossers, the boundary-swellers, perpetrators or the pass-over-ers of errors? Simultaneous sinners and forgivers, crossing between flawed and faultless–who of us? Or all of us?)

Maia (singing underneath English words):… im ha-avaryanim… im ha-avaryanim…

Shelby: We are saying these words so that we can pray together even though (because?) we have done harm.

Shelby & Maia: I agree to pray with you if you agree to pray with me.

[Water lapping sounds from Gasworks Park on Lake Union and Potlatch Bay from Hood Canal]

Jessica: Kol Nidre is the only service where we all get there on time and it is really sunset… the first time I learned to chant it was when I was leading services at a prison And so the men there raised money. They 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. 

Maia: That essential wholeness–this group of prisoners fought for it.

Jessica: They felt that… the day and time and being in sync with the rest of the Jewish community was very meaningful…

[Water lapping continues blended with group chanting Kol Nidre in the traditional Ashkenazi tune]

Group singing: Kohl need-ray veh-eh-sah-rai oo-shvoo-ay vah-khah-rah-may vi-koh-nah-may…

Shelby: 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…

Jessica: …To know we are saying the same words as… settlers. We don’t get to believe we are so seperate…  there is a specificity to Jews and Palestine… and we wrestle with how that impacts our tradition.

Shelby: To have kinship with people who are capable of horrific violence…

Jessica: …which we would have whether or not we were saying Kol Nidre…and non-jews also have….

Shelby: Yeah, it’s specific and mundane…

[Chanting of Kol Nidre continues]

Shelby:  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 un-obligated 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.

[Chanting of Kol Nidre continues until the end of the prayer]

[Walking sounds continues]

Maia: 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 (ya 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 Geonim 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 understanding 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. 

Shelby: The grandson of Rashi, ​​Rabbenu 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 makhzor in 1565 by Rabbi Yosef Karo (author of the “Shulchan Aruch”, 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 and Ashkenazi Turtle Island, we are accustomed to a text that reads partially in the perfect past tense to begin and then orients us to releasing the vows we make “from this Yom Kippur to the next,” ending with a litany of imperfect verbs.   

[Noraa singing Kol Nidre solo mostly in the traditional Ashkenazi tune but with some specific variations; singing continues underneath narration]

Maia: Kol Nidre has been a site for two simultaneous struggles: internal Jewish struggles over rabbinic authority and what our tradition should mean AND external struggles with Christian hegemony and antisemitism.  

Kol Nidre 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 in 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 Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism lobbied successfully to have the movement replace the text of Kol Nidre with Psalm 130 in the Makhzor.  But, now it’s back!  Folx have always loved it, found ways to say it despite threats from within and without.  This is a story where minhag (the custom of the people) keeps winning out over authority.

[Noraa singing Kol Nidre solo continues]

Shelby: Kol Nidre requires emptiness. 

Xava: For this moment, we are setting aside those things to enter into a space of purity, and it’s not a purity that’s created by the absence of sin or the absence of mistakes, it’s created by the absence of the concept of mistakes, in order to be able to perform this ritual, that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. 

Jessica: When we were chanting in Hebrew and when I was chanting Kol Nidre… at Graterford and then Phoenix…was a ritual for me of like, “‘Of course i don’t know what to say here,” and I’m going to say something and the millenia plus old words are going to say more than i could ever say. Let me try to channel more than teach. Let me open myself to offering. 

[Sounds of rain return]

Shelby: …to be a channel, which means being kinda empty.

[Rain continues underneath narration]

Xava: The ability to choose to do things and 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 aspect of human experience. Which is why we don’t have Kol Nidre every day of the year. The difference between poison and medicine is dosage. Too much Kol 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 those things to enter the space of Kol Nidre to unclench those internal fists. Both the shame around agreements I’ve broken and resentment around agreements that weren’t kept to me. 

[pause]

G-d joins us too in that space for a reason. G-d has plenty of broken agreements each year to make up for.

[Rain continues]

Maia: We are attempting some of our boldest border-crossing right now.  When the Book of Life is open and the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest.  Jews don’t really believe in linear time and right now we believe we can maybe cross some major timezones.  But we are not just reaching backwards. Come with us to look at how we tried to translate our textual ancestors’ futures.

[Ocean sounds begin]

Look at this phrase right in the middle of the prayer:   הַבָּא עָלֵֽינוּ לְטוֹבָה

[Recording of Yiddish cantor Moyshe Oysher singing this part of Kol Nidre]

One potential hyper-literal translation of this line is: the-future we-come-up for-good. Aleynu 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.  L’tovah: the lamed is a prefix that can mean to or for. Tovah: good, handsome, valuable, fit…or, goodness, happiness, mercy, much, many, very.  Finally, habah, the future.  Bah, here can mean: coming, future, the world to come, futurity (the possibility of a future).  It comes from the root bet, vuv, alef–to enter into, to come, to have sexual connection, to bring, to offer, to bring about. 

Shelby: 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 we be counted in the world to come! may that future arrive to us anointed in goodness! 

[Sounds of ocean]

[Sounds of Maia singing the Ashkenazi Kol Nidre along with Jeannie’s violin, continues along with the translation]

Maia: All vows: every way we bind ourselves, whatever forbiddings we were under the spell of, all bans, excommunications, renunciations, even our most sacred separations & what we set aside in old Temple ways…

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

Maia: …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…

Shelby: …from this Yom Kippur to the next Yom Kippur. May we be counted in the world to come! 

Maia: May that future arrive to us anointed in goodness! 

Shelby: All our vows, we regret. May they all be untied, unharnessed & set free, 

Maia: May they all be unbound, abandoned & let be, 

Shelby: May they all be abolished & unseen, 

Maia: May they all be hollowed & put to sea, Null and cast back into the void. 

Shelby: Invalid & without standing.

Maia & Shelby: We vowed no vows. We forbid no forbiddings. We oathed no oaths.

[Kol Nidre chanting and violin fades; ocean sounds continue]

Maia: 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.  

[Ocean sounds continue; prayerbook pages begin to rustle]

Shelby: We are in the past and the future as we chant, we are in the finished and unfinishedness of our actions, because we are moving–together. We are getting unstuck. [Ocean fades out] 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. [Sound of walking with bird sounds] But, please, may we still keep arriving there… 

[Bird sounds continue]

Maia: Kol Nidre 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 is dizzying, it is 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 Chazzan’s afterword to kol nidre–that we are about to hear at the close of this episode–reminds us of Mitzrayim…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 Chazzan 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. 

[Bird sounds]

Xava: One of the beautiful things is that it happens across millenia, right? We are in conversation with rabbis and 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 wound of the foolishness that we are saying now.

[Sounds of rain]

Maia: Kol Nidre is not ensuring that we can break our promises and still be forgiven. Kol Nidre tries to give us just enough space to feel able to keep making promises, despite not knowing what narrowness or wide-open-ness lies ahead.  Kol Nidre 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.  

Shelby: 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 G-d’s words, but vocalized through the congregation itself:

[Sound of rain gets louder]

Maia: May we be forgiven and forgive, all of us who meet praying,

Shelby: all of the children & the strangers,

Maia: everyone of us who errs, everyone of us who needs pardon.

Shelby: What is biggest is kindness, the rest is narrow.

Maia: It has been like this since Mitsrayim until now.

Shelby: Suddenly — we hear g-d’s reply from our own mouths:

Maia: Adonai replied, “I have forgiven, just like you asked.”

Shelby: Adonai replied, “I have forgiven, just like you asked.”

Maia & Shelby: Adonai replied, “I have forgiven, just like you asked.”

[Final words of Maia chanting Kol Nidre to violin gives way to sounds of ocean waves]

[Ocean fades to reflective outro music]

[Reflective show music returns]

Maia: Ways of Awe was written by Maya Brown and Shelby Handler, based on translations originally shared with the Kadima Reconstructionist Community in Seattle, Washington, on unceded Coast Salish, Duwamish land.

Shelby: All episodes edited by Maia Brown. Audio engineering by Daniel Guenther.

Maia: 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.

Shelby: Thank you to our friends Ross Kirshenbaum, or Levoneh, Jimmy Austin and Peter Lippman for our show music, and to Jenny Asarnow for their field recordings.

Maia: Thank you to the Jack Straw Cultural Center Artist Support Program, the King County Office of Arts & Culture Smart Ventures Program, and Signal Fire Coop—without which this project would never have made it into your ears, dear listener.

Shelby: 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.

[Show music continues and fades out slowly]