The h azzan is obviously not a bet din! On this matter, too, the Rosh asserted that a sage must be sought only if a vow to be negated involves a mitzvah. But Kol Nidrei does not involve mitzvah vows. When I served as a congregational rabbi, I asked an observant Jew to stand next to me, behind the h azzan , during the chanting of Kol Nidrei. As I informed the congregation, the three of us would form a bet din of sorts. But what about the Talmudic requisite for a peta h h aratah opening for regret?
Again the Rosh rebutted this sixth argument: There must have been h aratah if an individual did not fulfill a vow! Actually, the challenge had been rebutted earlier by Solomon ben Samson 11th century, Worms, Germany. He insisted that Nedarim 23b was referring not to past vows but to future ones. Oriental Sephardim utilize a Kol Nidrei that mentions both former and future vows. Indeed, from the Middle Ages to as late as the 19th century, Jews in some countries were forced to take the infamous Jewish Oath when testifying in Christian courts.
To counteract such Gentile thinking, as well as the notion held by many Jews that Kol Nidrei did invalidate all vows, Rabbenu Tam declared that only nidrei atzmo vows imposed on oneself are nullified by Kol Nidrei. After the dawn of the Enlightenment and Emancipation for Jews, two more objections were raised against Kol Nidrei. One the ninth by our count was that it was morally offensive and, with some influential Gentiles aware of that, keeping Kol Nidrei in the synagogue service might hinder full equality for, and acceptance of, Jews.
The other objection number ten , related to the preceding one, was that Kol Nidrei seemed so contrary to the convictions of general enlightened society. Especially to Reform Jews and their progressive Christian compatriots, good religion should be rational, ethically oriented, and morally uplifting.
As a result of such challenges, Kol Nidrei was dealt with in various ways. Of course, many Yom Kippur services included the traditional Kol Nidrei text. In the 20th century a number of non-Orthodox synagogues resorted to various devices in dealing with Kol Nidrei. Some substituted a psalm usually number or , or a hymn, or an original prayer. It is likely that some Jews of centuries past and in the 20th century have been puzzled, even annoyed, by the mostly Aramaic, archaic technical language of Kol Nidrei an eleventh objection.
But cannot such language be viewed, at least, as a picturesque, sentimental carryover of ancient Jewish legalese? Its underlying purpose we moderns can accept: our yearning to be absolved of unfulfilled vows to ourselves and God, our desire to start afresh. For so many Jews the traditional melody of Kol Nidrei is hauntingly, powerfully, captivating.
The eleven intellectual objections to Kol Nidrei — and more could have been listed — vanish in the solemn, inspirational mood created by the music of, and the feeling elicited by, Kol Nidrei.
The heart overwhelms the head. This is because the trans-lation in the Harlow-edited mahzor see note 1 , as in some other prayer books, deviates too much from a literal translation. Also see pp. Quoted by Gershon, p. See Gershon, p. Kieval, p. This may have provided a support for the custom of reciting Kol Nidre a formula for dispensation of vows prior to the Evening Service of the Day of Atonement Ran.
Though the beginning of the year New Year is mentioned here, the Day of Atonement was probably chosen on account of its great so-lemnity.
But Kol Nidre as part of the ritual is later than the Talmud. Gall, by which such typical passages were evolved, influenced all music in those French and German lands where the melody of "Kol Nidre" took shape. Thus, then, a typical phrase in the most familiar Gregorian mode, such as was daily in the ears of the Rhenish Jews, in secular as well as in ecclesiastical music, was centuries ago deemed suitable for the recitation of the Absolution of Vows, and to it was afterward prefixed an introductory intonation dependent on the taste and capacity of the officiant.
Many times repeated, the figure of this central phrase was sometimes sung on a higher degree of the scale, sometimes on a lower. Then these became associated; and so gradually the middle section of the melody developed into the modern forms.
The speculation is ventured that this was done about the year , when thirty-four men and seventeen women perished at the stake at Blois , chanting the "'Alenu," and when all the Rhenish Jews, as well as those of France, were bewailing the martyrdom as the encyclical of R.
Tam reached their congregations. The full transcription following differs from the version best known to the general public, that for violoncello, etc. Table of Contents. Frankel, Die Eidesleistung der Juden, pp. Strack, in Herzog-Hauck, Real-Encyc.
Bibliography: Vocal: A. Consolo, Libro dei Canti d'Israele, No. Mombach, Sacred Musical Compositions, p. Instrumental: Various pianoforte, organ, and especially string arrangements by M. Bruch, P. Franz, A. Garfinkel, L. Lewandowski, L. Mendelssohn, J. Rosenfeld, A. Russotta, F. Singer, E. Wagner, H. Weintraub, and G. Hast, Divine Service, ii. Naumbourg, Recueil de Chants Religieux, No. Marksohn and W. Images of pages. V:7 P 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. Jacob Emden took issue with some of the legalistic assumptions on which the new Kol Nidre was based.
This is not to say that the older or Hebrew version of the Babylonian Geonim was entirely displaced. The Romanian Balkan Rite, which has long been obsolete, and the Italian Rite, preserved today in only a handful of congregations, retained the old geonic Kol Nidre in its Hebrew form.
The Sephardim of the West recite only part of the geonic text, notably its concentration on the vows of the past year, while the Oriental Sephardim and the Yemenites have compromised by adding the emendations of Rabbenu Tam to the older geonic version. Not all the opposition to Kol Nidre has come from within Jewish ranks or from sectarian groups like the Karaites.
Throughout the Middle Ages in Christian Europe, Kol Nidre was seized upon as a prime weapon in the continuing campaign to vilify the character of the Jew. Kol Nidre made trouble for the Jews in other ways too. Several public disputations between learned rabbis and churchmen in the 13th century included controversy over the legitimacy of Kol Nidre.
In the 17th century, Manasseh ben Israel, the famed rabbi-statesman of Amsterdam, had to defend the ethical character of Kol Nidre in the course of negotiating with Oliver Cromwell to permit the return of Jews to England whence they had been expelled in The governmental machinery of Tsarist Russia was likewise concerned with the legitimacy of Kol Nidre. On October 25, , after repeated complaints from unfriendly quarters to the Russian authorities touching on the rights of Jews in the province of Kurland, the authorities issued an order prescribing a special Hebrew introduction to Kol Nidre, which stated explicitly that the declaration was valid only for vows exclusively involving the person who made them but no other human being.
Yet many defenders of Kol Nidre were themselves uneasy about it, haunted by the well-known criticism of illustrious rabbis, both Sephardic and Ashkenazic. Thus in 12th-century Spain, R. Judah ben Barzillai declared the recitation of Kol Nidre to be dangerous, since ignorant Jews might erroneously conclude that all their vows and oaths were annulled through this declaration and, consequently, would take obligations upon themselves without due caution.
In 13th-century Italy, R. Against this centuries-old background of controversy, it is not surprising that Kol Nidre was one of the early targets of the Reform movement which arose in 19th-century Germany. In , the first conference of Reform leaders decided to expunge the ancient ritual entirely from the Yom Kippur liturgy, and several attempts were subsequently made by both German and American Reformers to substitute an acceptable prayer in its place.
The Berlin Prayerbook and the older editions of the Union Prayerbook of the American Reform movement substituted the th Psalm, a most appropriate selection since it had introduced the Yom Kippur evening service in ancient Palestine long before there ever was a Kol Nidre. But once again, the incredible resilience of the traditional Kol Nidre ritual made itself felt: in the most recent edition of the Union Prayerbook , Kol Nidre has been restored with its full Aramaic text.
In the United States, also, the Reconstructionist movement attempted to abolish the recitation of Kol Nidre. These our vows, and these only, shall not be vows. It should be obvious that the phenomenal capacity of Kol Nidre to withstand so many vicissitudes over the centuries cannot be explained in purely rational terms. Due regard must be given to other factors, foremost among them the powerful folk tradition that has long associated Kol Nidre with Jewish martyrdom, especially at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition.
The fact that this deeply rooted tradition cannot be substantiated by firm historical evidence has not in the least dimmed the mystical aura with which it has surrounded an otherwise undramatic legal formula of dubious provenance. The legendary association of Kol Nidre and its various musical settings with Jewish martyrdom was given some scholarly underpinning in by Joseph S.
Bloch who attempted to trace the origin of the ritual to the persecution of Jews in 7th-century Spain by the Visigoths. According to Bloch, these barbarian conquerors, themselves freshly converted to Christianity, forced the Jews of their Spanish domains to renounce their religion and vow their acceptance of the Christian faith.
But the forced converts remained secretly faithful to their ancestral religion, and when Yom Kippur came, they would observe it surreptitiously. This, Bloch suggests, is the reason that Kol Nidre is recited before the prayers of Yom Kippur proper begin. Bloch further argues that Jews suffered similar persecution in the Byzantine Empire and utilized Kol Nidre in the same fashion, as also did the Marranos who secretly practiced Judaism after being forcibly converted by the Spanish Inquisition In any case, there is a very long history in Jewish writings, going back to ancient rabbinic literature, of explaining innovations and peculiarities in worship and ritual in terms of persecutions at the hands of a variety of enemies.
Whatever the merits or demerits of any particular theory of this type, the overall effect has generally been further to endear the prayer in question to the Jewish people.
The plaintive melody of Kol Nidre has been scarcely less important than the martyrdom tradition as a factor protecting the embattled formula against its critics and enemies.
Indeed, the music itself has been associated by popular tradition with persecution and martyrdom. For this notion there is no historical basis whatsoever, yet the myth dies hard.
The history of the Kol Nidre music is as obscure as that of the words; and, as with the text, there are a number of versions. To name only the best-known, there is the familiar Ashkenazic melody and the two current Sephardic melodies: one for the Western and the other for the Oriental communities, both based on the mode of Selihot prayers of penitence and both quite different from the Ashkenazic.
The procedure, still current, of chanting the Kol Nidre formula three times is recorded in Mahzor Vitry , a 12th-century record of the liturgical practices of Old-French Jewry. Each of the repetitions was intended to convey particular thoughts and emotions, and it is probable that the early Hazzanim improvised in order to express these ideas.
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