Yom Kippur begins at sundown tonight and continues until dusk tomorrow. It’s the culmination of the Days of Awe in the Jewish calendar, and the time for a sort of moral Spring cleaning—the Day of Atonement, when you’re meant to rummage through your behavior over the previous year, acknowledge your shortcomings with respect to your fellow humans, apologize (to those they’ve trespassed against and to God) and resolve to do better.
Then—having cleared the slate, so to
speak—you’re good to go for another year.
Well, the deal is that God opens the Book of
Life on Rosh Hashanah and inscribes your name in it, but doesn’t close-and-seal
it until the end of Yom Kippur. You have those ten Days of Awe to get your
ducks in a row.
In recent times, people have taken to issuing
blanket apologies for transgressions, presumably in
the hope that anyone who’s actually suffered at their hands will happen by at
the time the apology emerged, and will catch it in passing. And, of course, SoMe
has amplified this impersonalization of what should be
a very personal act of contrition.
I have never subscribed to the
one-size-fits-all approach to giving or receiving apologies, but that’s just
me. I mean—in the Roman Catholic Sacrament of Reconciliation, we’re meant to
hawk up actual things we’ve done, say
them out loud to the confessor and accept the penance we’re given. (Toughest
priest I ever knew wouldn’t give you any generic Hail Marys or Our Fathers; no,
no. If I’d been pissed off at my family, he’d tell me to go back and be
specially nice to them. Killed me, he did.)
Protestants generally have no truck with
confession and atonement. That may be because, being based on the teachings of John
Calvin, they’re guided by the tenets of Predestination: God decided long before
your birth whether you’re saved or damned, and nothing you can do here will
change that. Therefore there’s not much point in calling out your
transgressions, or promising to make amends—you’re headed where God sends you.
(Okay—there’s a lot of talk in some
fundamentalist circles about repentance and forgiveness. But that seems largely
to apply to Republican elected officials and some preachers who’ve been caught
doing something that they can’t wriggle out of on account of the video and the
forensic evidence. I take no notice of this.)
But I digress. This post is about Yom Kippur
and the mindful inventory of one’s transgressions with a view to amending one’s
trajectory in the New Year.
In synagogues and communities around the world
just before sundown tonight, someone will be singing “Kol Nidre”, a call from
the Ashkenazi tradition of Judaism. It’s a mixture of Aramaic and Hebrew,
declaring null any oaths or commitments made to God from one Yom Kippur to the
next, and asking for pardon for shortcomings in fulfilling those vows. The
idea, as I understand it, is to mitigate the sin of failing to fulfill a vow
that might have been made rashly. (It also annulled any vows associated with
forced conversion to Christianity, which was a thing for a long time.)
Both Al Jolson and Neil Diamond sang “Kol
Nidre” in their appearances in The Jazz Singer (1927 and 1980,
respectively). Johnny Mathis and Perry Como have also recorded it, which seems
passing odd to me. But I’m giving you Cantor Julia Kadrain of the Central
Synagogue (a Reform shul in Midtown Manhattan) leading it for Yom Kippur 5776
(nine years ago).
May your name be sealed in the Book of Life.
©2024 Bas Bleu
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