The following was preached at Kol Nidre services at Kolot Chayeinu.
I grew up at Jewish summer camp. My childhood sky is
speckled with constellations of the great counselors who came before me—legends,
as we thought of them, almost gods. The stories we told about them: how one of
them hit a half-court shot at the buzzer to win the staff basketball game
against our rival camp; how another one was almost struck by lightening, and
subsequently shaved a lightening bolt into the side of his head. They were our
heroes; we worshipped them; and to some extent, we still do to this day.
Years later, I and my friends became the counselors, and
like the legends who came before us, we reveled in the larger-than-life tales
that sprouted up around us.
One of my campers, of whom I was quite fond, was a young man
named Aaron.[1] He
and I were similar: we were both kind of bookish, but also at camp, somehow
kind of cool; we were both into jazz; we even kind of looked alike. And so,
people started to refer to Aaron as my Mini Me. And I loved it.
Eventually, Aaron himself became a counselor, and one
summer, we were on staff together. Suddenly, the curtain was lifted; I was no
longer a legend and he was no longer my Mini Me. We were both just staff
members, trying to create a fun and safe summer.
One night during staff training week, there was a
conversation about role models who had made a difference in our lives. Aaron’s
parents had divorced the previous year, and so when it was his turn to talk
about a role model, Aaron said of his dad: “I learned this year that he’s not a
god, he’s just a man.”
I’ve never forgotten those words: “He’s not a god, he’s just
a man.” Cause while I know that Aaron was talking about his dad, I also know
that on some level, Aaron was talking about me—about the legends; about the
summer camp sky, so full god-like heroes; about our expectation that the world
is full of beauty, and our inevitable discovery that the world is also full of
disappointment.
===
The past several months, I’ve found myself wrestling not
with the god-like heroes of my childhood summers, but with God. This world, so
full of natural beauty—where a sequoia tree can live for 2,000 years, or a
trickle of water can carve out the Grand Canyon—is at the same time so full of
natural suffering—where illness strikes so arbitrarily, where merit isn’t
always rewarded, where love is inevitably met by death. What is this God—or
whatever else we might call it: this mystery, this force, this unfolding
process—what is this anomaly that caused the world to be so full of beauty and
yet at the same time so full of suffering?
===
I’ll save you the anticipation: I don’t have an answer.
We’ll come back to this question in a little bit. For now, I want to approach a
different anomaly—this one not coming from the world, but from our High Holiday
prayer book.
Kol nidre ve-esarei [v’charamei] … u-sh’vu’ot … la sharirin v-la kayamin. Nidrana la nidrei, ve-esarana
la esarei, u-sh’vu’atana la sh’vu-ot. / “All our vows, and all our promises
… and all our oaths [that we have sworn or will swear],[2] …
they are not valid and they are not in force. Our vows are not vows; our
promises are not promises; our oaths are not oaths.”
Anomalous, indeed, to find in our tradition this declaration
that our promises should not be considered reliable. Indeed, European Jews in
the early modern period sought to remove Kol Nidre from the Yom Kippur liturgy,
fearing that it would undermine the Jews’ “newly won acceptance within
[non-Jewish] society.”[3]
In our professional and personal lives, we and others depend
upon the reliability of our promises. “I do.” “Yes, I will.” “I’ll be there at
noon.” “You can count on me.” “I love you.” [4]
These are but a few of the vows, oaths, and promises we swear in our everyday
lives. We live in an economy of words: we buy other people’s trust with our
words, and our line of credit depends on the regularity with which our words
can be trusted.
While we may speak of an economy of words, our ancient near
eastern forebears thought of words as being powered by angels, demons, and
spirits. In their metaphor, every word that a human being uttered commissioned
an angel or a demon into action, to carry out the content of that word.
Historian Stuart Weinberg Gershon notes, that, “having set demons into motion,
rash words could not be taken back. ... When a person swore an oath, … it was
considered as if the [spirits] themselves had simultaneously undertaken an oath
to carry out the curses attached to them.”[5]
Hence, we find in the Hebrew Bible the troubling story[6] of
Yiftach and his daughter. Yiftach was a commander in the Israelite army, and on
the eve of a great battle, he made a careless vow to God, saying: “If You
deliver the enemy into my hands, then I will sacrifice to You the first thing I
see upon returning home.” Sure enough, Yiftach won the battle; but the first
thing he saw upon returning home was his daughter. And so, Yiftach did the terrible thing and sacrificed
his daughter—not from piety or zeal, but rather for fear of what kind of spirit
might strike down his daughter if he didn’t fulfill his vow.
Hence, the Book of Ecclesiastes declares: “It is better not
to make a vow than to make a vow and not fulfill it.”[7] In
the ancient metaphor of angels and demons, an unfulfilled vow was a safety
hazard; in our contemporary metaphor, an unfulfilled vow is like bad credit. In
either metaphor, an unfulfilled vow is a liability.
This liability arises from the fact that a word, once it’s
uttered, takes on a life of its own. The Talmud[8]
declares that verbal wrongdoing is more grievous than financial
wrongdoing—because while misused financial property may be restored to its
rightful owner, an ill-used word can never be restored to the mouth from which
it came.
Words have a life of their own. This may be exactly what our
biblical tradition is trying to express when we read: “God said, ‘Let there be
light.’ And there was light.” That verse is less about the origins of the world
than it is about the creative power of words. We create God in our image: just
as our words take on a life of their own, so too do we imaginatively propose
that this universe is the faint, distant echo of a divine speech-act.
So why, then, on this night, of all nights, does our
tradition—which so thoroughly affirms the irrevocable creative power of words—declare
that “our vows are not vows; our promises are not promises; and our oaths are
not oaths”? Why, then, this anomaly?
To approach the anomaly of Kol Nidre—and also the anomaly of
our beautiful world, so full of suffering—we travel to meet the ancient sage
Rav Abba bar Bar Channah.
The very name Rav Abba bar Bar Channah is already something
of anomaly. Without going into the mechanics of it all, suffice it to say his
parents named him something like: “My father, the grandson of his grandfather.”
Rav Abba bar Bar Channah is something like a Mini Me of his grandfather.
Rav Abba lived in Babylon in the 3rd century CE,
and he travelled often to the land of Israel to study in an academy there. The
Talmud tells fantastical stories about Rav Abba’s many travels. In one set of
stories,[9] Rav
Abba hires an otherworldly guide to take him on a mystical tour of the Sinai
desert—to see the many locations where the Israelites encamped during their 40
years of wandering in the desert. The tour guide takes Rav Abba to the place
where many among the generation of Moses and Miriam are buried. Their corpses are
giant, such that Rav Abba can walk underneath the bend in a corpse’s knee
without having to duck. The tour guide takes Rav Abba to the place where Korach
and his gang of rebels were swallowed up by the mouth of the earth. The crack
in the ground is still there, hissing out white steam and the faint voice of
Korach, croaking, “Moses spoke the truth; we all spoke in lies.” The tour guide
takes Rav Abba to the very place where heaven and earth kiss, where the wheels
of eternity grind—the place from which the sun rises and into which the moon
sets.
At last, the tour guide takes Rav Abba to the base of Mount
Sinai. But the place appears not as it is described in the biblical account—no
fire upon the mountain, no violent trembling of the earth, no blast of the
shofar. No—today, all is quiet. A pack of giant white scorpions, each one the
size of a donkey, guards the base of the mountain, such that Rav Abba and his
guide cannot approach.
From a distance, discreetly, Rav Abba hears a voice. Not the
thunderous Anochi that erupted from
the mountain in the days of Moses, but rather, a faint cry, soft, mournful,
feminine in tone. It is the voice of God, and she is weeping: “Woe is Me!” the
voice cries out, “Woe is Me! For I regret the oath I made to exile the people
of Israel. And alas, now that I have made that oath, who could release me from
it?”
Rav Abba hears the voice of God, however we understand
that—the mystery, the force, the unfolding process—the voice of the universe
saying: “Woe is Me! I spoke a word that I cannot un-speak. I created a world
that I cannot un-create. I regret that this universe so full of suffering. I
regret that illness strikes so arbitrarily. I regret that merit isn’t always
rewarded. I regret that love is inevitably met by death. But alas—now that the
universe has turned out this way, who could ever un-speak the world that I have
spoken?”
When Rav Abba returns to Babylon and tells his colleagues
about Mount Sinai, they say to him: “Rav Abba, you fool! You should have
responded and said: ‘Your vow is not a vow. Your promise is not a promise. Your
oath is not an oath.’ You should have said: ‘Kol nidre ve-esarei [v’charamei]….’”
But this isn’t what Rav Abba said. He remains silent.
Because Kol Nidre is, after all, only wishful thinking. A word is a word; and
it can’t be taken back. And the world is the world; and it can’t be taken back.
At the end of it all, the anomaly of Kol Nidre is that does not and cannot
annul our vows, no matter how much we might wish it could. What Kol Nidre does
give to us, and to others—and perhaps most importantly, to God—is the space to say:
“Woe is me! I have regrets that I cannot un-make.”
And by giving others the space to say, “I have regrets,” Kol
Nidre allows us to look up into that summer camp sky—so speckled with
constellations—and let those god-like legends down from the pedestals on which
we’ve placed them.
And by giving ourselves the space to say, “I have regrets,” Kol
Nidre allows a Rav Abba bar Bar Channah—who had only ever been known as a Mini
Me of his grandfather—to step out of that shadow and be known for his own story.
And by giving God the space to say, “I have regrets,” Kol
Nidre allows us to live in this world—so full of beauty and yet so full of
suffering—without wrestling every minute with all the anomaly.
This Kol Nidre, I’ll echo the words of my camper—my friend—Aaron:
“Not even God is a god; much more like a person.”
[1]
Names have been changed for the sake of anonymity.
[2] I
have intentionally chosen neither the Ashkenazi/Mizrachi future-tense nor the
Sephardi past-tense rendering of this verb. The difference in tenses between
these texts, while interesting to study, is not relevant to our current
discussion.
[3]
Gershon, Stuart Weinberg. Kol Nidre: Its
Origin, Development, and Significance. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc.,
1994. p. 130.
[4]
This list is based on: Wenig, Margaret Moers. “All Vows? No! Then, Which
Vows?” All These Vows: Kol Nidre. Ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman. Woodstock, VT:
Jewish Lights Publishing, 2011. p. 218
[5]
Gershon, p. 119
[6]
Judges 11
[7]
Ecclesiastes 5:4
[8]
Bava Metzia 58b
[9]
Bava Batra 74a
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