Kol Nidre

Presentation of the prayer

Before the sun does not lie down at the time of the day before the Jour of the Atonement, the congregation meets in the Synagog. The Arche is open; two people (of the men in the orthodoxe ritual) withdraw of it each one a roller of the Torah. They position then around the cantor, and entonnent with him:

“In the name of the council of in top and in the name of the council of in bottom, with the assent of Omnipresent the — rented is — and with the assent of this holy congregation, we declare that it is allowed to request with the transgressors”

The cantor entonne then the prayer begin with the words Kol Nidre , which he repeats three times with his melody, by raising volume gradually, of pianissimo (very soft) to fortissimo (very extremely):

Tous wishes that we could make since this day of Kippour until that of the next year (that it is favourable for us), any prohibition or sentence of anathema which we would pronounce against ourselves, any deprivation or renunciation that, by simple word, wish or oath we could assert ourselves, we retract them in advance; that they all are declared nonvalid, are cancelled, dissouts, are null and not which occurred; that they have neither force nor value; that our wishes are not looked like wishes, nor our oaths like serments.

The officiant and the congregation say three times of continuation then “And he will be forgiven at all the community of the children of Israel and abroad which remains among them; because the error was common to all the people. ” One replaces the books of the Torah, and one begins the office of the evening.

Philip Birnbaum, in its traditional edition of the Mahzor explains in connection with this passage why it only refers to wishes assumed by an individual for him, and where no left third is implied. Although the context returns perfectly clearly that no wish or obligation towards others is implied, of many people were carried to believe incorrectly that by this formula, all their wishes and oaths would be dissouts. With, the rabbi Meir Ben Shmouel (the son-in-law of Rachi) changed the phrased original one of Kol Nidre , in order to return the applicable version ashkénaze for the future rather than the past; i.e. with the wishes which one could be unable to fill in the year with venir.
La version séfarade always refers to the past year.

Certain commentators affirm that Kol Nidre is not a prayer as well as a declaration before the prayer of Yom Kippour does not start. This opinion is based largely on the fact that the text of Kol Nidre supports on the request which the informant is not held for person in charge to carry out the promises that the faithful ones will make during the 25 next hours.

Origin

The tendency to make wishes with God was strongly prévalente in old Israel, and this since the biblical time, since the Torah finds necessary to warn against the practice: “If you make a wish with the Eternal, your God, you will not delay to achieve it: because the Eternal, your God, would ask you for account of it, and you would undertake a sin. If you abstain from making a wish, you will not make a sin. But you will observe and you will achieve what will leave your lips, consequently the wishes which you will voluntarily make with the Eternal, your God, and which your mouth will have pronounced. ” (Deutéronome 23:21 - 23)

this was the cause of a desire of dispensation, which generated the rite of discharge of a wish ( hatarat nedarim ). This one could be realized only by one scholar, an expert or a court of three Jews profanes.
Les petitioners stated to want to reconcile itself with God, solemnly retracted their wishes and oaths which they had made intervening with God during the period between the preceding day of the Atonement at the day of the Atonement present; this rite made them null and nonwhich occurred since the beginning, allowing their place divine forgiveness. This is in agreement with the oldest known formula of the text, preserved in the Siddour of Amram Gaon.

Adoption in the offices of prayer

The speed with which the wishes were pronounced and facility with which they were demolished by the scribes was scoffed by the Karaïte S, adversaries of the rabbinical Judaïsme, which saw there as well a proof of a laxism of the Talmud as inconsistency of those which followed it. In reaction, the Gueonim , directing Babylonian Judaism at the beginning of the the Middle Ages, minimized the capacity of cancellation. The rabbi Yehoudaï Gaon of Soura (760 of the common era), author of the Halakhot Pesouqot, declared prohibited the study of Nedarim , the treaty talmudic on the wishes. The siddour of Amram Gaon mentions Kol Nidre only for décrier the habit to recite it, describing it as “idiot” ( Minhag shetout ). The Kol Nidre was thus discredited in the two Babylonian academies, and was not accepted by them.

According to others, however, it was usual to recite the formula in the various countries of the Jewish Diaspora, and it is also obvious according to Dissour d' Amram which this use was widespread of its time in Spain. However, the gueonic practice not to recite the Kol Nidre was a long time prévalente, and it forever adopted in the Catalan or Algerian rite.

In addition to the Kol Nidre , a habit, which one can recall with Rabbi Meïr de Rothenburg, developed to make precede Kol Nidre by the formula starting with “In the name of the council by in top. ” It gives the permission to the transgressors of the Law or to the people banished “to request with the congregation,” or according to another version, to the congregation to request with the transgressors. This habit was spread from Germany in France, in Spain, in Greece, before being generally adopted.

It was advanced at one time that the Kol Nidre had been composed by Marranes, constrained Jews of the Iberian peninsula to conversion with the Christianisme, but secretly remained in their Jewish faith. This assumption is without historical base, the prayer having been made up of the centuries before this time. However, the prayer was well recited by the Marranes.

Modification of the time of spent to the future

An important modification of phrased Kol Nidre was carried out by the son-in-law of Rachi of Troyes, the rabbi Meïr Ben Samuel, who changed the sentence “of the last day of the Atonement to this one” into “this day of the Atonement to the following. ” Cancellation thus did not relate to any more the A posteriori , of the obligations not-filled during the past year, but the A priori , referring to wishes that one cannot fill or that one could forget to observe during the year to come. Meïr Ben Samuel added in the same way “we repent all these,” the true repentance being a condition of cancellation. The reasons given to these modifications were that a cancellation of the wishes Ex post facto was meaningless, and that moreover, nobody could agree a cancellation, which can be delivered only by one council of three laymen or a qualified judge.

It seems that it is however his/her son Rabbenou Tam, who consigned the deteriorations made by his father, and tried moreover to modify the verbal forms of the sentences, “which we contracted” becoming “that us contractions. ” However, that it is about a persistence of a text whose old version was well anchored, or which Rabbenou Tam did not correct these verbal forms in a consistent way, the old verbal forms are still of use, at the beginning of the formula, although a connotation of future their is given following the modifications of Meïr Ben Samuel.

These modifications, which agreed to the opinions Isaac ibn Ghayyat, were integrated in the German, Polish rite and of the north of France, like in the rites influenced by those, but they were not it in the rites Spanish, Roman and of Provence. The “old version” thus is usually called the version séfarade. In certain prayer books, old and new versions appear sometimes side by side.

Other modifications

In Siddour d' Amram Gaon and Mahzor of Rome, the formula is written in Hebrew, starting with Kol Nedarim . However, the current formulation is araméenne, and the words “as he is written in the doctrines of Brace Your servant,” which appeared in these old forms before Nombres 15:26, were cancelled by Meïr de Rothenburg.

Modus operandi of the recitation

As for the manner according to which the Hazzan must recite the Kol Nidre, the Mahzor Vitry gives the following instructions: “The first time, it owes the entonner very gently, as a person who hesitates to enter the palate of the king in order to obtain one present of him, that it fears to approach; the second time, it can speak a little more extremely; and the third time, even more extremely, as a person who has her practices at the court and approach her sovereign like a friend. ”

If there is consensus on the fact that at least a delivers Torah must be left for the Kol Nidre , the exact number varied with the habits: some took only one of them, others two, three, seven or even all the rollers available. The Kol Nidre must be recited before laying down it sun, since the cancellation of a wish cannot be obtained at the time of a Chabbat or a feastday (unless the wish does not refer to the one these days).

Charges of perfidy by the anti-semites

The Kol Nidre was used by the Antisémite S to throw the doubt about the value which one could await from a wish contracted by a Jew. This attack had repercussions such as many legislators not-Jews considered necessary to have a form of special oath reserved to the Jews, and that many judges refused to grant the right to them to contract another oath, basing their objections on this prayer mainly. As of 1240, Yehiel of Paris was obliged to defend the Kol Nidre of these loads at the time of the disputation of Paris.

Answers to these charges

The Rabbin S from time immemorial insisted on the fact that the cancellation of the wishes in the Kol Nidre refers only to those which an individual voluntarily contracts for itself without implication of a left third or interest. The formula is restricted with the last wishes graft the man and God alone; it is without effect on the wishes contracted between men, and consequently on the oaths pronounced in front of a court, or a community. According to the Jewish doctrines, the only goal of this prayer is to grant protection towards the divine punishment in the event of violation of a wish.

Jewish reserves and oppositions to Kol Nidre

The prayer was not appreciated among the leaders and wise Jewish. In addition to Amram Gaon, four gueonim had decided in discredit of the recitation of the formula. Only Saadia Gaon was favorable there, by however limiting the use to wishes obtained of the congregation by extortion in times of persecution; he declared in addition that the Kol Nidre did not give any discharge to the oaths taken by an individual during the year.

Juda Ben Barzilaï, a Spanish author of declares in his work halakhic Sefer ha' Ittim, that the habit to recite the Kol Nidre was unjustifiable and misleading, since many ignoramuses were brought to believe that the formula cancelled purely and simply all the wishes and oaths, and thus swore with inconsistency.

For the same reason Yerouham Ben Meshoullam, which lived in Provence approximately two centuries later, inveighed those which, trusting the Kol Nidre , swore with any wind, and declared them unable to lend oath

Other voices rose, of which those of Yom Tov Ben Abraham Ashvili (death 1350), Isaac Ben Chechet, rabbi of Saragossa (death in 1406), the author of the " Collar Bo" () and Leon de Modena (death in 1648).

The printed mahzorim thus contain often comments and explanations of Kol Nidre aiming at clarifying the restrictions of application of the Kol Nidre .

In a more anecdotic way, because its judged opinion heretic would not have been taken into account, the Karaïte Juda Hadassi also fustigated this rabbanite use.

With

Because of the many complaints and charges formulated against the Kol Nidre during the centuries, a rabbinical conference held with Brunswick in 1844 decided unanimously that the formula was not essential, and that the members of convention should exert their influence to abolish the use quickly.

Other assemblies were held with in other places, and reflect the accent on the fact that " in the Kol Nidre , are only implied the wishes and obligations assumed voluntarily and contracted, so to speak, in front of God, therefore of exclusively religious nature; but are not to in no case included the obligations which refer to other people or matters non-religieuses".

Decision of conference was accepted by many congregations in Western Europe and in all communities reformed American, which while preserving the melody (whose many Jewish authors write that she played the main role in the safeguarding of the religious authority to the Kol Nidre ) substituted for the Formula One a German anthem or a Hebrew psalm, or modified the text which became “Can all the wishes rise with You having Which them children of Israel address their wishes, Seigneur, who they have returned to You with all their hearts, for this day of the Atonement with the next day, etc”.
Ces changes was badly accommodated and refused by the orthodoxe Jewish , of which Mr. Lehmann, editor of the “Israelit. ”

The melody

More famous still than the formulation is the melody classically used for its recitation, so much so that it was preserved even in the communities which had removed the text.

The alternatives are as numerous as the synagogs where it is sung, which have generally only the first joint agreement. These divergences are however not radical, and are due to the fact of having been made up not by one but by several cantors, who transmitted each one a distinct version, which followed all the rhapsodic method of the Hazzan out.

The musical structure of the Kol Nidre is built on a simple basis, the melody resulting from the mixture of a simple cantillation with a rich figuration. The opening of the Kol Nidre is what is called in the catholic Plain-chant a “Pneuma,” where one announces the words of opening by a long sighing tone going down in the low registers before going up, resembling a sigh intersected in sobs, only way judged acceptable for an officiant to inaugurate the Jour of the Atonement, rather than by starting it by familiar or monotonous sentences déclamatoires. The use seems to have started in the South of Germany.

Similarities with the Gregorian plainsong

Breslaur draws the attention to the similarity of these agreements with the first five measurements of the sixth movement of the four-bit byte out of C minor, COp 131 of Beethoven, “adagio quasi a poco andante. ”

This resemblance shows the original element around of which all the melody of the Kol Nidre was built. The pneuma given in the antiphonaires of the Saar and Ratisbon (or in booklets of catholic ritual music) like typical passage of the first Gregorian mode (or the notes in the natural scale going from " d" with " d" with " ré"), resembles quasi-exactement the figure which prevails throughout the Hebrew air, in all its alternatives, and reproduced still more precisely one of the agreements favorite.

The original reason for these sentences seems to be the agreement of melody so frequently repeated in the modern versions of the Kol Nidre during the introduction of each repetition. Such a reason is indeed repeated five times consecutively in the first sentence of the text in its simple form, the less elaborate Italian tradition, and in a way a little more elaborate four times following starting from the words nidrana lo nidre.

The septentrional traditions prefer to use in these moments its complement, in the second ecclesiastical mode of the Church, which extends as well in lower part as above the " ré" fundamental. The agreement, whatever the form, probably goes back to the Early middle ages, before, when the practice and the theory of the school of song of St Gall, from which such passages evolved/moved, influenced all the musics in the French countries and German where the melody of the Kol Nidre took form.

Therefore, a typical sentence in the Gregorian mode most familiar, daily heard by the Jews of the Rhineland in music as well ecclesiastical as layman, was considered to be suitable for the recitation of the Discharge of the Wishes, and it was then added there, at the same time as the “foreword” of Meïr de Rothenburg, an intonation introductrice which depended on the taste and the capacity of the officiant. Repeated many times, the figure of this central sentence were sometimes sung on a higher tone, sometimes on a lower tone. Those were then associated; and thus, the median section of the melody was gradually developed in its modern form.

Inspiration of other musical compositions

The prayer and its melody formed the base of a certain number of compositions of Classical music, including an arrangement of the prayer by Arnold Schoenberg, a concert for solo cello and orchestrates by max Bruch, an agreement for four-bit byte by John Zorn, and others.

The album of the Electric Plums, Release off Year Oath , subtitle and commonly The Kol Nidre according to its first title, is based on a combination of the liturgies Jewish and Christian.

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