Kol Nidre–Three Times: Listening & Being Heard
(delivered by Rabbi Sacks on September 24, 2023)
Kol Nidre draws us in, with its haunting melody, its historical and mythic associations, its solemn and dramatic ritual setting, and its strategic location leading us into the Yom Kippur fast. This year, as I meditated in preparation, I pondered the question, “Why do we repeat Kol Nidre three times?
None of the machzorim[1] explain this. Some note that it should be done as Rabbi Light beautifully did this evening. The first repetition is done hesitantly in a low voice, and each following repetition grows in confidence as we approach the awe, majesty, and gravity of the moment and the day, before the sifrei Torah[2] and before G!d.
Furthermore, it turns out that three Kol Nidre recitations is not universal. For example, in Worms, Germany, Kol Nidre is recited only twice, while in Aleppo, Syria, it is recited seven times. Some state that since Kol Nidre should be linked to the timing of Yom Kippur that it is recited as many times as needed until the moment that the community can properly begin the Yom Kippur Ma’ariv[3] prayers.
So why has most of the Jewish world landed on three? Well, in an introduction to the machzor that he edited and commented on, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the late Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, and of no known relation to any other Rabbi Sacks who may be in this room, offered a possibility. He writes that in the Old World, if you had a grievance and could not get a hearing, you could go to the synagogue and bang on the Torah reading table three times–yes, three times–and the service would be delayed until an acceptable plan to hear your problem was arranged.
Quite a dramatic scene when you think about it–and quite moving. Picture it: No one would pray until you were heard and satisfied that you would be addressed. According to Rabbi Sacks, this Old-World remedy for communal conflict found its way into Yom Kippur evening: Kol Nidre is repeated three times as a symbol of the need to listen and be heard.
Kol Nidre reminds us to listen to others. Hearing this helps me to frame important social movements. The MeToo Movement protests are a striking of the Torah table to call out the shameful reality of discrimination, harassment, and sexual violence against women that remains pervasive in our society.
We might also think of the Black Lives Matter movement protests following the murder of George Floyd. Thousands of people took to the streets then and banged on the metaphoric Torah table of America, crying out, “Enough is enough! No more business as usual! We demand to be heard!”
The same can be said for the way white, rural, working-class America has taken a turn to the right. What they, too, are saying is, “We’ve had enough! You can’t ignore us anymore! Our jobs are disappearing; our towns are dying; we’re ravaged by the opioid epidemic. We demand a hearing!’”
One of the most potent symbols of these Yamim Nora’im, these Days of Awe, is the Shofar and its shrill, startling sound. The mitzvah, however, is not to blow the shofar but to hear it, to wake up from our moral and ethical slumber: “Wake up! A new year is here. Wake up and listen to the cry of the oppressed, to the vulnerable. Wake up and listen!”
So, the first Kol Nidre table pounding that calls to me this holy night is the airing of grievances, the demand for a hearing from many quarters in our public square. People want to be heard. Leaders on all sides of the aisle–and the rest of us Americans–need to do a better job of listening.
But the need to listen to others is powerful in our private world as well. How often do we feel heard? How well do we listen to each other? It’s humbling to think about. When I review the past year, more often than not my conflict with someone was really a miscommunication. Perhaps I misunderstood what the other person said. Worse, I presumed to understand why they said what they said, without my inquiring. I may get distracted, or tired, or triggered, but either I either stop listening, or I don’t hear what the other person actually said.
These kinds of miscues remind me of cell phone ads where the reception is poor and the person on the receiving end of the phone call always incorrectly hears a key part of the conversation. In one, it’s a couple’s anniversary: he says, “I love you” and she hears, “I bought glue.” Another concerns a business dinner. One caller advises the other to wear something basic that doesn’t make her look like she’s attending a costume party; however, the woman only hears “costume party” and attends the dinner in a medieval gown with a matching headpiece, ready to gnaw on an oversized turkey leg.
And it is not just verbal communication that’s a problem. Email is even worse. We read it too quickly, only half engaged. Or the email starts with a harsh word and–boom!–before you know it, you are furiously typing a reply. If you are aware enough or lucky enough to recover your senses, you will pause and re-read before you hit send. If you are not so lucky, you will hit “send” and then break into a panic realizing that your response was to a different email, one that you conjured up in your fight-or-flight-flooded brain!
A cartoon in the New Yorker beautifully expressed this experience. It shows a man with a sci-fi looking metal contraption over his head with the caption, “I’ve invented a time travel machine to go back and hit ‘unsend.’”
Deeper understanding means discerning the message behind or beyond the words. We often forget that we come to conversations with the sum total of our experiences–all of our family history, all of our professional experiences, all of our personal interactions. The stakes in any conversation, what it fully means to each party, will always be different. Instead of raising our voices, we would do better to stop and actively hear each other. We might treat another’s earnest words as if they came from that person’s inner shofar. Remember? The mitzvah is to listen. When we listen well, we are attuned to the words being said, sure, but we are also keyed into what is behind, or even beyond, the words. So, both in our public lives and in our everyday, personal interactions, the strains of Kol Nidre convey an urgency to pay attention to others.
As challenging as it can be to listen and really hear what others are trying to say, listening to our own voice, our own neshamah, our own soul, can be even more difficult. Sometimes it seems like we will do anything not to hear what is often an inner cry for a hearing. Kol Nidre, the plaintive melody and its repetition, bypasses our defenses and speaks directly to our often-starved souls, inviting a response.
What keeps us from hearing the voice of our inner beloved, our soul? One possibility: Our pain. This becomes clearer when we meditate. Most of us come to meditation to feel better in some way, and we often think that means leaving our hurts and our heartaches behind. That does often happen at first, as we learn to sit quietly and calmly. But inevitably the initial relief gives way to an increased awareness of our pain and all our defenses against it. The practice of meditation doesn’t allow us to escape discomfort, but rather to learn to sit with it and have compassion for ourselves and for everyone else.
Naomi Shihab Nye writes about the desire to escape pain in her poem, “The Rider”:
A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.
Avoiding pain seems like a good idea, but there is no bicycle that will allow us to out-ride our sadness, our loneliness, our fear. Nevertheless, we try. We fill our calendars, work too much, eat and drink too much, over medicate (hence the opioid epidemic), and various other things, all in order not to feel our own pain. Our soul wants us to wake up, but we are desperate to go “comfortably numb,” and that is always a dead end. In her now famous Ted Talk on vulnerability, the social scientist, speaker, and author Brene Brown addresses this when she states:
“You can’t numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our
emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those
[distressing feelings], we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb
happiness. And then we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose
and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of
beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle.”
So, Kol Nidre reminds us that kol dodi dofek, “our soul is knocking.” It needs our attention. Can we listen?
I have in mind one more knock, a third rapping on the Torah reading table that I think of this holiest of nights. It is the knock of the Holy One, HaShem, the Ground of All Being. G!d raps on the table tonight and demands a hearing.
In years past, it’s been the other way around. We demanded the hearing! We were quick to point out all the ways that the God of our Machzor was all wrong. We wanted an explanation for all the injustice and suffering; the seemingly random cruelty of existence.
Tonight, I suggest that we all declare a ceasefire against G!d. It is spiritually exhausting, but the actual crux of the matter is that the clamor of the battle against what we don’t believe makes figuring out what we do believe very difficult.
Radio talk show host and author Michael Crazny in his book Let There Be Laughter offers:
So, a man for 30 years has been praying every day at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. One day a reporter looking for a good human interest story interviews him and asks, “So what do you pray for?”
He thinks for a second, strokes his beard, and then replies, “I pray for peace in the Middle East, honest politicians, the end of hunger, famine, and war.”
“Very interesting,” responds the reporter. “How does it feel to do this every day?”
“Like I’m praying to a wall!”
Struggling with the God we don’t believe in feels to me like praying to a wall. It’s tiring and not so fruitful. What happens when we put down the struggle and try to just listen with our hearts. What do we hear? What do you hear?
To start, here is some of what I hear when I listen:
I hear a longing for connection, compassion, love, and for shalom in the fullest sense of the word.
I hear the voice of the Other, the cry of oppressed people everywhere; and I recognize that our response is also God.
I hear–and feel in my bones–the sweet song of Creation as well as her cry.
I hear the sound of a river and then I feel it moving through me, a River of Light, carrying us all along, the River that flows from Eden, the River that waters our Garden, the River of Life and Death and everything in between.
No, I don’t hear the voice of a Ruler or Parent. It’s o.k. if you do. The images that we apply to the Divine are all metaphors, all attempts to describe something we have no words for.
That is what Elijah the prophet learned. If you recall, Elijah comes to every Seder in every Jewish home and drinks a cup of wine. Well, he was also a prophet who spoke truth to power, and it got him in trouble. He had to flee for his life. He ended up in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights seeking G!d. There was a tornado, but G!d was not in the tornado. There was an earthquake, but G!d wasn’t there either. There was even a fire, but G!d was also not there. Where did Elijah find G!d? In the kol d’mamah dakah, in a still, small, voice.[4]
Kol Nidre compels us to seek G!d, to listen for G!d, to hear the still, small voice within us and around us.
We have explored why we chant Kol Nidre three times. This is what we learn. Kol Nidre is repeated three times to emphasize the need to be heard and the need to listen:
- To listen to the voices of other people, whether on a large scale or with our closest, most intimate and dear people in our lives.
- To listen to the voices of our own souls, our heart’s deepest yearning.
- And to listen for the still small voice of G!d, the voice of something infinite, something divine, something holy.
May the power of Kol Nidre and the catharsis of the Yom Kippur day, help us to bang on the Torah reading table three times and better express our need to be heard, and may we listen better, more actively, and more caringly to all the voices in our lives. Amen.
G’mar chatimah tovah!
[1] Plural of machzor, the special prayer book for holy days.
[2] Torah scrolls.
[3] The name for the evening prayer service.
[4] I Kings 19:11-12.