The Irony of Kol Nidre

How Babylonian magic found its way into the synagogue

The first fully comprehensive, Jewish prayer book was compiled around the year 870 CE by Amram Gaon. He was the head of the academy in Sura, the southernmost of the Talmudic academies sited between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, in a small cluster around Baghdad. The Jews still referred to the region by its ancient name of Babylon. It was where the Talmud had been compiled three or four centuries earlier.

In his prayer book Amram included a declaration which some people recited on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Although he printed the declaration, he prohibited its use. He called it a foolish custom.

As his name indicates, Amram was a gaon, a title given to the most senior rabbinic scholars in Babylon; the acknowledged centre of the Jewish world in those days. He was by no means the first gaon (pl: geonim) to prohibit the declaration, over the previous hundred years or so a succession of geonim had objected to it. They regarded it as superstitious and worthless. It was not a prayer and it had no precedent in the Bible or rabbinic literature. As a legal declaration it was erroneous and ineffective. As a personal statement it made little sense. They did not know who had first written it or what its origins were but it seemed suspiciously like something composed by one of the many magicians and sorcerers who the local people relied on when times were bad or when they had to face a powerful enemy.

The declaration is Kol Nidre; the formula recited at the very beginning of the Yom Kippur evening service. It is the best known of all Jewish liturgical pieces. Recited on the one evening in the year when all the synagogues are full, Kol Nidre is heard by more people than any Jewish liturgical piece. Sung to a captivating melody, often with a choral backing, it is one of those rare pieces of Jewish liturgy that holds the congregation’s almost complete attention

The melody of Kol Nidre has its own history.  In 1927 Al Jonson sang it in The Jazz Singer, a movie that was remade three more times, twice for the cinema and once for TV. Beethoven adapted it as an adagio in the 6th movement of his String Quartet No. 14. The adagio found its way into the 2001 Band of Brothers TV series.*

The 9th century attempt to prohibit Kol Nidre has evidently not worked.

Those geonim who objected to Kol Nidre (and not all did), regarded it as worthless because its purpose is to annul one’s vows simply by reciting it. Vows in ancient times were extremely grave matters; to break a vow was to invite catastrophic heavenly or demonic retribution. In Judaism vows were taken so seriously that the law courts would rely on the word of even the most hardened criminals if they gave their testimony under oath. Unlike today, the possibility that they might commit perjury was wholly disregarded. Nobody, it was believed, would run the risk of making a false vow.

Since oaths and vows were such a serious matter the Talmudic authorities strongly discouraged their use. Although there were legal devices through which a court could release someone from a vow, the conditions under which this could happen were strictly limited. It was better not to vow at all than to rashly utter a vow which could not be undone.

The Kol Nidre declaration flew in the face of the Talmud’s advice. The idea that one could make a declaration in synagogue releasing oneself from all past vows undermined the seriousness and gravity of vowing. It meant that anyone could make an oath or a vow at any time, knowing they could release themselves from it by reciting Kol Nidre at Yom Kippur. To try to get round this, in the 12th century some religious authorities changed the wording of the declaration to annul future instead of past vows. It didn’t work; all it meant was that people could now make vows knowing that they had given themselves an opt-out at the previous Yom Kippur.

The other geonic objection to Kol Nidre was that it was superstitious. The concern was based on  the form of the declaration; a string of ten words, all of which have a similar meaning to vows. The words are in Aramaic, the language that was spoken in Babylon where the geonim lived. Archaeologists working in the area and around Mesopotamia have found similar lists of words inscribed on bowls buried face down in the earth at the entrance to ancient dwellings.

Dozens of the ‘magic bowls’ have been found buried in the ancient Babylonian earth. Their surfaces are crammed with closely spaced, tiny words setting out spells and incantations. Some bowls seem to have been written to protect the inhabitants of the house they were buried in front of. Others were placed there by malefactors hoping to curse the dwelling’s residents.

The similarities between the Kol Nidre formula and the wording on the magic bowl is intriguing. It has been suggested that rather than being a formula to annul vows, Kol Nidre was originally a formula intended to annul spells or curses. If so, the purpose of reciting it on Yom Kippur was to cancel spells cast by the person reciting the declaration, maybe in error or in anger, over the past year.

The idea that the Kol Nidre was originally a formula to rescind unwanted or injudicious spells explains why the geonim considered the declaration to be superstitious. The Torah makes it very clear that there is no place for sorcery or witchcraft in Judaism. We can’t be sure what Amram and the other geonim thought about sorcery. Perhaps they thought that sorcery was nonsense and that the superstition lies in reciting a formula trying to annul sorcerous spells. More probably they thought that there is a potency to witchcraft. If so, it would be superstition to imagine that a spell could be annulled so easily. Spells would be like vows, once they were made there was no going back.

The irony is that the Kol Nidre formula which the leading rabbis of the 8th and 9th centuries tried to ban has become the best known of all Jewish legal formulae. It is not a prayer, it is not profound, the essence of the Day of Atonement would not be radically altered if it were never said.  But in the popular imagination the recital of Kol Nidre is a solemn moment. It has even given its name to the service in which it is recited; the service on the eve of Yom Kippur is known as Kol Nidre.

There is nothing particularly remarkable about this. The Jewish faith stresses the importance of challenge and enquiry. And what is more challenging than trying to come to terms with why we attach so much importance to reciting a declaration that we may not even know the meaning of, and which, in many venerable opinions, should never have been recited at all? An English political leader recently said that Jews don’t understand irony. Kol Nidre proves they do.

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*Thanks to Rowan Davies at the wonderful Metropolitan for pointing this out. The Metropolitan is a fascinating newsletter about the pop-culture and social experience of Generation X. Everyone should read it, no matter what generation you are. metropolitan.substack.com