arts & entertainment

Perfect Complements

Prayer and justice work hand-in-hand.

Jill Jacobs
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

New York

I

n contemporary Jewish discourse,
the worlds of the synagogue and the
worlds of service and advocacy sit
far apart. The former is a place of intro-
spection, of prayer and of relationship
with God. The latter is a place of action
and engagement in the world.
Many of us distinguish between "reli-
gious" Jews and "secular" Jews. Religious
Jews attend synagogue, observe Shabbat
and keep kosher. For secular Jews, their
primary involvement comes through
culture and justice.
But these boundaries between prayer
and justice, and between the internal
and the external, are foreign to Judaism.
Halachah, most often translated as
"Jewish law:' literally means "the way
to walk." To be a Jew is to walk through
the world in a Jewish way. This Jewish
way includes contemplation and action,

prayer and service, relationships with
the Divine and relationships with other
human beings.
On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur,
many Jews spend more hours in the
synagogue than at any other time dur-
ing the year. For this reason,
these holidays can feel
purely contem-
plative. Yet Rosh
Hashanah is also
yom teruah, "the
day of sounding
the shofar," when we
hear the sound that
the Torah associates
with liberation. And
Yom Kippur morn-
ing is punctuated with
Isaiah's call to "loose the
chains of injustice ... to
set the oppressed free."
These intrusions of
real-life politics into the contem-
plative business of prayer remind us
that prayer and justice work were never
meant to be separate realms of behavior.

Rather, the two constitute complemen-
tary aspects of an integrated Jewish life.
In this integrated life, prayer and ritual
push us toward justice work and sustain
us in these efforts.
We often think of prayer as a
one-way conversation with God.
We praise God for everything
that is good in the world and
beg for supernatural forces to
change what is not. Instead,
we might understand prayer
as a two-way exchange that
includes a challenge to us
as well as an appeal to
God.
For example, Jews each
morning traditionally
recite a series of bless-
ings about everyday
miracles. We give
thanks for our vision, our free-
dom, our clothing and our other basic
needs. For those who have what they
need to survive, these blessings remind
us to be grateful for what we have, even
when every one of our desires might

Rabbi Jill Jacobs

not be fulfilled. For those who are strug-
gling to get by, these blessings offer
hope that our situations will improve.

The Appeal Of Kol Nidre

Reflections on a "superstition-laden" prayer.

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

New York

O

n his way to converting to

Christianity, philosopher Franz
Rosenzweig attended Yom
Kippur services and was so moved
that he decided to remain Jewish. One
look at the most famous prayer for the
occasion makes it hard to believe that
he did not abandon Judaism all the
quicker.
Kol Nidre actually is no prayer at all.
Rather it is a legal formula in Aramaic
that delineates obscure categories of
vows and oaths known to the Bible
and the rabbis, and then solemnly pro-
claims that we are free of them.
The origin of this concern was our
ancestors' anxiety over reneging on
promises sworn in God's name. The
Talmud permitted such oaths to be
canceled, but only one by one and in
the presence of a talmudic sage. The
idea of a blanket-nullification was

104

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anathema to rabbis who first heard of
it in the eighth and ninth centuries and
denounced it as "a foolish custom."
But no one listened.
The prayer had emerged alongside
a parallel practice of smashing
clay pottery on which
a formula to
annul vows
had been
engraved, the
idea being that
your enemy
might have
conjured evil
spirits and forced
them magically to
promise you harm.
Breaking the bowl
would free them
from their promise.
Here, then, is a
superstition-laden
prayer that was condemned by rabbinic
authorities but stuck anyway. Its final
version reflects a 12th-century sub-
stitution of "vows made in the future"
for "vows made in the past:' so as to

do away with its obvious disregard for
talmudic law.
Even so, it hardly represented
Judaism at its moral best. In the
19th century it fueled German anti-
Semitism to the point where Jews
were hauled into court and forced
to swear that they would be held
answerable for the truth of any
oath they took there.
Despite all this, Kol Nidre per-
sisted, eventually supplied with
unforgettable music and the
choreography of a courtroom
trial held before God.
Jews were chanting it as far
back as 11th-century France;
14th-century German
cantors were prolong-
ing the melody to make
sure latecomers got to
hear it. Polish Rabbi Mordecai Jaffe
(1530-1612) sought in vain to change
the text because cantors resisted cou-
pling the age-old melody to new lyrics.
Nineteenth- and 20th-century rabbis
tried to substitute Psalms or write a
new prayer altogether.

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman

A more successful subterfuge was t
play Kol Nidre on a musical instrume
without words or to chant the prayer
but omit the words (especially in trar
lation) from the prayer book.
What attracts us to this strangely