Kol Nidrei Sermon

I wish I had a way to send a recording of the tune to which I am referring. If you want to hear it, please post or email me and I will send it to you. Many thanks to Rabbi Larry Hoffman for this gem which he taught our class right before the High holy Day break. He, like this teaching, is a treasure and a real gift.

Remember that tune we learned last week? Well there is more I want to tell you about it. Not only is it the music of the holy days, it is the holy days. We begin with the upbeat-ya dai dai dai dai dai dai dai

This is Rosh Hashanah. According to two recently ordained HUC rabbis, the prayers for the New Year are all about birth and when the earth was conceived. If we remember, we repeated again and again, this is the birthday of the world! A major part of the day was the blowing of the shofar. Traditionally, on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, we read about another birth; that of Isaac’s. According to some of the Rabbis, the sound of the shofar is the sound of a mother’s birth pangs and the tekiyah gdolah is the sound of the final push of setting new life off into the world.

Then we have the ten days in between-dai DAI dai dai dai dai dai…These reflect a condensed life lived, hopefully, righteously. These days give us the opportunity to think about and act on our ideal life of how we would want to live.

And then we move to Yom Kippur di di di di daidididi dai (2x) which is much more somber and sad. Yom Kippur is about our death. You know how people say, what if this was the last day of my life? I wonder what I would do, how I would feel? Well, we, as Jews, have the opportunity to practice the last day of our life once a year. We fast and tomorrow we will stand for a long time. By the end of the day, it feels like you are dead. Many people wear white-the same as a burial shroud. Some do not bathe or brush teeth. It is as if our bodies do not exist. We feel and look tired, haggard and worn out.

In a few moments, we will rise, remove the Torah from the ark and begin the confession of our sins. Staring at the empty ark is like staring into an empty coffin. We get to ask ourselves the question, what if I did die today? What if this was the last day of my life? Have I really lived? Have I lived like I wanted to? Put liturgy, our sages, our day are giving us this chance to ask this question and it is up to you to seek out the answers

But the tune does not end there. Dai dai dai dai, di didi dai dai DAI! We end on this high note. The liturgy has us say the Vidui or confession where we hit out chest and in the Al chet,we have sinned against you, twice. In these prayers we confess our sins. We say both prayers in all of the services we do except the last one; Neila, the closing service tomorrow evening. In that service we only say the vidui or confessional, not al chet, we have sinned against you. In the closing service we add a new prayer where we say that God will reach out a hand. The liturgy tells us, God does not want us to continue to beat ourselves up for what we have done. We have repented enough. It is time to move on to our chance to live the lives we have envisioned, to be the ideal we strive to be.

The message is this: We are creatures that were born and creatures who will die. The ten days of repentance are a condensed life. We end Yom Kippur with a tekiyah gdolah; the long loud shofar blast. This is the sound of our rebirth; a life after our death.