Kol Nidrei – Freeing the Individual to Change His Mind

By Yaacov Mascetti*

What is the point of staging a public ceremony at the very beginning of the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, by virtue of which all obligations, all “nedarim,” namely all those verbally established behavioral frameworks which the individual decides to fashion regardless of the existing orthopraxis, are annulled and considered as inexistent? Here is the translated text from Wikipedia:

All vows, and prohibitions, and oaths, and consecrations… that we may vow, or swear, or consecrate, or prohibit upon ourselves, from the previous Day of Atonement until this Day of Atonement and… from this Day of Atonement until the Day of Atonement that will come for our benefit. Regarding all of them, we repudiate them. All of them are undone, abandoned, cancelled, null and void, not in force, and not in effect. Our vows are no longer vows, and our prohibitions are no longer prohibitions, and our oaths are no longer oaths.
Last week, at a lesson given at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem by Rabbi Dr Ariel Picard, it dawned on me that there’s a lot more to this ceremony than the dry, rather boring halachic performance which, at least for me, has always provided a stark anti-climax to the whole Yom Kippur experience. Allow me to elaborate on Rav Picard’s brilliant reading of the whole “neder” business.

A neder is the an individual’s solemn declaration, formulated using the name of God, by virtue of which he or she accepts a self-made pledge – the neder is a self-imposed framework, constructed with words, within which the individual accepts the obligations related to the pledge with the same importance of halakha. While I lack the competency to delve into the meanders of nedarim (there is a whole tractate in the Gemara, and the term is mentioned 33 times in the whole Torah), I certainly can say that a neder is the result of a person’s resolution to perform according to a certain behavioral system for a specific time span. This self-imposition is the result of a resolution, either positive or negative (both possibilities are conceived), and may provide the individual with a base of behavioral steadiness – one might even say, coherence. Side by side with this concept, the Rabbinical tradition has devised what is called “hatarat nedarim,” the annulment of the neder, which is performed by a rabbinical court (made up of a minimum of three men), and by means of which the individual is freed of his or her self-imposed obligations. So what we have here is a typical example of how the rabbinical tradition expresses a great deal of discomfort with what is seen by the Torah as a perfectly acceptable act – while the biblical text establishes that one can construct these behavioral frameworks, the rabbis conceive a way for the individual to undo that pledge. The Mishnah in the Hagiga Tractate, Chap. 1 Mishna 8 states the following:

“The rules about release from vows hover in the air and have naught to support them; the rules about the Sabbath, Festal offerings and Sacrilege are as mountains hanging by a hair, for teaching of Scripture thereon is scanty and the rules many; the rules about cases concerning property and the Temple service, and the rules about what is clean and unclean, and the forbidden degrees, they have that which supports them, and it is they that are the essentials of the Law.”

This is actually quite extraordinary – the rabbis state here that the whole system devised by tradition in order to free the individual from self-imposed pledges, obligations which one creates verbally at some stage of a life in need for stability and coherence, that system actually “hovers in the air,” lacking the foundations of a solid structure. While I’ll leave the discussion of the Sabbath and the endless regulations defining the sabbatical rest and how this specific mishna defines that complicated system as “mountains hanging by a hair,” I wish to emphasize here the fact that hatarat nedarim is, for this specific rabbinical voice, senseless – legally it is based on nothing. So why do hazal make such an effort to create this supposedly legally-baseless device to undo the neder?

In the Gemara, Hagiga Tractate 10a, within the framework of a long discussion on the above-mentioned Mishnah, Rav Yehosua is quoted in a baraita, saying that “They [the rabbis] do have something to base [their conception of hatarat nedarim] on – for it is said [in Psalm 95:11] ‘I declared on oath in my anger,’ I made an oath and then changed my mind.” In the passage quoted by Rav Yehoshua, Gd himself is shown as the prototype of he who makes an oath (which is not exactly the same thing as a neder), and then changes his mind. In Psalm 95 Gd says:
Today, if only you would hear his voice,
Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah,
as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness,
where your ancestors tested me;
they tried me, though they had seen what I did.
For forty years I was angry with that generation;
I said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray,
and they have not known my ways.’
So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’”

In his anger, following the hardening of the hearts of the Israelites in the desert, Gd swears that they will never enter Israel – he wears something which then, Rav Yehoshua argues, he takes back, because as we know the Israelites eventually enter the land of Israel and eventually do attain Gd’s rest. So if Gd changes his mind, why shouldn’t people do so too?

Now, beyond the interesting legal dynamics here, and the mind-boggling exegetical warfare between generations of rabbis, I am going to focus here on something which Rav Picard said and which touched me. The discussion which is presented here is between two fronts: there are those who, in the heat of a moment, whether because of anger or religious enthusiasm or whatever else, are convinced that verbally constructing frameworks of behavioral obligation is an acceptable practice; and then there are those who acknowledge that this is a tendency in human behavior, but nevertheless wish to keep a window open for those who change their minds at some point. If we consider the individual as an ever-changing being, a thinking creature who mutates in his or her ideas, feelings, understanding of life, etc., and who is perpetually at search for meaning, a neder can be seen as a device conceived to freeze what William of Baskerville in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose calls “the infinite whirl of possible things.” A neder is an obligation conceived by a person here and now, which will be binding also for that same person tomorrow, after tomorrow, in a month or even in a year – regardless of the changes, the neder-making individual wishes to scoff away the whirl of possible changes, and to enforce a regularity upon himself. Part of the rabbinical tradition does not consider this as an entirely acceptable practice – the hatarat nedarim, the annulment of those pledges, is conceived specifically because people change, because the human being mutates with time, and what is decided today may very well not be right or applicable tomorrow. And if I can just go for the slam-dunk here, as my beloved supervisor used to call it, one might even say with Rav Yehoshua that if Gd changes his mind, then we are most certainly also allowed to do so too. Go ahead, make a neder if you must, but know that we are aware of the fact that tomorrow, when the enthusiasm dies off or when the anger stops enflaming and blinding your understanding of things, you will see things in a different way – at that point, know that you can change and undo the neder.

On Yom Kippur, to conclude, we are allowed to just be, regardless of the webs of obligations, regardless of the deeply involved performances in our daily lives. Yom Kippur is a day of introspection, of silence, prayer, and, ultimately, change.

*Ph.D., Department of Comparative Literature, Bar Ilan University