That we could come together and recite Kol Nidrei during our Yom Kippur services is because, despite the different attempts across history to ban this prayer, our ancestors – in the broad sense of the term – didn’t renounce it.
Rabbis in Europe during the 19th century were trained by European imperial states to act as representatives of their communities and were expected to prove that their community members were worthy of assimilation, meaning that they were ready to renounce their communities’ moral tools – of which Kol Nidrei is one – and be abided instead by imperial laws. In a world imperially fashioned, a community’s freedom to reexamine its choices and void those vows which it deems harmful was – and still is – seen as a mark of that community’s unreadiness to be assimilated, a mark of its failure, an indicator of its unreliable character.
And yet, despite this, communities kept reciting it in Europe, Africa, Asia, Americas, resisting the imperial criteria and command for assimilation. Though Kol Nidrei is no longer sung under the open sky, it continues to fill the air of synagogues year after year.
I want to suggest that our ancestors’ adherence to this prayer is linked to the fact that this prayer does not, as it is often understood, deal only with vows made by individuals; it is not only about personal teshuva, but rather it also concerns vows that communities made, were forced to make, or accept as theirs.
The prayer was perceived as source of our ancestors’ power, and they too endowed it with power, similarly to the way we engage with amulets. Not only did our ancestors continue to recite Kol Nidrei when told to cease to do so, but they also transmitted it, so that we too could reclaim it today as our talisman.
Today, more than ever, we need to liberate ourselves from the curse of Euro-Christian-Zionism and from the ways it colonized our diverse Jewish worlds. The Zionist state for the Jews was a vow made through the extracted consent of many of our ancestors who were forced to exchange their histories and memories for those the state created for them while destroying many worlds.
With Kol Nidrei as our shared talisman, we can hear the voices of our ancestors calling us:
“May all vows and oaths …that we have vowed be null and void”
and we can reply:
“All vows and oaths … are null and void.”
What exactly is this prayer? A reenactment of the freedom to commit anew – or not to commit – to all possible vows and oaths once they were proclaimed – through this prayer – null and void. It simulates a tribunal and utters a request at a certain instance to undo vows, but actually it reaffirms the power of the community – not the state – to be the site where vows are instated and undone.
Kol Nidrei is not just another prayer in the Mahzor of Yom Kippur but a precious ancestral antidote against the imperial violence of inevitability.
Kol Nidrei is one of the unruliest, liberating, anarchic Jewish texts, our heritage of refusal. In a world where our consent is constantly extracted through a minor finger movement like clicking ‘yes,’ terms accepted,’ this prayer carries, as living substance, a remainder of our unruliness. It invokes a refusal to accept as a fait accompli, as a certified and normalized fact, what was achieved with violence, what was extracted as consent when little or almost no choice was available. The unruly cyclical temporality instantiated by this prayer – a temporality which refuses to be abided by the violent, linear temporality of imperialism – allows us to re-inject respite in our decision making for moral considerations, to interrupt and reassess what was already set in motion, and insist on our right to ask if a choice is right or wrong, regardless of whether consent was given or taken.
Kol Nidrei is not just another prayer in the Mahzor of Yom Kippur but a precious ancestral antidote against the imperial violence of inevitability – it gives us the hope of reversibility. In other words, Kol Nidrei allows us to say that what was achieved with violence, like the destruction of Palestine, can still be reversed, This is why so many of us, Arab Jews, Berber Jews, Muslim Jews and all other diverse Jews, are reclaiming our diverse heritage. We reclaim it along with our right not to be represented by national histories and memories that were imposed upon us. Together we say:
All imperial vows extracted from us from the moment Europe decided to emancipate our ancestors in the late 18th century are null and void.
All imperial vows extracted from our ancestors, which forced them to forget who they were in exchange for making them citizens of empire, are null and void.
All imperial vows extracted from our ancestors in European colonies in the Maghreb and the Middle East are null and void.
All imperial vows extracted from our ancestors in the colony they were mandated, not to say incited, by Euro-American imperialism to establish in Palestine, as a way of helping Europe to dispose of them are null and void.
We have to be reminded that among our Muslim sisters and brothers in the Jewish Muslim world we were craftspeople. We were a people of jewelers, and our only talent for armament was that of crafting metal objects.
All the Zionist vows extracted from our ancestors in the aim of turning us into members of a war-machine-people against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, are null and void.
Amen