I. Moshe Annuls a Vow
THE CORE IDEA
There is a strong connection between this parasha and Yom Kippur. Less than six weeks after God gave the Torah at Mount Sinai, the Israelites committed what seemed to be the unforgivable sin of making a Golden Calf. Moshe prayed repeatedly for forgiveness on their behalf and eventually God agreed to forgive them. On the tenth of Tishrei, Moshe descended from Mount Sinai with a new set of tablets to replace those he had smashed in anger at their sin. The tenth of Tishrei subsequently became Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, marking that moment when the people saw Moshe with the new tablets and knew they were forgiven.
Moshe’s prayers, as recorded in the Torah, are brave. But the Midrash makes them more courageous still. The text introducing Moshe’s prayer begins with the Hebrew words “Vayeḥal Moshe” (Shemot 32:11). Normally this is translated as “Moshe besought, implored, entreated, pleaded, or attempted to pacify” God. However, the same verb is used in the context of annulling or breaking a vow (Bemidbar 30:3). On this basis the Sages suggest something truly remarkable:
“Vayeḥal Moshe” means “Moshe cleared God of His vow.” When the Israelites made the Golden Calf, Moshe asked God to forgive them, but God said, “I have already taken an oath that whoever sacrifices to any god other than the Lord must be punished (Shemot 22:19). I cannot withdraw what I have said.” Moshe replied, “Lord of the universe, You have given me the power to cancel oaths, for You taught me that one who takes an oath cannot break their word, but a scholar can release them from the promise. I hereby release You from Your vow” (abridged from Shemot Rabba 43:4).
According to the Sages, the original act of divine forgiveness on which Yom Kippur is based came about through this cancellation of a vow. This explains the opening service of Yom Kippur – Kol Nidrei, which is a declaration of the cancellation of our promises.
QUESTIONS TO PONDER
1. Did the people deserve to be punished? According to the Midrash, why did God decide to forgive them?
2. What themes connect this story to Yom Kippur?
IT ONCE HAPPENED…
Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) was a young German-Jewish intellectual from a highly assimilated family. At twenty-seven, his cousins and a close friend persuaded him to officially convert to Christianity. He decided the best way to do this was to act like a religious Jew, and then transition, like the early Christians, from there to Christianity. He travelled to Berlin to spend Yom Kippur in a small Orthodox synagogue as his last Jewish act.
The experience changed his life. A few days later he wrote that “leaving Judaism no longer seems necessary to me and…no longer possible.” He became a celebrated baal teshuva (he returned to the Jewish faith), and one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. On postcards, in the trenches of the First World War, he wrote a masterpiece of Jewish theology entitled “The Star of Redemption.”
QUESTIONS TO PONDER
1. What do you think is the power of Kol Nidrei and Yom Kippur and how this experience had such an impact for him?
2. Is this similar to the experience of the “secret Jews” of Spain and Portugal, who came once a year on Kol Nidrei to annul their vows (see Thinking More Deeply)?
THINKING MORE DEEPLY
Kol Nidrei is an enigma wrapped in a mystery, perhaps the strangest text ever to capture the religious imagination. First, it is not a prayer at all. It is not even a confession. It is a dry legal formula for the annulment of vows. It is written in Aramaic. It does not mention God. It is not part of the service. It does not require a shul. And it was disapproved of, or at least questioned, by generations of halakhic authorities. Why then, do we begin every Yom Kippur, our most important day, with Kol Nidrei?
The first time we hear of Kol Nidrei, in the eighth century, it is already being opposed by Rav Natronai Gaon, the first of many Sages who found it problematic. In his view, one cannot annul the vows of an entire congregation this way. Even if one could, one should not, since it may lead people to treat vows lightly. Besides which, there has already been an annulment of vows ten days earlier, on the morning before Rosh HaShana. This is mentioned explicitly in the Talmud (Nedarim 23b). There is no mention of an annulment on Yom Kippur.
Rabbeinu Tam, Rashi’s grandson, was particularly insistent in arguing that the kind of annulment Kol Nidrei represents cannot be retroactive. It cannot apply to vows already taken. It can only be applied to vows made in the future. Accordingly, he insisted on changing its wording, so that Kol Nidrei refers not to vows from last year to this, but from this year to next.
Kol Nidrei also created hostility on the part of non-Jews, who said it showed that Jews did not feel bound to honour their promises since they annulled them on the holiest night of the year. In vain it was repeatedly emphasised that Kol Nidrei applies only to vows between us and God, not those between us and our fellow humans. Throughout the Middle Ages, and in some places until the eighteenth century, in lawsuits with non-Jews, Jews were forced to take a special oath, More Judaica, because of this concern.
So there were communal and halakhic reasons not to say Kol Nidrei, yet it survived all the doubts and misgivings. It remains the quintessential expression of the awe and solemnity of the day. Its power defies all obvious explanations. Somehow it seems to point to something larger than itself, whether in Jewish history or the inner heartbeat of the Jewish soul.
Several historians have argued that it acquired its sadness from the phenomenon of forced conversions, both to Christianity and Islam, that occurred during the Middle Ages, most notably in Spain and Portugal in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Jews were offered the choice: convert or suffer persecution. Sometimes it was: convert or be expelled. At times it was even: convert or die. Some Jews did convert. They were known in Hebrew as anusim (people who acted under coercion). In Spanish, they were known as conversos, or contemptuously as marranos (swine).
Many people remained practising Jews in private, and once a year on the night of Yom Kippur they would make their way in secret to the synagogue to seek release from the vows they had taken to adopt another faith, on the compelling grounds that they had no other choice. For them, coming to the synagogue was like coming home, the root meaning of teshuva.
There are obvious problems with this hypothesis. Firstly, Kol Nidrei was in existence several centuries before the era of forced conversions. Moreover, the text of Kol Nidrei makes no reference, however oblique, to conversion, return, identity, or atonement. It is simply an annulment of vows.
So the theories as they stand do not satisfy.
However, it may be that Kol Nidrei has a different significance altogether, one that has its origin in the remarkable rabbinic interpretation of this parasha, quoted in The Core Idea.
According to that midrash (Shemot Rabba 43:4), the original act of divine forgiveness on which Yom Kippur is based came about through the annulment of a vow, when Moshe annulled the vow of God. The Sages understood the verse, “Then the Lord relented from the evil He had spoken of doing to His people” (Shemot 32:14) to mean that God expressed regret for the vow He had taken – a precondition for a vow to be annulled.
Why would God regret His determination to punish the people for their sin? On this, another midrash offers an equally radical answer. The opening word of Tehillim 61 is Lamenatze’aḥ. When this word appears in Tehillim it usually means “to the conductor” or “to the choirmaster.” However, the Sages interpreted it to mean “to the victor,” meaning God, and added this stunning commentary:
To the Victor who sought to be defeated, as it is said (Yeshaya 57:16), “I will not accuse them forever, nor will I always be angry, for then they would faint away because of Me – the very people I have created.” Do not read it thus, but rather, “I will accuse in order to be defeated.” How so? Thus said the Holy One, blessed be He: “When I win, I lose, and when I lose, I gain. I defeated the generation of the Flood, but did I not lose thereby, for I destroyed My own creation, as it says (Bereshit 7:23), ‘Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out.’ The same happened with the generation of the Tower of Bavel and the people of Sedom. But in the days of Moshe, who defeated Me (by persuading Me to forgive the Israelites whom I had sworn to destroy), I gained for I did not destroy Israel.” God wants His forgiveness to override His justice, because strict justice hurts humanity, and humanity is God’s creation and carries His image. That is why He regretted His vow and allowed Moshe to annul it. That is why Kol Nidrei has the power it has. For it recalls the Israelites’ worst sin, the Golden Calf, and their forgiveness, completed when Moshe descended the mountain with the new tablets on the tenth of Tishrei, the anniversary of which is Yom Kippur. The forgiveness was the result of Moshe’s daring prayer, understood by the Sages as an act of cancellation of vows. Hence Kol Nidrei: a formula for the withdrawal of vows.
The power of Kol Nidrei has less to do with forced conversions than with a recollection of the moment, described in our parasha, when Moshe stood in prayer before God and achieved forgiveness for the people: the first time the whole people was forgiven despite the gravity of their sin. On Kol Nidrei we recall the first Yom Kippur when Moshe annulled the Almighty’s vow, so that His compassion could override His justice. This is the basis of all Divine forgiveness.
I believe we must always strive to fulfil our promises. If we fail to keep our word, eventually we lose our freedom. But given the choice between justice and forgiveness, choose forgiveness. When we forgive and are worthy of being forgiven, we are liberated from a past we regret, to build a better future.
QUESTION TO PONDER
Why are justice and forgiveness opposite values? Why choose forgiveness over justice? Where do we see this in the parasha?
FROM THE THOUGHT OF RABBI SACKS
Law without love is harsh, but love without law is anarchy and eventually turns to hate. So in the name of the love-of-law and the law-of-love, we ask God to release us from our vows and from our sins for the same reason: that we regret and have remorse for both. The power of Kol Nidrei has less to do with forced conversions, or even music, than with the courtroom drama, unique to Judaism, in which we stand, giving an account of our lives, our fate poised between God’s justice and compassion.
Ceremony & Celebration, Yom Kippur, 74
AROUND THE SHABBAT TABLE
Why is the prayer Kol Nidrei “mysterious”?
What is the connection between Yom Kippur and this parasha?
How does “strict justice hurt humanity”? What is the alternative?
EDUCATIONAL COMPANION TO THE QUESTIONS
IN A NUTSHELL
Forgiveness is a core value at the heart of our relationship with God. It has to be, because humans are fallible and make mistakes. If God only exercises the value of justice (focusing only on justice and judgement, reward and punishment) then it would be too difficult for humans to live. But of course we need to earn God’s forgiveness, through sincere regret and a commitment to change for the better. This is teshuva.
THE CORE IDEA
Strictly speaking, the people deserved to be punished for worshipping the Golden Calf. If God had executed true justice, He would have killed all those who participated in the worship. However, He also has other attributes and principles that are often in conflict with the attribute of justice, such as mercy and forgiveness. The midrash describes Moshe convincing God to give these attributes primacy in this instance, and gives God a legal precedent, a loophole to cancel His previous promise to punish those who worship idols.
According to tradition, this story took place on the tenth of Tishrei, the day of Yom Kippur. This is the day in history when God first placed the value of forgiveness above justice, when He forgave the Israelites for a sin that deserved punishment. This is the basis for Yom Kippur, when we pray to God to forgive us, despite our many flaws and sins. We ask Him to give the values of mercy and forgiveness prominence over justice.
IT ONCE HAPPENED…
We can’t know for sure what Rosenzweig felt on Yom Kippur in the small simple shul in Berlin in 1913. But we do know that on Yom Kippur more than any other day of the year, we feel a powerful intimacy with God as we stand before Him and plead for forgiveness. Perhaps Rosenzweig felt the deep contrast between this and the intimidating experience of standing in a large and grand church trying to connect to a distant and impersonal version of God.
The anusim (crypto-Jews of Spain and Portugal in the Middle Ages who practised their Judaism in secret, for fear of torture and death at the hands of the Inquisition) would approach God in a similar intimate way once a year on Kol Nidrei, in order to annul their own vows to the church. The difference is that Franz did not intend to have a religious experience that would connect him back to his Jewish roots (although that was the result), whereas the anusim desperately wanted this experience; it was their one time a year when they would risk their lives to congregate together and pray.
THINKING MORE DEEPLY
Justice and forgiveness are by definition opposite values. In a case where justice determines someone is at fault and therefore liable, forgiveness ignores this and wipes the slate clean. It has to be one or the other. Rabbi Sacks urges us to choose forgiveness in our relationships, just as God chooses this in our parasha when He forgives the Israelites for their sin of worshipping the Golden Calf. Forgiveness allows us to leave the past behind and to be released from the chains of our previous mistakes. “When we forgive and are worthy of being forgiven, we are liberated from a past we regret, to build a better future”.
AROUND THE SHABBAT TABLE
No one is quite sure where the text for this service came from or how it became an integral part of the holiest day of the year. Many Sages were opposed to its inclusion, yet it has passed the test of time. It is not really a prayer at all, rather a dry legal formula for the annulment of vows. It is written in Aramaic and not Hebrew. It does not mention God. It is not part of the actual Yom Kippur service. And it was disapproved of, or at least questioned, by generations of halakhic authorities. And yet it begins our Yom Kippur service. Often the tunes used are beautiful. Millions of Jews, of many levels of observance, attend Kol Nidrei each year, and feel inspired by their attendance. So both its roots, and its power, are mysterious.
The story of the Golden Calf, including God’s forgiveness of this sin, gives us an archetypal example of when God first placed the value of forgiveness above justice, when He forgave the Israelites for a sin that deserved punishment. This is the basis for Yom Kippur, when we pray to God to forgive us, despite our many flaws and sins. We ask Him to give the values of mercy and forgiveness prominence over justice. According to tradition, this story took place on the tenth of Tishrei, the day of Yom Kippur, and acts as a precedent for all future Yom Kippurs.
Humans make mistakes. They are imperfect. If the world (both governments and judicial systems, as well as God) functioned only according to strict justice, it would be too difficult to live there. We all fall short sometimes, and we need to be given the chance to learn from our mistakes and try again. Justice needs to be implemented within a framework of compassion and mercy. Judaism’s version of that is repentance (teshuva) and forgiveness.