Kol Nidre again

There are very few prayers in our Jewish ritual that make me feel alive. Paradoxically, one of them occurs every service, the recital of the kaddish, the prayer for the dead. And the other is recited only once a year. On the eve of the Day of Atonement. Kol Nidre. Neither of them are in a language I understand. Aramaic with some Hebrew. But the canter, rhythm and melodies of them both are what stir me.

What is it about the Kol Nidre that helps me feel that aliveness? Well the words infer a release from unmet vows and offer a fresh start, but for me, the melody is what really juices. It is the bittersweet cry, the awful sadness. I feel a kinship with my younger self entering into deep longings, longing to belong, longings for love, longings to hold onto the ephemeral. All that sweet desire rises to surface while the music tugs at my heart. It is as if you and I are all exiled from the womb, from an elusive Eden, and share this longing to find a way back.

This sense of connection I feel listening to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ or Alexi Murdoch’s “Orange Sky’ makes for an easy hopscotch to the kabbalah parable of the creation. A cosmic wholeness has exploded into fragments, and deposited shards of the whole into each one of us. Following on from that mythical imagining, our journey during this lifetime is to recognize the fractured light in ourselves and others. When we share our longings, we are recognizing the magnificent shards in ourselves and one another, and bringing them all back into wholeness through our connection. Nurturing one another within community is to bring those fragments back into wholeness.

So, this music unites us in what feels like a grand imperfection. This impermanence. I will die, my children will die, and hey, it is just wonderful right now. I know joy. I know beauty. I am human. All fades to dust. Returns to darkness. In a world that often tells us not to acknowledge our longings, which is to say, not to love each other as deeply as we could... for that too will end in tears... this wailing string of notes pries open our hearts.

This experience of a piercing beautiful longing is also so delicate. How do I hold that sense of transcendence, while not slipping into depression and acute anxiety of the immanent loss. I know the music is going to stop. I know pets die. I must age, I experience sickness and die. How do I resist tuning into the loss of change rather than the gift of my experience.

Is that not our work, each one of us mortals, wrestling with the way everything is so fundamentally beautiful and trapped in finitude? I am sounding to myself right now like a priest or rabbi on the pulpit. Again and again Kobayashi Issa’s famous Haiku that I love so much….

I know that this world of dew is just a world of dew

But even so, but even so.

I don’t have any answers and if you do, I would love to know.

For the meantime all I can think of is to put down my arguments with the universe. Just put put them all down, and perhaps wrap them in a silken tallis on Yom Kippur.

Kobayashi Issa wrote this a month after his daughter’s death. (All 4 of his children and his wife preceded his own death)

windy fall—

the scarlet flowers

she liked to pick