Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is a global religious leader, philosopher and prolific author. His most recent book is Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence.
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the supreme moment of Jewish time, a day of fasting and prayer, introspection and self-judgement.
At no other time are we so sharply conscious of standing before God, of being known. But it begins in the strangest of ways.
Kol Nidrei, the prayer which heralds the evening service and the beginning of the sanctity of the day, is the key that unlocks the Jewish heart.
Its melody is haunting. As the cantor sings, we hear in that ancient tune the deepest music of the Jewish soul, elegiac yet striving, pained but resolute; the song of those who knew that to believe is to suffer and still to hope, the music of our ancestors which stretches out to us from the past and enfolds us in its cadences, making us and them one.
The music is sublime. Tolstoy called it a melody that “echoes the story of the great martyrdom of a grief-stricken nation.” Beethoven came close to it in the most otherwordly and austere of his compositions, the sixth movement of the C Sharp Minor Quartet (Opus 131). The music is pure poetry, but the words are prosaic prose.
Read the full article by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks at ABC Religion & Ethics.