The Mystery of Yom Kippur’s Most Famous Prayer - Rabbi Menachem Salasnik

Many of us, we going to turn up Yom Kippur in the night. This is most amazing, amazing evening, the Kol Nidre evening. The men turn up wearing their white kittles, this white robe with their tallis. Everybody's dressed well. You can feel the awe of the moment. And then the chazzan, the person leading the service, gets up there and he says that tune that across the Ashkenazi world, in every single synagogue across the world for the Ashkenazi community, it's the same tune everywhere and it sends chills down your spine. Kol Nidre ve'asarei. You feel it. THIS IS THE MOMENT. THE NEXT 25 HOURS, your life for this year is dependent on this. And yet, when you when you look at those words, you check out the translation, it's not about atonement. It's not about cleansing from sins. No. It's about if by mistake during the year, I said I was going to do something and I didn't say the formula of bli neder, that means without a promise. I didn't say, "I'll do this, but without a promise." So then, I want to sort of wash that away and use a a particular mechanism that can undo that vow that I made. And [laughter] you think to yourself, "One second, this is this is the beginning OF THE MOST HOLY DAY OF THE YEAR. And this is what I'm focusing on?" It's weird. We're coming up to the High Holy Days and on Yom Kippur, this day of atonement, we stand there all day confessing our sins. For those who know, we bang our chests and we go through several phrases called the Al Cheytz, for the transgressions that we've done during this year. There's 44 of these Al Cheytz, 44 transgressions where we beat at heart. And if you look through that list, you'll see that 13 of them are specifically to do with speech. And of the others, there are quite a few that although not primarily about speech, they can be transgressed through speech as well. So, the question is, why on this holiest of days are we so focused on our mouth and the way we speak? What's it all about? I mean, after all, isn't it just words, air, sound vibration? Who cares about that? It's not real. So, before we look at the Jewish view of that, I I just want to be honest. And let's explore what things look like in the world. I don't know about you. I grew up with a particular phrase that we always said in school. It's something like this, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. And I understand why I was taught that phrase. It was probably to make me hardy, to be able to let things wash off my back if somebody said something not nice to me. But if we were to be completely honest, the real phrase would be, sticks and stones may break my bones, but I'm young and I'll heal quickly. But words, words will put me in therapy forever. And that's the truth because we know deep down that often, it's words that are much, much more harmful than anything physical. Why is that? So, the Chofetz Chaim, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, who wrote several volumes about the concept of speech, explains like this. He says, the more something is physical and constrained within physical limits, the less harmful it can be. Let me just take an example. Let's take a a rock or a tree. A rock that's lying on the ground or a tree. How [clears throat] is that rock or tree going to harm me if it's just staying where it is? It's not going to harm me. I I need to go to the tree, bump into the tree, trip over the rock, and then it's going to harm me. Why? Because it's solid and physical and contained, restrained within its boundaries. Then there's something called liquid. Liquid is actually less hard than rock or tree. And yet, because it's less constrained within physical boundaries, it can flow and it can affect things further away. I don't have to go to it. I could be in a situation where water comes to me and damages my things or gets me into trouble. And then, if we go even less, even less physical, we come to concepts of fire. I could put my hand in in fire. There's nothing there. It's not really tangible. Or air, wind. These are even less physical and therefore, because they are even less constrained, they have the ability to cause much, much wider damage. But let's just think of for a moment about the history of warfare. Go going back, if you wanted to harm somebody, you took a sword, maybe a a club. You'd have to be right in front of that person to be able to harm them. But as the years have gone by, humans developed ways to transport these damaging things over large distances using forces in the air, let's say an arrow, or forces of fire to transport rockets or missiles far, far, far away. And speech is very much like that. It is very intangible. There is nothing physical about it. This is why Jeremiah Hanauer, Jeremiah the prophet, when he's describing speech, he compares it to an arrow. He doesn't compare it to a sword. He compares it to an arrow because the arrow, unlike the sword, can affect far, far away. It uses forces beyond the physical constraints of the actual sphere. More than that, an arrow, once you've let go of it, you've lost control. You can never get it back. You can never be sure what it's going to hit. You know, the the target can move out of the way. Somebody else could get go there and be hit by that arrow. You've lost control. And when you say something negative about somebody, it travels across the world, can destroy their life. You've got no control as to how it's going to destroy their life, how many other people are going to be affected. This is the danger of speech that makes it so, so, so damaging. But actually, I'd like to go a little bit deeper. Before I do that, let's just share that today's episode has been graciously sponsored as a refuah shleimah, speedy recovery for Sarah Bas Golda. So now, let's delve a little bit deeper. We have to understand that we've been given an unbelievable tool. This tool, our mouth, is the tool of connection. It connects us between us and us and other people. It allows us to help If we use those words to build other people, it allows us to help people connect to their true inner worth. It connects us with our creator. Through prayer, through studying his deep, essential [clears throat] wisdom, which is called the Torah. This is the tool we've been given and we can build worlds with it. But imagine if you take that tool and you use it for the wrong thing. Instead of using it to build people, you destroy people with it. You use it not to connect people to their deep worth, but to make them feel worthless. And then it comes to the time when you're about to use this tool. Let's say in a couple of weeks time. When we're standing there, the new year, Rosh Hashanah, the day of atonement, Yom Kippur. We're going to be standing there and we're going to be asking God, "Please give me another chance. Give me another year. I want to use this year to build myself and the world around me so that we're aligned with what you want from us. I know you gave me opportunities in the past and perhaps I didn't use them the way I was supposed to. I understand that. But please believe in me. Trust in me. Invest in me. I can do this. We're going to use our mouth, our words to say that. But there's a problem. Our mouth is filled with grime and filth. It's infected by all the other things that we used it for. We may not be able to see that filth, but it's there in a spiritual way. The tool is broken. When those words reach up to the higher court, the heavenly court, they're going to get there broken, infected, distorted. They're going to be untrustworthy. When we say, "No, no, I'm going to be better." Why would those words be believed when we lie our way through the rest of the year? And therefore, when it comes to this such an important day, we want to make sure that we're cleaning our mouth. Let's try and at least wash away all of the problems, all of the grime that we've lined our mouth with so that when we speak, it's something genuine. We're starting this day and we're going to be making promises. We're going to say, "Give me another chance and I'm going to use it well." But if I've been spending all year making promises and not keeping them, what do my words mean? So we start that day, we start the first prayer of the whole day, we start by cleansing our mouth. Let's call it spiritual mouth hygiene. And once we've done that, we're ready. We're ready to approach our creator and say, "Yes, I'm going to be different and I mean it." In the next episode, we're going to look at some other some other reasons why speech is so important. 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