Indeed, the Jews do not deny it. Early in the year, when a famous Jewish violinist landed in New York after a triumphant tour abroad, he was besieged by thousands of his East Side admirers, and was able to quiet their cries only when he took his violin and played the “Kol Nidre.” Then the people wept as exiles do at the sound of the songs of the homeland.
In that incident the reader will see that (hard as it is for the non-Jew to understand it!) there is a deep-rooted, sentimental regard for the “Kol Nidre” which makes it one of the most sacred of possessions to the Jew. Indefensibly immoral as the “Kol Nidre” is, utterly destructive of all social confidence, yet the most earnest efforts of a few really spiritual Jews have utterly failed to remove it from the prayer books, save in a few isolated instances. The music of the “Kol Nidre” is famous and ancient. One has only to refer to the article “Kol Nidre” in the Jewish Encyclopedia to see the predicament of the modern Jew: he cannot deny; he cannot defend; he cannot renounce. The “Kol Nidre” is here, and remains.
If the prayer were a request for forgiveness for the broken vows of the past, normal human beings could quite understand it. Vows, promises, obligations and pledges are broken, sometimes by weakness of will to perform them, sometimes by reason of forgetfulness, sometimes by sheer inability to do the thing we thought we could do. Human experience is neither Jew nor Gentile in that respect.
But the prayer is a holy advance notice, given in the secrecy of the synagogue, that no promise whatever shall be binding, and more than not being binding is there and then violated before it is ever made.
The scope of the prayer is “from this day of atonement, until the next day of atonement.”
The prayer looks wholly to the future, “we repent, aforehand, of them all.”