The prayer breaks down the common ground of confidence between men—“the vows shall not be reckoned vows; the obligations shall not be obligatory, nor the oaths considered as oaths.”
It requires no argument to show that if this prayer be really the rule of faith and conduct for the Jews who utter it, the ordinary social and business relations are impossible to maintain with them.
It should be observed that there is no likeness here with Christian “hypocrisy,” so-called. Christian “hypocrisy” arises mostly from men holding higher ideals than they are able to attain to, and verbally extolling higher principles than their conduct illustrates. That is, to use Browning’s figure, the man’s reach exceeds his grasp; as it always does, where the man is more than a clod.
But the “Kol Nidre” is in the opposite direction. It recognizes by inference that in the common world of men, in the common morality of the street and the mart, a promise passes current as a promise, a pledge as a pledge, an obligation as an obligation—that there is a certain social currency given to the individual’s mere word on the assumption that its quality is kept good by straight moral intention. And it makes provision to drop below that level.
How did the “Kol Nidre” come into existence? Is it the cause or the effect of that untrustworthiness with which the Jew has been charged for centuries?
Its origin is not from the Bible but from Babylon, and the mark of Babylon is more strongly impressed on the Jew than is the mark of the Bible. “Kol Nidre” is Talmudic and finds its place among many other dark things in that many-volumed and burdensome invention. If the “Kol Nidre” ever was a backward look over the failures of the previous year, it very early became a forward look to the deliberate deceptions of the coming year.