A Message from Rabbi Rubinstein

May 2009

Every year, shortly after Yom Kippur ends, we meet to debrief and assess the High Holy Day experience from a personal and a congregational perspective. We immediately set an agenda for the coming year, taking into consideration which services might benefit from further exposition and creative arrangement. The new liturgies and prayer booklets for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services are the results of those conversations.

Please note that one practical change in the schedule of services will limit our use of the Waldorf-Astoria on Yom Kippur. We are doing this for cost-saving purposes and, as members have requested, to hold our family services in the sanctuary. The schedule for the time of all services will be announced shortly and we will continuously remind you of the schedule in future communications.

From a liturgical standpoint, we have set what we believe to be an incredibly significant goal for ourselves: to reinterpret and focus on the significance of the Kol Nidre (Yom Kippur Evening) service. The fact, and irony, is that few of our members know what the Kol Nidre prayer says in the traditional Aramaic. Here is the translation from the Philip Birnbaum edition of the traditional service:

All personal vows we are likely to make, all personal oaths and pledges we are likely to take between this Yom Kippur and the next Yom Kippur, we publicly renounce. Let them all be relinquished and abandoned, null and void, neither firm nor established. Let our personal vows, pledges and oaths, be considered neither vows nor pledges nor oaths.

Most of us would recoil to know that according to this prayer we proactively and publicly renounce all the pledges we will make in the year to come.

Obviously the power of this prayer for us does not reside in the words of the prayer but rather in the personal memory, the community gathering as a Jewish people and our desire to be profoundly honest about ourselves as we seek forgiveness for our moral weakness and wrongdoing.

We will have a different Kol Nidre prayer service this year but we hope and believe that each of us will feel a strong and personal engagement in the significant meaning of this solemn Holy Day.

Thanks,

Rabbi Peter J. Rubinstein