Yom Kippur: Kol Nidrei – The Key to Freeing Yours

Description

KOL NIDREI: THEY KEY TO FREEING YOURSELF

Are you trapped by your habits or patterns? Do you ever feel stuck in old routines, that are not allowing you forge ahead despite all your good intentions and best efforts? Are you ever your own “worst enemy?”

But then comes Yom Kippur and offers us a way out.

Seems strange – doesn’t it? – to begin Yom Kippur with Kol Nidrei, renouncing all vows that we might have made. On this holiest day of the year – the day which we spend asking God to forgive us for all transgressions – we start out by breaking former promises. How can that be?

That may have made sense during the Inquisition, when Jews were forced to pledge allegiance to Christianity, but how did it make sense for the centuries before and since? How does it make sense to us now? A moving story told by Elie Wiesel takes us back to Tisha B’Av 1492, and reveals the power of Kol Nidrei in 2010.

By renouncing “all vows” we are declaring our commitment to break the bonds that keep us from traveling on the journey within, the knots that keep you from opening ourselves to the Yom Kippur experience and entering our personal “Holy of Holies.”