Judaism teaches that there are moments in life that deserve a blessing lest we take for granted truly extraordinary experiences, like the one we just shared. Ba-ruch a-tah A-do-nai E-lo-hei-nu Me-lech Ha-o-lam, she-cha-lak mei-choch-ma-to li-rei-av. Blessed are You, Adonai, our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who distributed a portion of divine wisdom and talent to human beings.

Thanks to our congregants, Stefanie Jacob and Steve Colburn, our service began with the melody of Kol Nidre. In a few minutes, Cantor Robins and our choir will sing it again.

Before they do, in lieu of a formal sermon, I’ll share the first of two brief meditations about the prayers we see only on Yom Kippur: Kol Nidre and the Vidui.

Tonight we continue our exploration of the concept of Tikkun – healing – we began last week. On Rosh HaShannah, I spoke about Tikkun Olam, the work of social action we engage in to heal this broken world. Tonight, we will turn to Tikkun Hanefesh, the healing work of the soul.

Kol Nidre has an interesting history. It was composed during the sixth century when the Visagoth king of Spain ordered Jews to convert on pain of death. Kol Nidre was initially the anguished cry of those forced to commit apostasy. Thereafter, Spanish Jews sang it when they gathered in secret to celebrate Yom Kippur, as they did in the ninth century under Byzantine persecution, and again during the papal and Spanish inquisitions of thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.

We can hear anguish in the music. The melody begins on a falling note that stretches for two phrases, which is followed by a series of heroic ascents. After an interlude conducted in the lower register, the chant concludes with a defiant, triumphant flourish. The chant traces the journey of a soul in turmoil, searching for its voice, seeking solace, yearning for a sense of connection and communion. It’s the voice of Jewish history, tracing the arc of Jewish history. Even as it provides a melodic template for our souls’ journey during this season. 

And this journey begins abruptly, with no introduction, no build up.  We take the Torahs from the ark to assemble a beit din, a rabbinic court. The community’s elders, in our case former presidents of the congregation, hold the Torah’s as we stand. The Kol Nidre’s first words ask permission for us to pray with the Avaryanim. Who are the Avaryanim? In modern Hebrew the term means criminals, but it likely comes from the word Averah meaning transgression or sin. Thus, we ask for permission to pray with the sinners. Why would we need to ask permission to pray with each other? This question gave life to a persistent folk belief that the word Avaryanim refers specifically to the Marranos, the Jews of Spain who were forced to convert to Christianity but who secretly remained Jewish and returned to the community every year to hear Kol Nidre. Avaryanim, the proponents of this theory argue, may well have been a transliteration of the word Iberians, with whom a religious assemblage might well have raised eyebrows, to say the least.

The Kol Nidre chant has incredible transformative power. Franz Rosensweig was a young Jewish philosopher in Germany before WW I. In order to receive an appointment at one of Germany’s most prestigious Universities, Rosensweig decided he would convert to Christianity. Religion in general, and Judaism in particular, held little interest for him. It served only to impede his professional advancement.

As the story goes, he was out for a stroll on the eve of his conversion to Christianity when he passed by a synagogue. It was Erev Yom Kippur and as he passed by the synagogue, he could hear the chant of Kol Nidre. He was riveted to the spot, unable to move. By the time the cantor reached the prayer’s conclusion, Rosensweig knew in his heart that he could never leave Judaism.

Rabbi Nachman of Btratzlav said that when the soul hears its call and begins its journey back to God, God immediately begins to raise up impediments, because God knows that its strengthens the soul to overcome impediments, and because it is human nature – it is the nature of the soul – to yearn for precisely what it is difficult to attain.

The impediments before us are formidable. The call of the Shofar and the plaintive Kol Nidre may indeed stir something inside of us, something ancient and essential. But so many issues stand in our way.

We are challenged by the nature of how we pray, and by prayers that are foreign to us in form and content. Hebrew is for most of us impenetrable. The English translation makes us aware of metaphors that strain credulity – the talk of kings and servants, of a God who knows us personally, who cares about us, who opens a book of life and a book of death and, on the basis of our deeds, decrees our fate. At first contact, these images create cognitive dissonance that is difficult to overcome.

Recognizing these impediments, let me suggest that as we prepare to chant Kol Nidre, we silence the side of our brain that wants to think about the meaning of the prayers. If you want to explore the meaning of the prayers, I’ll teach a class on Tuesday nights. For right now, don’t worry about the words or their meaning. Close your eyes and open your heart and let the melody wash over you.  Let the arc of the Kol Nidre chant meet up with and then propel forward the trajectory of your own life, let its ancient melody comfort your soul.

The message of the Kol Nidre might be that repentance begins with a subtle reorientation of the senses effectuated, in this case, through music. Perhaps the Kol Nidre is sung precisely at the beginning of the service in order to orient our souls to the work that lies ahead.

The story is told of a rebbe who had a close disciple who fell into a long period of staleness that troubled him deeply. He felt as if all meaning had been drained from his life, and when he prayed that his prayers turned to chalk and died in his mouth before he could utter them. The rebbe, aware of the disciple’s problem, took him out of the village to a deep, dark forest. Before they entered the forest, the rebbe said to the student, “As you are entering this forest, ask God to give you the answer to your dilemma, then forget about this prayer, because you must pay very close attention to the path through the forest. Otherwise, you’ll get lost and never come out of the forest alive.” So the student entered the forest asking God for the answer to his struggle, and then he lost himself in following the path. As the rabbi had instructed him, he devoted all of his attention to the path itself. Soon he began to take great pleasure in the path. He took great pleasure in the working of his body as it found its own pace on the path and the fall of his foot on the cool forest floor. He was taken with the path itself – a verdant path of deep, brilliant, green. When he finally came out of the forest he was smiling broadly. The rebbe asked: “Did God give you an answer?” The student started to weep. “I forgot all about the question”, he said. “I put all my attention on the path, and after a while I took so much pleasure in what was in front of my face that I forgot about the question altogether.” “In that case,” he rebbe said, “I would say that God gave you your answer.”

We’ve reached the section of the service called the Vidui, which means confession. Yes, Judaism has a prayer for confession. Traditionally, we say it on our deathbed, or it is said on our behalf. And on Yom Kippur, its words comprise the framework for confessing our transgressions. The 12^th century sage, Maimonides, tells us that there can’t be Teshuvah, a true repentance, without confession. Confession is bringing the awareness of the heart to our lips and giving it a name. We have to name what we’ve done, and say it out loud; otherwise, it is too easy to disassociate ourselves and evade responsibility.

Yet, while confession is altogether personal, the Machzor has us confess our sins together with others, in a community. All of the sins we confess, we voice in the first person plural. Al chet sh’chatanu lifanecha, for the sins we have committed before you through stubborness, by refusing to acknowledge our shortcomings, by lacking compassion for ourselves and others. Ashamnu, bagadnu, we are culpable, we have hurt others and ourselves. There are sixty-seven transgressions listed, which our sages tell us are subject headings for even broader categories. While confession is, by definition, a solitary act, we don’t confess alone; instead, we join together as a community of sinners. And we do this in the very room where stand some of those we are likely to have hurt most this past year.

• We confess, even if we didn’t transgress in that particular way this past year.
• We confess to sins we haven’t committed in order to support those who have, in their repentance; and to assert that when one of us trangresses, others are affected.
• We confess, even if we don’t feel remorse for what we’ve done; Judaism teaches that the mitzvoth are important to do no matter what your intention or how you feel about it. Moreover, the repetition of a mitzvah can in fact create the emotional intention. Give Tzedakah to the needed and you’ll become more compassionate. Pray on a regular basis and you will feel more of a connection to God and the community. Confess your transgressions and there’s a good chance we’ll begin to feel sorry. It’s a textbook Jewish behavioral conditioning.

Between the lines of the Al Chet and Ashamnu confessions, lurks a most persistent question: Who is to blame for the human damage we have done? Some of you may recall the cartoon that puts the question concisely. A young student hands his father a report card that displays a dismal set of grades, among them a number of “F”s. The boy looks up at his father and says: “So dad, what do you think? Nurture or nature?”

For children, taking personal responsibility is not generally their first move. Blaming others is. Children, it seems, go through a stage of moral development in which their desire to do the right thing and be seen by others as people who do the right thing leads them to deny something they just did in front of a room full of people. They can’t reconcile what they’ve done with who they want to be. Instead they blame others. 

From adults, we expect less prevarication and more truth telling. Sadly, some adults haven’t haven’t figured that out. Have you seen the news lately? The lamentable drama playing out in the news and even in the debates reveals how reflexively we turn to fix blame elsewhere.

Consider just a few of the answers we’ve heard to the question: Who should be blamed for the financial melt down? Depending on who you ask, it might be:

• Those who pressed for more and more deregulation
• Predatory lenders
• The speaker of the house
• People who bought homes they couldn’t possibly afford
• Financial wizards who, in an attempt to take the risk out of lending entirely, sliced mortgages into little tiny bits and repackaged them. In a qualified sense, risk was lowered, but by putting so much distance between the lender and borrower, and introducing so many variables, they created financial instruments the value of which no one can assess.
• Pork padding politicians who support only legislation containing earmarks for their pet projects, and who have the gumption to tell us how they have put country first
• Or how about those whose party members defeated the first bail out package and then turned around and blamed the other party who had all voted for it, for its defeat?

The blame game isn’t new; it is as old as time itself. In the Garden of Eden, God confronts Adam after he ate from the tree of knowledge. Adam immediately points the finger at Eve, and says: “she gave it to me.” Eve, in turn, fingers the snake, saying, “the snake duped me!”

Even more confounding, the passage of time only makes the process of blame and recrimination that much more Byzantine. For example, seven years on can we say who is

to blame for Sept. eleventh? Most of us would point our fingers at the nineteen hijackers, as well as at Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants. But we can also blame those who might have prevented the catastrophe but didn’t — the national security adviser, who ignored warnings of imminent attack; the F.B.I., which ignored reports of suspicious activity at a flight school in Minnesota; or the screeners at Logan International Airport (and Portland Maine) who allowed box cutters past their security systems. And then there are the culprits of a more conceptual kind — American foreign policy, which some feel saw its proverbial chickens come home to roost; or Islam, which is said to have stewed in its resentments for centuries; or globalization, which transmits grievances and conspiracies across borders as rapidly as capital and goods. If you want to blame someone for Sept. 11, the sky in the limit.

Sociologist Charles Tilly, in his book, Credit and Blame, explored our compulsive drive to assign credit and blame and to give reasons for what we do. Explaining, he stressed, is a social art; what counts as a good reason always depends on the relationship between who’s giving the reason and who’s taking it. If you spill a glass of wine on a stranger, you might shrug it off with a conventional remark like “I’m a klutz.” If you spill a glass of wine on your wife, you are more apt to tell a story: “I was feeling nervous because of the bills.” It’s one thing to give someone a bad explanation. It’s even worse to give the wrong kind of explanation. If you expect your doctor to give you a technical account of your illness and you receive a cliché instead, you feel you are not being taken seriously.

How do we know which response is most appropriate?  Tilly suggests that we possess something like an “all-purpose justice detector.” When something good or bad happens, we measure the magnitude of the change, identify an agent who helped bring it about and assess how the agent’s skills, knowledge and intentions figure in the result. How much blame does the Ford Motor Company deserve when an Explorer rolls over on the highway? The answer, Tilly writes, depends on how badly the driver or passenger was injured, whether Ford should have known the crash was likely to happen and whether it intended to build the car the way it did. Lawyers argue this way in civil suits, but couples apply similar rules of thumb when they argue over who left the car windows down.

It appears we don’t want to ascribe what happens to chance or caprice. When something good or bad happens, we rarely say, “Oh well, those are the breaks,” or “I suppose I got lucky this time.” Instead, we leap at the chance to deem someone — anyone — responsible. We blame our parents when we are unhappy, and credit them for their sacrifices when they die. Thanking friends and family at the Academy Awards ceremony may be, as another sociologist has written, “the ultimate American fantasy” of giving credit, while winning a lawsuit against a local polluter may be the ultimate fantasy of affixing blame.

And yet, Tilly cautions, blaming draws clear boundaries between a worthy us and an unworthy them, and that can be dangerous. When a group is faulted for a violent act, it’s all too easy to single out its most vulnerable members for retaliation, inciting further violence. Credit, by contrast, “does not necessarily establish a sharp line between ins and outs,” Tilly writes. The bestowal of honors, prizes and promotions can prompt resentment and disputation. But for the most part, crediting is less contentious: after all, it “associates giver and receiver in the same moral milieu, while blame separates two moral settings from each other.” We pat some people on the back, thank others heartily for even minor acts of politeness and grease the wheels of social life as best we can.

Bestowing credit or blame is an important part of the way we tell stories, or create our own narrative. We respond to just about any sequence of events by evaluating the actors who seem to have brought it about. If we hear a story about an accident or battle or sporting event, our first questions are likely to focus on who deserves honor or dishonor. While stories enable judgment, however, they also distort it. When television news reports about poverty focus on an individual’s situation rather than on poverty more generally, “viewers look for someone (the poor person or someone else) who caused the hardship.” But this, Tilly argues, is to avoid “the whole complicated process that brought someone grief.”

And it works in the other direction. Viewers of the Olympics this past summer were treated to a never-ending set of stories about how each of our Olympians had overcome adversity in the most heroic of fashions. This one was raised by wolves, another overcame seven year bout with hiccups. It’s as if we needed to understand the individual’s story to see what reserves of fortitude they would draw upon in their quest for the gold. 

Whether emphasizing positive or negative elements, stories call our attention away from chance, the influence of institutions or social structures, or the incremental contributions that different factors typically make to any outcome. And they follow conventions that verge on melodrama: events are caused by individuals who act deliberately, and what those individuals do reflects their underlying character. This, to put it mildly, is not how most things happen.

In truth, there’s a lot that happens for reasons we’ll never understand, or perhaps for no reason at all.

• Tonight we affirm that despite the credit and blame that inevitably play a role in our lives, the transgressions we commit are ours.
• Tonight, we confess them.
• Tonight, we name them.
• We do teshuvah in order to reconcile what we’ve done with the image of who we want to be.
• And we try not to confuse the mistakes we’ve made with the lives we are creating.

Before we continue with the service, I have a serious request: turn to those friends and family who may be here with you tonight, andto take a moment to offer the apologies of your heart.