Kol Nidre 5787
For eighteen years, year after year, I have given a sermon before you on the night of Kol Nidre.
And for eighteen years I have honoured, right here, a tradition, a slightly absurd challenge I set myself: on the night of Kippur, I always tell a joke.
It may seem out of place, but it is in fact exactly what our sages ask us to do. They call it milta de-bedihuta, “a witticism”, which in their view must find its place in every teaching, precisely because it has the power to open minds.
So every year, in the weeks before Kippur, I think about my “Kol Nidre joke”. I look for the best story, I test it on those close to me, and I try to find the one best suited to the moment, to the period, to the context.
This year, while racking my brains, I set about rereading all the Kippur jokes of years past, wanting to reflect on everything I had put you through for eighteen years. That is how I came across a story told a very long time ago, a rather inappropriate and very cheeky joke. I even wondered how I had dared to bring up such a thing… And yet I told myself it was time to tell it again:
The scene takes place in a synagogue, one Yom Kippur evening. A few hours before the service, a terrorist enters the synagogue and takes the rabbi and one of the congregants hostage. The guy says to them both: “I’ll let each of you state a last wish, one final request, before being killed.”
The rabbi thinks and says: “Listen, it’s Yom Kippur and, as I have every year for decades, I’m getting ready to read a very long dvar Torah tonight, forty-five minutes or an hour… so, before I die, I’d like to read the two of you my sermon.”
The terrorist then asks the congregant: “And you, sir, what’s your last wish?”
And the man replies: “Well, mine’s simple: I’d like to be killed before he starts reading.”
Yes, I know, it is black humour, but it is also truly Jewish humour, that particular way our people have of laughing at everything, at the tragedies that strike us and at the world’s hatred alike; and even at rabbis, and at the boredom they induce.
Of course, I could try tonight to prove to you, in forty-five minutes or an hour, that no, it is not true, that rabbis’ speeches are not necessarily “deadly boring”, and so try to save the honour of my profession.
But I am going to try something else instead, and use this Jewish joke to think with you about another message it carries, another question it contains.
Between the lines, this story asks: why is it that, like the congregant in this story, we sometimes prefer to die rather than listen to someone else?
Or, to put it differently, and in a way more relevant to today: why does listening sometimes become so difficult, or so painful?
I am telling you nothing new when I say that all around us, more and more, speech has become inaudible and listening impossible, and that there is a direct link between vocabulary, violence, and the inability to hear one another. For several years now we have witnessed it: words addressed to us, or words we ourselves use, have become slogans. They no longer serve to say something, to teach or to convince anyone, but simply to exclude, to “cancel”, as we now say, and to consolidate the identity of some by expelling others.
There are a thousand examples of this, starting with the use of terms such as “Zionist”, “anti-Zionist”, “leftist” or “fascist”, “settler”, inhabitants “of Judea and Samaria” or “of the West Bank”, “traitor” or “genocidal”. The list is long, all these words whose definition no longer matters: they no longer seek to explain anything; nobody much cares what they mean, since they are used first and foremost to exclude a person or a group, against whom one takes a stand.
Suddenly, the validity or relevance of a term no longer needs to be demonstrated, since the point is simply to consolidate an in-group by evicting someone else who has become the enemy. And every attempt to think about the word, to debate its meaning, to question its relevance, is in vain, because it is no longer about defining but about rallying. It is no longer a question of debate but of combat.
This use of language as an identity marker is nothing new. It has been used this way so often in history, in almost every era. Believe it or not, even the Bible talks about it.
The scene takes place in the Book of Judges, chapter 12.
There we are told of a conflict that, at the time, pitted two populations in Israel against each other, two tribes. On one side the Gileadites, on the other the Ephraimites (the descendants of Ephraim). They were waging a kind of civil war, which the Gileadites eventually won.
The victors then took up position along the Jordan, right at the river’s crossing points, to prevent the members of the tribe of Ephraim from crossing the river: there was no question of letting them through.
To prevent them from crossing, they first had to recognise them! After all, both sides spoke the same language and looked strangely alike. So the Bible tells us that the Gileadites had the idea of asking anyone crossing the ford: “Are you from the tribe of Ephraim?” As a rule, the person answered “no”, to be on the safe side. And then the Gileadites insisted that everyone passing through pronounce a seemingly harmless word, a word that means “ear of wheat” in Hebrew: the word “Shibbolet”.
Now, the tribe of Ephraim had an accent of its own, a slightly peculiar way of pronouncing certain Hebrew letters, and in particular the letter shin שׁ (the “sh” sound in Hebrew), which they articulated like a sin שׂ (the same letter, which makes the sound “ss”).
This trivial detail, this micro-inflection, was used by the Gileadites to identify those who wanted to cross. In this biblical episode we learn that all those who said Sibbolet rather than Shibbolet were put to the sword. Forty-two thousand members of the tribe of Ephraim died there…
It is to this biblical passage that we owe the word “shibboleth”, which has passed into everyday language even if it is not much used. It denotes, and I quote, “a word or a custom that makes it possible to determine whether a person belongs to a group”.
A shibboleth is a word or a gesture that says who you are. It may be an insignificant mark, but it becomes the site of a difference, or of an exclusion.
The meaning of the word, in this case “ear of wheat”, is of no importance in itself; what matters is that whoever pronounces it, one way or the other, signals where they belong.
A friend told me that, when he was a counsellor at a Jewish summer camp, he sometimes amused himself by sowing chaos among all the children simply by asking one question: “Tell me, should we say dafina or tafina?” Immediately, the children of Moroccan origin and those of Tunisian origin would start arguing over a simple shift in the pronunciation of the dish they all ate at home, but did not quite call by the same name. There you have a perfect shibboleth, but a harmless shibboleth: tasty, calorific, and non-lethal.
It is not always so. Look at how, today, so many words have become deadly shibboleths. You are required to pronounce them or, on the contrary, forbidden to mention them. And their meaning always matters far less than the function they serve: to rally or to exclude.
We Jews know this well, because in recent years in general, and in recent months in particular, we have had painful experience of it. On many occasions we have been told: no, you cannot sing, write, or set foot in this or that place, this or that event, this or that party, until you have said the shibboleth-word, which generally requires using the vocabulary of genocide, or denouncing Israel’s essential guilt.
Only this summer, members of our community, Yedidia Levy-Zauberman and our rabbinical student Anna Klarsfeld, were on holiday in Greece (you may have read their story in the press). They wanted to hire a boat. Nothing out of the ordinary.
But then the skipper who was to accompany them on the crossing told them, before they boarded, that given their very Jewish-sounding names, he needed to know their position on the Israeli occupation of Gaza.
An absurd situation, and an almost perfect replica of the biblical shibboleth episode: someone stands at the ford of a body of water and demands a word, in this case not from the tribe of Ephraim, but from anyone who has a Jewish surname and intends to cross the sea.
And there are many, many examples of these moments when Jews are made to sit a linguistic exam, a test of words. Again and again, we are ordered to use the right vocabulary before we can be let through, or simply let be.
In his latest book, entitled Partie prenante, the philosopher Paul Audi describes this brilliantly, explaining that Jews today labour under what one might call a “presumption of guilt”. It is the exact opposite of the presumption of innocence. It presupposes an “essential” responsibility of individuals for something they did not do, but to which they are tied by ethnic identification.
That is how the “shibboleth effect” works today. If you pay attention, you will quickly notice that it is at work almost everywhere. Even within the Jewish world. There too, you may have experienced it: inside our communities, and sometimes within our very families, certain words become unavoidable and others are banned. Some are absolutely compulsory and others strictly forbidden.
I have experienced it myself, along with many others in the Jewish world, in the diaspora and in Israel. Expressing a critical point of view, an ideological disagreement, or simply questioning the means of a struggle can very quickly earn you the label of traitor, sell-out, useful idiot, enemy within, kapo, or who knows what else.
Suddenly, voicing a criticism or questioning a policy acts as a shibboleth and unites a group in ostracising you. It is the same phenomenon, admittedly not always with the same consequences, but it is always the same story at work: words cease to mean anything or to contribute to the debate; they are used to rally, and to contribute to the fight.
This should alarm us above all, we who are the children of a tradition that has always believed in the power of words and in the necessity of debate between opposing views; we who are about to spend the next twenty-four hours pronouncing words and uttering verbal confessions, affirming that our future depends on it.
This week, I was thinking about shibboleth-words, about the way some among us are simultaneously accused of being totally responsible in the eyes of some and totally disloyal in the eyes of others… that is, at once “guilty” (ashemim in Hebrew) and “traitors” (bogdim in Hebrew).
Suddenly, I had a kind of revelation. For the first time in my life, I heard the words of the Kippur prayers resonate with a meaning I had never heard before. Listen to them carefully. Throughout this solemn day we are going to repeat them in the form of confessions, beating our breasts, saying, word for word: Ashamnu, bagadnu.
Ashamnu אשמנו, “we are guilty”; bagadnu בגדנו, “we are traitors”…
Do you hear these words? Something singular, almost unprecedented, is happening this Kippur. The world keeps telling Jews: Ashamtem, “you are guilty”. And many Jews, faced with the threat, say to their fellow Jews who express a different view: Bagadtem, “you are traitors”.
And suddenly, gathered in a synagogue, sitting side by side, next to people you do not necessarily agree with, people who do not have the same mistakes to confess as you, you are about to do something strange: to take on together the accusations, the guilt and the treachery, and to shoulder a collective responsibility.
On Kippur, all the confessions are in the plural: they commit us all, without distinction. On that day we say “we”, because it is no longer a matter of ostracising an other but of stating what one might call a co-responsibility, a solidarity with the other, whatever the mistakes they have made or the accusations brought against them.
Let us be clear: this is not about validating the accusation that another may have levelled against us, nor about confirming our status as traitors; it is a way of re-establishing among us another mode of speech, by inviting a group to enact, for twenty-four hours, what one might call a “counter-shibboleth”.
Suddenly, the Gileadites and the tribe of Ephraim, the enemies who waged such terrible wars on each other, are gathered at the ford of the river of Kippur, to cross it together. They say to each other: if in the future you are accused of being guilty, I will be at your side; if you are accused of being a traitor, I will be at your side, for כל ישראל ערבים זה בזה, kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, “the people of Israel must be able to answer for one another”, says the Talmud; that is, to establish a pact of co-responsibility.
On Kippur, for twenty-four hours, we pretend, speaking in the plural, that we are all guilty and all traitors, not because we are, but because we refuse to reproduce the murderous shibboleth of our book.
It is not easy to say “we”, or rather, it is not easy to pronounce a “we” that is not built at the expense of an other whom one excludes, to build a “we” that, despite the strength of its disagreements, goes on believing in debate. It is the hardest thing there is, and it is the challenge facing the Jewish world today. And not the Jewish world alone.
This year, many important dates await us, elections among them. And you will see that many people will try to play shibboleth, to consolidate their camp through the violent exclusion of someone else, and so to reinforce the terrible polarisation that is devastating our society.
The lesson of Kippur must lead us to choose another path. Not by erasing disagreements or telling ourselves we are going to silence the dissonances. But, on the contrary, by fully accepting our differences, as long as they are voiced in a language where the Other still has a place.
For that is what this is about: finding again the words that allow us to cross, side by side, that ford of the Book of Judges.
Allow me to return for a moment to that most emblematic of episodes. The tribe of Ephraim was executed because it did not know how to pronounce the shin שׁ, “sh”, and turned it into a sin שׂ. In Hebrew the letter is the same, ש, but the vocalisation differs. It is a minor difference, but sometimes a fundamental one. Let me illustrate it through a Hebrew word you all know.
The word “messiah”, in Hebrew, is mashiah משיח. It stirs many passions today. So many people wrap themselves in it to claim that they hold a truth others lack, and that by their belief they can hasten the end of history and the coming of the messianic age.
Now imagine that you are members of the tribe of Ephraim, the one they want to stop from crossing the river. You would then pronounce this word differently. Mashiah משׁיח would become, in your mouth, massiah משׂיח and, suddenly, it would carry another meaning… Massiah, in Hebrew, literally means “the one who makes dialogue possible, the one who enters into conversation”.
I often find myself thinking that the Mashiah is a long time coming. I tell myself that he will never come unless the world first agrees to welcome a Massiah, someone who chooses dialogue, someone who still believes in the power of a genuine conversation.
That is where we stand, dear friends. Words no longer have meaning, but the rabbis beg us not to give up using them, to try and make them resonate again.
They say it in every era, generally in sermons that are too long and very boring… What do you expect? It’s their tradition!
I hope that over these past eighteen years I have been faithful, before you, to this injunction to cherish words and not to give up using them to cultivate our collective intelligence.
It is with great emotion that I prepare to step down as rabbi of “Judaïsme en Mouvement”. Tomorrow evening, just before Ne’ila, I will address the community to speak about this transition. I promise, I will not give you a forty-five-minute or hour-long sermon, but, who knows, I may manage to slip in a little joke…
May you be inscribed and sealed in the book of life, and may you write in that book words that will make us better together, that will help us cherish dialogue and choose, for ourselves and for our children, life.