In that incident the reader will see that (hard as it is for the non-Jew to understand it!) there is a deep-rooted, sentimental regard for the “Kol Nidre” which makes it one of the most sacred of possessions to the Jew. Indefensibly immoral as the “Kol Nidre” is, utterly destructive of all social confidence, yet the most earnest efforts of a few really spiritual Jews have utterly failed to remove it from the prayer books, save in a few isolated instances. The music of the “Kol Nidre” is famous and ancient. One has only to refer to the article “Kol Nidre” in the Jewish Encyclopedia to see the predicament of the modern Jew: he cannot deny; he cannot defend; he cannot renounce. The “Kol Nidre” is here, and remains. If the prayer were a request for forgiveness for the broken vows of the past, normal human beings could quite understand it. Vows, promises, obligations and pledges are broken, sometimes by weakness of will to perform them, sometimes by reason of forgetfulness, sometimes by sheer inability to do the thing we thought we could do. Human experience is neither Jew nor Gentile in that respect. But the prayer is a holy advance notice, given in the secrecy of the synagogue, that no promise whatever shall be binding, and more than not being binding is there and then violated before it is ever made. The scope of the prayer is “from this day of atonement, until the next day of atonement.” The prayer looks wholly to the future, “we repent, aforehand, of them all.” 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?