An incredible Occupy Wall Street Kol Nidrei draws hundreds (The Tablet)

Atonement in Lower Manhattan
An incredible Occupy Wall Street Kol Nidrei draws hundreds
By Marc Tracy|October 10, 2011 10:00 AM

Friday night, as the sun went down, hundreds of Jews gathered in an open square a few dozen yards from Zuccotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street protest has taken place for the past three weeks. Led by a rabbinic intern, a chazzan, and a few others, and with no electronic amplification—the group relied, instead, on the old protest trick of forming concentric circles and having the outer layers repeat what the inner layers have said—the group davened the Kol Nidrei service. (Even Israel noticed!) The leaders sought to connect the service and its titular prayer, in which Jews ask God to release them from obligations made to Him, to the causes championed by the protesters across Broadway, whose drums and chants resounded during quiet moments, and who had been consulted beforehand. Like the protest, what emerged from this were undeniable left-wing sentiments deliberately muffled in order to maintain as large as possible a tent.

“Kol Nidrei reminds us that though we make commitments under duress, ultimately we are accountable only to the higher values of Justice and Righteousness,” Daniel Sieradski, a young Jewish writer and activist who organized the event, told the crowd, reciting a labor organizer’s midrash. (Right-wing critics would be correct to note that, if it were 100 years ago, Sieradski and the others would be inciting socialist riots on the Lower East Side; what they fail to see, here as elsewhere, is that it isn’t 100 years ago, and today you couldn’t find a minyan to form that riot.)

Today, we are thinking about a different kind of commitment made under duress. A big part of our financial crisis was caused by a banking system which misled and pressured, which up-sold and implored us to sign without reading, where fraud was rampant, and where caution was absent. Because of those external problems, many good hardworking people were steered, under a sort of duress, into financial doom while their futures were sold from the rich to the richer.

Today, as we think about how commitments must be contemplated in the context of right and wrong, of earth and heaven, we know that those notes have no moral weight, that banks can’t and shouldn’t own the futures of people who work, and that it’s time for the bankers to abandon their claims on everyday people’s futures. I will leave it to another <on this day> to think about what this means practically or what policies we should adopt as a country ...

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