The Knot That Unties

There is a secret here. And it is right to publish it

Michael Berg says one phrase kept returning to his mind in the days before. It was a phrase Rav Ashlag used whenever a particularly important secret was at stake.

There is a wisdom that is kept. And there is one that is opened, because the opportunity is too great to stay hidden. Yom Kippur is plainly the most powerful day of the year, with the greatest opportunities for our lives. Hence the effort to do everything possible to make this day's secrets known.

The question that opens everything

Kol Nidre is written in Aramaic and speaks, literally, of the annulment of vows. But whoever was there on the eve of Rosh Hashanah already did this: we all annulled our vows. So why again?

And the more important question follows right behind: why is the first connection we make with the most powerful day of the year precisely this one? If it were spiritual paperwork, it would not hold that place. What comes first reveals what the whole day is.

The action is not the terrible part. The binding is

Monica Berg noted at Rosh Hashanah that the Torah's word for a negative action is isur, and that the root of that word does not mean prohibition. It means being bound.

That is the difference between carrying guilt and carrying weight. Guilt looks back and judges. The weight keeps acting, today, in the present, pulling you toward the same reactions. Kol Nidre is not about the guilt. It is about the weight.

The true word is hatarah

"Annulment of vows" is the surface translation. The ancient Hebrew word, the one that carries the energy, is hatarah: to detach from something, to separate from something.

So the first thing that happens on Yom Kippur is not confession, nor contrition, nor inventory. It is separation. In consciousness, in word and in action, we are separating from every negative force we bound ourselves to in the year that passed.

Becoming matir of yourself

The mikveh before Yom Kippur is the most important immersion of the year. After the connection that afternoon, some friends from the chavurah came to Michael Berg with the practical question: what is the consciousness? The answer was simple, and for that reason powerful.

You meditate to be matir, to separate your soul from every negative action you committed in this past year. Then from every one you committed in your whole life. Then from every one you committed across all your incarnations. Three circles opening, one inside the other.

And everything shared about Yom Kippur, he says, is only a fraction of the Light and the opportunity available. But this is where it begins.

The Din still at seed level

The work of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is to prepare the year. Even so, sometimes Din, judgment, remains. Not as punishment: as a seed. A health matter, a legal one, a financial one, a family one, anything not yet manifest but already present at seed level.

This is the second separation. The first was of you from your own actions. This one is of you, and of those around you, from what has not yet begun to happen.

The shevuah of the world

Rav Shimon bar Yochai explains in the Tikunei Zohar that the world as we see it, with so much darkness, war, pain and death, exists because of humanity's cumulative effect. Individually, each of us is bound to the negativity we created. Humanity as a whole is bound to the negativity we all created.

An oath is not an arbitrary sentence. It is cause and effect on a collective scale, and for that very reason it can be untied. The Light of Yom Kippur has the power to remove that ancient, deep binding between our world and the root of all the negativity that manifests in it. But it has to be present in the consciousness of whoever connects.

Three gifts, one consciousness

It is the same movement at three widening radii. First, you separate from any negative energy you bound yourself to, from any knot called isur. Second, if there is any Din hovering over you or over someone close, it is removed before it manifests. Third, the seemingly unbreakable binding between humanity and the darkness it created is broken.

You, your year, the world. That is hatarah. That is the separation, the detaching, available tonight at Kol Nidre, with the Light and the power of Yom Kippur.

And consciousness asks for a place to happen. That is what the meditation below is for.