Re: Kol Nidre

[SamWeiss <SamWeiss...>]

At 09:33 PM 7/26/01, Robert Cohen wrote:
>It occurs to me that the line, I believe, *before* Kol Nidre perhaps does 
>refer, or perhaps is understood to refer, to those who underwent forced 
>conversions.  (It "gives us permission" to pray with "those who have 
>transgressed.")  Maybe that's what Joe was thinking of here.

Well, a literal connection between this statement ("Bishiva shel 
Ma'ala...") and the Spanish expulsion/conversions can't be supported from a 
historical standpoint, since it was written over two hundred years earlier 
by the famed (Ashkenazi) Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg to satisfy the Talmudic 
dictum that "A public fast in which Jewish transgressors do not take part 
is not a fast."

As far as fanciful associations with the Iberian Conversos, there is indeed 
a tenuous link between them and Rabbi Meir's formulation, on the basis of a 
misreading of (or a pun on) the word "Ha-avaryanim" ("transgressors") to 
somehow mean "the Iberians."

______________________________________________________
Cantor Sam Weiss === Jewish Community Center of Paramus, NJ