Kol Nidre: The Melody That Beat the Lawyers

A Torah & History explainer for the week of Yom Kippur. Ha'azinu — the oldest song in the Bible — contains a verse where you can literally watch ancient scribes editing the theology (the Dead Sea Scrolls' 'sons of God'). And Kol Nidre, the most attended moment of the Jewish year, is a legal formula the greatest rabbis in history tried to kill twice — and lost twice, to its own melody. A story about how a people that lost its land survived inside a text, and why some of the portable homeland's load-bearing walls are tunes, not laws.