Kol Nidre 2025

Our Overstory

Kol Nidre is a night of profound paradox. We stand in an unseen courtroom, feeling the weight of judgment with the Book of Life open before us. Yet, our very first prayer isn't about guilt; it's about release: Kol Nidre ve-esarei…—"All vows, oaths, and promises we made but could not keep—let them be undone, forgiven, canceled."

This opening isn't a legal trick. It’s our tradition’s profound recognition that a system of judgment without compassion is cruelty. We come tonight not just to ask for forgiveness, but to understand what it means to be judged—and to judge ourselves. The question isn't only "What have I done?" but "What unseen forces shape who I am? What is the tipping point that changes everything?"

Malcolm Gladwell, in his recent book,  Revenge of the Tipping Point calls this force an "overstory." It’s a metaphor for the dominant cultural narratives and widespread societal beliefs that shape behavior, much like a forest’s canopy influences everything below it. An overstory is so pervasive that people accept it as reality without realizing it’s a narrative.

Our Jewish tradition understood this long before Gladwell. The Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 16b) teaches that a change of place can cancel an evil judgment, citing Abram, whom God instructed to "go out of your country" before promising to make him a great nation. The Hebrew slaves had to leave the environmental influences of Egypt in order to become God’s nation. And until the current military action in Gaza, and the failure of the Netanyahu  right wing government to grasp truths, the influence of Israel both spiritually and morally were a positive in our Jewish lives. I am not suggesting that Israel is no longer that positive overstory. Just that the current government is not.

 Our environment—our personal overstory—is not merely a backdrop; it is an active character in our lives.

An overstory is incredibly influential. It can normalize behaviors, create taboos, influence risk perception, and define social norms. Gladwell notes how the miniseries Holocaust in the 1970s changed America's overstory, making it a public topic. Similarly, Roots brought slavery and racial tensions into national consciousness. In another example, he describes how a privileged school’s environment shifted parents' views on vaccines from acceptance to widespread hesitancy, almost by osmosis. This echoes much in our society today.

While powerful, an overstory is changeable. Gladwell shows how the narrative around gay marriage in the U.S. shifted from "a problem to be solved" to a simple fact of life, partly through popular culture like Will & Grace. Today, social media and influencers play a similar role in shaping our societal overstory. Environmental and social factors clearly play a significant role in how we perceive ourselves and others, and the communities we belong to.

Consider the story of Philip Esformes. In Chicago, he was a respected, philanthropic businessman, deeply anchored in his synagogue and community. His rabbi, Sholom Lipsker, later noted he "made a thousand right decisions before he made this one profoundly wrong one." But Philip moved to Miami.

In Miami, Esformes entered a different world. The "overstory" of his new environment, one of wealth and temptation within his industry, led him astray. He lost his moral anchor, becoming entangled in one of the biggest Medicaid fraud schemes in American history—a sophisticated operation involving false claims and unnecessary equipment. This was a profound betrayal of trust, a theft from the most vulnerable. He drove a $1.6 million Ferrari, wore a $360,000 Swiss watch, and flew privately, immersed in a party scene.

The judge saw only the crime: "This man has defrauded the public. He deserves a harsh sentence." But Rabbi Lipsker pleaded for a different kind of justice: "Your Honor, the man before you is guilty. But in Chicago, he was a different man. The crime is real, but it is not the full story of his life. He is guilty, but he is not only guilty. He is more than his mistakes."

The rabbi wasn't excusing the crime; he was challenging the court to move beyond a rigid narrative and acknowledge the power of the "overstory."

The truth is, we are all more than our mistakes. The Unetaneh Tokef prayer speaks of divine judgment, but not a cold, unfeeling one. The Midrash (Exodus Rabbah 30:24) teaches that God first tried to create the world with strict judgment, din, but it could not survive. So God mixed in compassion, rachamim. Without mercy, the world itself could not stand.

Maimonides suggests paths to overcome our overstory. The traditional way is to "constantly call out before God, crying and entreating," much like our Ashamnu and Al Cheyt prayers. Does that formula always work? We return each year anticipating that moment in our liturgy. Another method is to entirely change one’s behavior. That’s a nice thought, but as we know, recovery isn't simple; you can’t simply change.

I prefer the reflections of country singer Jelly Roll. Despite his success, he speaks openly about his struggles. In one song, his lyrics capture the weight of this night, seen through a Jewish lens:

I am not okay 

I'm barely getting by 

I'm losing track of days 

And losing sleep at night.

I am not okay
I'm hanging on the rails
So if I say I'm fine
Just know I learned to hide it well.

Tonight, some of us may be feeling that brokenness, carrying a quiet, hidden weight. Jelly Roll's words are a plea for self-compassion. He is saying, "I have done things, I have been shaped by forces, I am not perfect. But I am not defined solely by those imperfections." This is the essence of Teshuvah. It is the understanding that our identity isn't just a ledger of deeds, but a promise to return, to be more than our failures.

This is the deeper work of this night: not just asking for forgiveness for our actions, but re-evaluating the foundational stories—the overstories—that led us to those actions. It’s about recognizing that we matter, that we belong in this community, and that our story is not yet finished.

Maimonides further suggests changing one's name, as if to say, "I am a different person," or intentionally attempting to reshape our overstory. We cannot change our names, but we can change how we relate to God. As the Kol Nidre requests, it's not about guilt, but about release.

His final alternative is "traveling in exile from our home," suggesting that exile atones for sin because it causes humility. Changing the "tops of the trees" in the forest can indeed shift the overstory's influence. I’ve personally seen young people addicted to opioids  and heroine turn their lives around when moved to a different community after rehab. Yet, for every success story, there are others who do not.

For us, the teshuvah and promised changes from previous years are often not a bold black-or-white success, but a "somewhat." It’s not all or nothing; it’s where we get stuck. It’s our place, where our overstory still has that strong influence upon us.

Yom Kippur asks us to consider not solely the guilt of the Al Cheyt or Ashamnu chants, but the release from that guilt and the overstories that may have influenced and broken us, as described in Kol Nidre. The Unetaneh Tokef teaches that if the overstory profoundly influences us, God must understand our foibles are not solely our own making. Are we responsible? Yes. But the Kol Nidre offers an alternative: we ask for the compassion, the rachamim, of God, of those in our lives, and of ourselves, to be released from the overconsuming overstories of this past year, and perhaps years past.

As a congregation, we strive to help form your overstory—not with religious guilt, but by fostering a communal overstory filled with promise and meaning. Yitz Greenberg, even at 90, continues to shape Jewish overstories. While some institutions shrink, he builds new ones like Hadar, molding our Jewish educational world beyond denominational labels. In his latest work, The Triumph of Life, Greenberg suggests we live in a Jewish era "in which God is almost entirely absent and we humans have a radical freedom to act on our own." He emphasizes that "if God is hidden, then our communal institutions are all the more important to hold us together." These institutions "must be adaptive... to face the newer challenges and opportunities of modernity, including feminism, pluralism, and antisemitism."

In other words, as a Jewish institution, we have the responsibility to create an overstory, no matter our numbers, to shape our future—and with hope, to create an overstory without the mindset that we are the last generation, but that others will follow us. This possibility can exist.

What is the overstory of our lives? Is it one of anxiety and busyness, or gratitude and connection? How can we intentionally reshape our personal and communal narratives? How can we shift from focusing on what is "lacking" to what is "present"? This is the deeper work of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It’s about what Gordon Flatt calls Mattering: "more than feelings like you belong in a group, it’s also being missed by people in that group if you weren’t there." And that mattering exists even when we are alone.

Kol Nidre begins with a prayer of release. May it release us from our self-condemnation, from the negative narratives that have become our overstory. It’s about releasing ourselves from moments where we felt we didn’t matter, whether by our own analysis or how others perceived us. Perhaps that was Philip Esformes's fault in thought—Miami transformed him, but Chicago is where he should have been.

May God remember the best of us—the "Chicago"  or shall I say the “New London” within us, the potential for goodness in each of us—and grant us another year where we gain mastery of the overstories that influence and transform who we are and are yet to be.