How many times in our lives have we said things that were better left unsaid? How many times have we wished that anyone who heard us would simply forget what we just said? The wondrous world of vowsopens our eyes to the world of the speech
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Fantasy and science fiction writers like to play with reality: what if one could go between dimensions? What if one could travel in time? What will happen to a person who has gone back and prevented his death? Or maybe even his birth? Or moved forward and already saw what would happen in the future?
In a sense, the halakhic world is a fantasy world in which such things can happen. One of the central places for this to happen is the world of vows, nedarim, which opens this week’s parasha. Starting from the beginning: the Torah allows for someone to make his own personal “lav” (halachic prohibition). Beyond all of the Torah’s commandments, there is also one open commandment - if you make a vow, you must fulfill it. “He shall not break his pledge” says the Torah, turning what a man said holy and its violation - desecration. Everything in the world can suddenly become sacred or forbidden, just as if it was is written in the Torah.
The Sages ruled that “with regard to vows, follow the ordinary language of people”, what determines Halakhah is the human language, even in the case that the Torah itself says otherwise. There is a very large opening here for human creation, to consecrate and desecrate. The Torah allows, and perhaps even requires, to treat speech and language with utter seriousness. The Torah applies its full weight in order for the speaker to do what he said. There is also an opening here for us to use our mouths to charge our daily activities with Torah energy.
On the other hand, the Torah teaches that there are cases in which one does not need to keep her word. In our Parasha this case relates to a woman who is not independent and depends on her father’s or her husband’s approval, but this is just an examples as the Sages expanded that there is a “vow” for vows, allowing us to undo the vows. This undoing is the discovery that the act of speech was not done with full intention, and that if the person had been thinking better, he would not have vowed. In such a case, the vow retroactively canceled, as if it had never been. The sacred world that had been placed becomes something of imagination.
The speech that creates the Torah’s holiness is only that which comes from the depths of the heart, only when one’s mouth and heart are equal the speech is sacred. Everyone knows the difference between speaking from the heart and just chatting. But sometimes our own words lead us in the wrong direction. How many times in our lives have we said things that were better left unsaid? How many times have we wished that anyone who heard us would simply forget what we just said? Our parasha recoginze that exactly and is creating a reality where if on second thought it turns out that our heart was not synced with our speech, that we regret it all, our vow will simply disappear, as if it was never said. The wondrous world of vows, with its halakhic development in the Mishnah and Gemara, opens our eyes to the world of speech: how words can turn the mundane into sacred and meaningful, It tells us about the imperative relationship between our words and our heart. All this while recognizing the human aspect of our lives as on occasion we regret our words and modify our commitments.
