Hello again everyone and welcome to the Temple Institute Parsha class.
My name is Gedalia Meyer, podcasting from my home in Maale Adumim, Israel.
Though it sounds like a broken record, once again I start this podcast with the unneeded
reminder that both here in Israel and in many places in the world, we are still in the midst
of this seemingly endless pandemic.
We have no idea how and when it will end, or if the future bodes better or worse for
us.
It seems as though all we can do is hope for the best and do whatever we can, both physically
and spiritually, to ensure that ourselves and those around us stay healthy and safe.
We are unquestionably living in strange times.
If one stays up to date on the news it seems as though it is all doom and gloom.
Many of us long for those times in the past when the worst that could happen was political
scandals, a not quite steady economy, a slew of societal problems of one form or another,
and the ever-present specter of the world coming to an end through global warming.
Now, those worries and whatever else kept us up at nights, seem like distant memories
of the good old days when life was simple and predictable, and we knew that somehow
things would work out, no matter how problematic they may have seemed at the time.
Hardly a day goes by without reading or hearing about the looming disasters to our jobs, our
normal activities in life, our entire economies, or our lives.
It’s like we woke up to a nightmare that just won’t end.
There are two things that come to mind when contemplating this apocalyptic outlook.
First, is that it probably isn’t going to be all that bad.
This too shall pass, just as every other potential world-ending catastrophe of the past did.
We just have to ride it out and keep on keeping on.
Things will change, perhaps for the better or perhaps for the worse, but we shall be
able to adjust to whatever comes our way.
While this may sound naive and overly optimistic, it is probably the only way to get through
something like this.
The second thing is that we have to prime ourselves to be able to get through whatever
happens.
It is not enough to just hope or even to pray.
We have to strengthen ourselves to rise to the moment.
How is this to be done?
How are we supposed to prepare ourselves for an uncertain future?
Believe it or not, there is something in this week’s Parsha that may help answer this
question.
The Parsha is called Matot, which means ‘tribes’ in Biblical Hebrew.
It happens that even in the Bible it is a relatively rare word for ‘tribe’, but
there it is right in the first verse of the Parsha.
It happens that the word has very little significance to what comes next so we are not going to
pay much attention to it.
There are a few different subjects in this Parsha.The first deals with the arcane subject
of making or annulling personal vows.
The second is the details of a brief war the Israelites fought with the ancient tribal
nation of Midian, whom we encountered in the two previous Parshas.
The third is a long and quite detailed rendering of a deal that Moshe brokered with two of
the tribes of Israel who wished to stay on the eastern side of the Jordan River and not
settle the land of Israel itself.
The deal forced them to commit themselves to fighting the battles to conquer the land
with the rest of the Israelites and only when all that ended could they return to their
families on the eastern side of the Jordan.
Admittedly, none of these subjects seems remotely connected to anything to do with pandemics
or uncertainty or preparation for an uncertain future.
However, the Torah is a tremendous storehouse of potential wisdom and it is seemingly always
possible to find some answer to whatever problem one is facing at the moment.
In our case, we are going to focus on the first section, the one dealing with the vows.
It happens that making, fulfilling, and annulling of vows is a fairly important subject of the
Talmud, the primary source of Jewish law.
The primary source for all of those Talmudic laws concerning vows is this section right
here.
The basic details can be stated rather briefly.
A vow is a formal oral declaration that a person makes to commit themselves to some
future action or mode of behavior.
Classic Biblical vows may have included bringing some voluntary offering or making a pilgrimage
to the Temple in Jerusalem.
But they may have included much more mundane things like not eating a certain kind of food
or not dealing with a specific person in a specific manner.
These same kinds of commitments apply equally well to today, with regards to diets or smoking
or personal behavior, or any other matter that a person feels they have to make a formal
vow in order to solidify a commitment.
The vow must be stated clearly, though it need not be heard by anyone else.
There may be time limits on fulfilling the vow and they become essential details of the
vow that must be observed.
This is serious business.
There are ways, however, of annulling or releasing the vow.
This is what the bulk of this section in the Torah deals with.
Annulment or releasing of vows is a formal process that involves going to a person who
has the authority to do such a thing.
Examples in the Parsha include a father annulling the vows of his daughter, or a husband annulling
the vows of his wife.
That these examples may or may not fit into the norms of modern society is not the important
point.
The point is that the annulment must be done by someone other than the person who made
the vow.
Contemporary Judaism employs either a rabbi or a delegation of three qualified people
to serve in this role.
When sufficient reason is given for annulling or releasing the vow, there is a formal process
for annulment.
When this is done, the person is no longer under any obligation to complete the vow.
Modern people might wonder why they were ever under any such obligation.
All that ever happened was that the person committed themselves to something or other
and realized that they either couldn’t or didn’t want to stick with it.
What is really the big deal with simply throwing in the towel and forgetting about the vow
altogether?
This, it turns out, is an important question and one that tunes us in to the core of this
entire subject in the eyes of the Bible and Judaism.
A vow is not simply the way we view a New Year’s resolution, though those may indeed
be considered formal vows.
Typically, we consider our vows or commitments to be nothing more than wish lists that can
be taken up or let go of as we choose.
Nobody really takes these things very seriously anymore.
This is not so in the Bible.
The second verse in the Parsha states clearly, ‘When a person vows a vow to God, or makes
an oath to prohibit something on his or her self, that person shall not break their word,
but shall do all that was expressed verbally.’
While this sounds very Biblical and harsh to modern ears, it was probably the expected
norms of Jewish society until fairly recently.
It basically states that we have to stick to our commitments and cannot treat them lightly.
They cannot be dismissed as one more bit of hot air that comes out of our mouths.
Words and commitments, to some degree, reveal the fiber from which we are made.
If our words and our commitments mean nothing more to us than some nonsense we post on Facebook,
than that, to some degree, is what we are.
Nobody is suggesting here that we have entered into a lifelong contract every time we open
our mouths.
Most of the things we say or post are really nothing more than thoughts or suggestions
or small talk that involves no lasting commitments.
Neither the Bible nor Judaism suggests anything otherwise.
However, when a genuine commitment is made, it has to be taken with utmost seriousness.
This is why such commitments, if not truly intended to be fulfilled, should not be made
as formal vows.
The bottom line in all this is that a commitment is a commitment.
If we treat our commitments as nothing more than wishful thinking than that is exactly
what they will be.
The price we pay for this, of course, is that we place little to no value on our own ability
to stick things out.
This, in turn diminishes ourselves both in our own eyes and in the eyes of others.
This is precisely why the arcane matter of vows is taken so seriously in the Bible and
in Judaism.
This also happens to be the reason why Moshe was so exact in the details of his deal with
those two tribes that didn’t want to settle on the westerrn side of the Jordan river.
He knew that if he didn’t include the fine print they would find some way out of their
commitment.
This is just the way things are and the way people are.
The only way around this fact of life is to make a personal commitment to keep personal
commitments.
In other words, to treat vows with the seriousness that they should be treated.
Perhaps this is a remedy for the spiritual doubts about our own fate during uncertain
times such as those that we are currently in.
To make a commitment towards some improved mode of behavior, to break a long-standing
bad habit, to resolve to be a better person - these may not cure the virus itself but
they may cure some of its side effects.
To stick with those commitments and to follow them through may very well be a remedy of
sorts to the uncertainty that we all find ourselves mired in.
If nothing in life is certain and we find ourselves groping for anything to anchor ourselves
to security, there may be nothing available to us other than ourselves.
We can be our own source of direction as to which way to go when we don’t really know
what will happen.
We cannot control everything.
Truth be told, in the big picture there is very little that we really do control.
But we can control, at least to some degree, how we see ourselves.
Making commitments and sticking with them is as good a barometer as any for knowing
how firmly invested we are in ourselves.
Shabbat Shalom