Changing God's Mind
Vow Nullification in Mattot-Masei
They gave each other a pledge. Unheard of, absurd.
You gave each other a pledge?
Unthinkable. Where do you think you are?
In Moscow? In Paris? Where do think they are? America? (Fiddler on the Roof)If a man makes a vow to the LORD or takes an oath imposing an obligation on himself, he shall not break his pledge; he must carry out all that has crossed his lips. (Numbers 30:3)
“And Moses beseeched [vayḥal] before the Lord” (Exodus 32:11)…Rava said: Moses stood in prayer until he nullified God’s vow. Here it is written vayḥal, and there [referring to vows], it is written: “He shall not nullify [lo yaḥel] his word” (Numbers 30:3). And [with regard to vows,] the Master said: He who vowed cannot nullify his vow, but others can nullify his vow for him. (Talmud Brachot 32a)
Thereupon the LORD was incensed and God swore, ‘None of the men from twenty years up who came out of Egypt shall see the land that I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob… (Numbers: 32:10-11)
1.
This week’s Torah reading, Mattot-Masei (Numbers 30:2 - 36:13), opens with the laws of vowing. The basic principle is obvious: we are responsible for what we promise. Once we make a pledge it becomes a reality, if only a reality for us. If ever there was an ancient example of constructivism (the notion that reality is invented, not discovered, and that nurture trumps nature), vowing is it. Vowing is magic. It is the alchemy of declarative speech into new reality. Philosophers call it nominalism—the notion that what we name is more real than what we do not name. Thus, can we declare bread crumbs on Passover eve “dust of the earth.” Thus, can we pledge ourselves in marriage. Thus, can we “bring in” Shabbat by reciting Kiddush (a prayer sanctifying the day)—as if Shabbat were something that needed our invitation to exist.
The Torah is full of 613 commandments (according to tradition), yet we might add our own personal commandments to the list, in the form of a vow. Theoretically speaking, insofar as we might take an infinite number of vows, there are an infinite number of commandments out there in the world of logical possibility. The commandment to observe what we vow is the Torah’s analogue to asking the genie for more wishes. I cannot vow to become something impossible, say a cartoon bird with four heads. But I can vow to do that which is possible. Where things get tricky is figuring out the space at the boundary between what is and isn’t possible. Can I vow to travel to space? Whether I can or not, it’s probably unwise to do so.
The Torah’s edge case is complex: what happens when someone who “belongs to us” makes a vow without our knowledge that nevertheless concerns us? Can a child vow to donate her possessions to the Temple when, in some sense, they don’t belong to her? On the other hand, they do belong to her?! What if a minor pledges to do something foolish? The Torah gives a practical answer—assuming the head of household does not object, upon learning of it, the vow stands. Theoretically, this is fascinating: the vow is both effective and ineffective simultaneously. The ambiguity of the case maps onto all kinds of modern examples. Most libertarians grant that minors should not be free to do whatever they want. One can debate the right age for consent, but most agree that there are cases in which even verbal consent is not enough to constitute consent.
On the one hand, the vow of a minor should count, as all human vows do. The power of a promise should stand on its own. And, by default it does. The head of household must opt out to cancel it. On the other hand, context matters—can a person who does not have full agency make a vow? Can a person pledge their own time when their time is not theirs to give? Not really. Can a person vow on behalf of someone else? To do so is to assert that the other can be controlled. While the Torah offers us the case of the daughter and the wife who vow without the patriarch’s permission, the philosophical underpinning and metaphorical power extend more broadly. In a more egalitarian world, we should not assume that everyone enjoys the full status of an ancient patriarch; on the contrary, we might just as well assume that we are all now like ancient daughters and wives. Hegel writes that in a modern society, the struggle between masters and slaves will be resolved only when everyone is equally a master and a slave in their social relations (the slave being prone to ambition and the master being prone to complacency and decadence).
2.
Metaphorically, the notion of a vow that is unapproved by the head of household describes the unconscious mind. Officially, we have certain views and attitudes. But unofficially, our drives and feelings are complex and contested. The id makes vows all the time that the superego vetoes. Even when the vow is approved, the point is that it must first pass through a censor. Vowing, therefore, is a flex. It’s also a way of testing boundaries. What can I get away with pledging before some higher up vetoes me?
3.
That the parashah is fundamentally about the meaning and not just the legality of vowing is underscored by the fact that a few chapters later we read of God having made two oaths. On the one hand, God vowed to grant the Promised Land to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. On the other hand, God swore that the generation of the spies would not enter the Land. Strictly speaking, the oaths don’t contradict one another. Yet they move in opposite directions—in one, God promises entry; in the other, barricade. This, too, is a kind of theological metaphor. Providence is, at the general level, stacked in our favor; yet at the particular level, nothing is guaranteed. Someone will enter the Land, but it may not be us. Redemption, in general, is path independent; but our own redemption is path dependent.
4.
Rabbinic texts offer us the radical image of a God who is bound by God’s own vows, a God who is not free to break God’s own promises—as if the power of God’s word were greater than the power of God’s will. Moses, and by extension, the prophet, is presented as someone with the power to free God from God’s unwittingly foolhardy proclamations (uttered in moments of recklessness). Of course, it’s shocking to us—though not to the rabbis—to invest humanity with this kind of power. It’s shocking that a religious text could be so humanistic, so seemingly secular in subordinating divine will to human agency. (Read boldly, the Talmudic text places Moses in the position of the father and God in the role of spouse or child.) But it’s not just that Moses can annul God’s vow; it’s that Rava, the Talmudic sage, can offer us this possibility on the basis of an observation about Scriptural language, by finding the same word written in two different passages. The close reader/creative interpreter thus finds in Torah the key to saving God from Godself, the key to surviving a formally fair, but substantively indecent outcome.
5.
If you think about God’s blanket statement that nobody who left Egypt should enter the Promised land, then Caleb and Joshua constitute not just exceptions to the rule, but, as it were, the fruits of a broken off vow. We are here today, studying the Torah, because God found a way out of a bad oath. We are here because of God’s teshuva (repentence) and the prophet’s capacity to awaken it.
6.
How do we tell the difference between a bad vow and a vow that only appears bad (or which is bad only because it is inconvenient)? How do we tell the difference between a bad vow which must stand because the time horizon to cancel it has passed and a bad vow which we still have the ability to cancel? The Torah’s stance on oaths—intensified by rabbinic commentary—is shot through with moral ambiguity. There are times when Moses argues with God and is told to stop. There are times when Moses argues with God and wins. And there are times when Moses challenges God and receives a compromise. The point is neither that we are always right nor that God is always right, but that being in relationship with God requires negotiation. What’s clear is the negative lesson: we are not allowed to give up until we’ve tried our utmost. If we are encouraged to challenge even divine will or what seems like it, how much the more so should we find it in ourselves to cultivate a dissident and skeptical spirit towards human authority?
7.
The Talmud emphasizes that we cannot nullify our own vows. There is something about vow nullification that requires, at the formal level, what Levinas calls “alterity,” the presence of another. Vow nullification reveals that our initial vow was illegitimate because we were more interdependent or dependent than we thought. Like tickling or consoling. We need the other to show us that what we think is impossible is possible.
8.
There are only two places in the Talmud (Brachot 5a and Nedarim 7b) where the phrase “the prisoner cannot free himself from jail” appears, once to describe someone in a state of melancholy or debilitating depression and the other to describe someone whose vows have placed him in a state of social banishment and isolation (niduiy). In fact, though, the Talmud teaches that a Torah scholar can free himself from his ban—the principle of “the prisoner cannot free himself from jail” does not apply. Whether the text means to say that the ban we are talking about is fundamentally different than other kinds of vows such as I’ve been describing or whether it means to say something superlative about the power of Torah study (or something else) merits its own discourse. But allow me to offer the speculative possibility that a Torah scholar is someone who is a master of chevruta, a paradoxical champion of being in relationship with others, a paragon of perspective-taking. Such a person doesn’t require the other because, as it were, the other(s) already coexist within that person. Because a Torah scholar can regularly take the opposite point of view, she knows that more is possible, that reality does not end with her own thoughts. Relationship opens us to natality, literally and metaphorically, the arrival of what we could not expect or anticipate.
9.
Numbers/Bamidbar ends this week. Moses will try—and fail—in the next book to enter the Land. Not every attempt at vow nullification will work. Yet the notion that we can change God’s mind, or appeal to a complexity of drives within a God who is divided, is worth considering. For in poetic terms it shows us that fate is more open than we think. Where scientists aim to establish anonymous, stable laws, our prophetic task is to reveal and claim that which can never be scripted, programmed or predicted: existence.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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