Learning to Draw and Shoot—Slowly

  There are a lot of nuggets in this combined portion, but we will look at one—making vows. The instructions given here seem a bit strange until we translate them into today's terminology. The issue on the table is making promises to the L‑rd, and by extension, to each other. 

  The Torah here refers to a person who has just emerged from a traumatic experience—grave illness, life-threatening danger. Like a foxhole atheist, most of us turn to the L‑rd in times of need—we have nowhere else to turn. In our desperation we often make promises to the L‑rd, prodded by the need of the moment: "L‑rd, if you get me out of this fix, I'll give myself completely to serve you; I'll give more, I'll serve more..." What happens after the storm clears and we are back on easy street? Our memory fades—we forget our desperation, our earnest pleading with the L‑rd and we rationalize our not following through on this promise. The L‑rd speaks of two types of vows here—positive (neder - referring to promises to do something) and negative (issar - referring to promises to abstain from something, like the Nazarite vows in Numbers 6:1-21). 

  The encouragement to the person making a vow is "he must not break his word but must do everything he said," (30:2, NIV). There are two aspects to the sin of breaking one's vow—relating to G‑d and to oneself. Firstly, a promise made to the L‑rd and not kept is nothing less than a slap in G‑d's face—tremendous disrespect to G‑d and His authority over us. It's as if we take G‑d very lightly. King Solomon exhorts us to remember that the only intelligent response to G‑d is to "stand in awe of G‑d" (Ecclesiastes 5:1-6). 

  Secondly, we slam ourselves and our own character and reputation when we make promises to G‑d and do not keep them. The Hebrew phrase here is literally "profane your word," which is the same kind of language used of slinging mud on G‑d's reputation. The Torah challenges us to keep our word so that we don't end up looking like shiftless people who lack integrity.