Parshah Commentary

Parshat Bechukotai

This week’s parshah, Bechukotai, introduces the practice of the neder (vow), a legally binding spoken commitment. As a first and paradigmatic case, the Torah describes “a person who makes an explicit vow to God for the value of a human being”—that is, pledging one’s monetary worth, quantified based on a scale laid out later in the parshah, to the Temple. Why make such an oath? The commentators point to the example of Jacob, who promises a portion of his possessions—and his wholehearted faith—to God in return for sustenance and protection during his desperate flight into exile, and to the medieval practice of Jews pledging to offer themselves to God if they overcome a particular hardship. This kind of neder is a sort of last-ditch gamble with one’s entire soul as the ante; in Hasidic terms, it is an act of “the giving over of the self,” a fiery devotion born of desperation.

Ten years ago, as a somewhat self-serious, lonely college student, I experienced the onset of severe, unremitting chronic pain, a condition that endures to this day. I had no hope of divine deliverance, but I entertained a spell of magical thinking: If I only could find something to believe in that could give my pain meaning, I would devote myself to it. I had loved the world of academia—and to some extent still do—but it was a place where earnestness was embarrassing and commitment distrusted, where we couched even our deepest confessions in half-apologetic ironies. The critical lenses at the heart of our education justified our reflexive refusal to take any ideal too seriously. But in the face of my suffering, my skepticism turned to ash; it is hard to scoff when you are crying out in pain. So I cast about for other consolations, and found them in religion and in organizing. Each offered a framework for making sense of my pain: Torah offered me a vision of suffering as spiritually and morally redemptive, while the left invited me to see the stigma of my condition as a point of entry into the broader struggle against oppression in all its forms. In exchange, each asked for my entire desperate soul—in our parshah’s terms, for the “value of a human being.”

In the rabbinic tradition, just such unreserved, unqualified commitment grants the neder an almost mystical power to create norms—what the sages call hitchayvut. Nedarim defy the ordinary rules of halachic gravity. If, for example, I take a neder not to eat meat, even kosher meat becomes as unkosher to me as hametz on Passover. Moreover, a collective vow taken by a Jewish community can actually override other commandments. Vows, in other words, can transform the rules of daily life that we had thought to be rigidly fixed.

But if offering one’s self to an ideal can be liberating, it is also undeniably dangerous. I think of friends who, fed up with the shallowness of American suburban culture, moved to settlements in the West Bank, where they dedicated themselves to right-wing religious Zionism, or of countless lonely teens radicalized by the online right’s grand narratives. The rabbis understood the hazards inherent in nedarim: One haunting midrash portrays Joseph’s guilty brothers, who have just conspired to fake his death and sell him into slavery, taking a vow to conceal their deed from their father Jacob and “including God as one of the partners.” As a result, the midrash explains, God is compelled to withhold the news of Joseph’s survival, subjecting Jacob to years of needless grief. Here, the neder takes on a theurgic power; the brothers twist the will of God to fit their fratricidal logic, and even God must comply. Small wonder, then, that some authorities forbid the making of vows altogether, or at least severely circumscribe them.

The fires of commitment can burn out of control. But in a world crumbling around us, the alternative—blanket skepticism and irresolution—is really no choice at all. For those of us working for justice, then, the question is not whether to commit ourselves, but to whom and to what—and how to do so generously, earnestly, with all we have to give.

Rabbi Allen Lipson is a community organizer at the Essex County Community Organization.