Parashiyyot Mattot-Mas’ei

Words That Build and Break Worlds: Parashiyyot Mattot-Mas’ei
By: Rabbi Jonah Rank, Hebrew Seminary President & Rosh Yeshivah

Streets are filled with broken hearts
Broken words never meant to be spoken
Everything’s broken
-Bob Dylan, “Everything Is Broken”[1]

Our trust breaks down when someone we admire or rely on says one thing and does another. Whether the word that never came to be began with a partner, a peer, a parent, or a politician—our faith in humanity is tested whenever some assurance that buoyed us from one moment to the next has settled in a graveyard of pledges that proved false.

Communication is sacred. Yet language can be two-faced. Every sentence we utter sincerely in the future tense carries in its grasp the seeds of the life we hope to live. Our words can also equip us with deceit; we can lie intentionally to others, and, if we are not careful, we may delude ourselves.

It is truly no wonder that one peak moment in the Siddur praises God for consistency in speech and action: “בָּרוּךְ שֶׁאָמַר וְהָיָה הָעוֹלָם” (barukh she’amar vehayah ha’olam—“Blessed is the One who spoke, and the world then came to be”).[2] Imitatio Dei—the Jewish (and Christian) desire to ‘imitate the Divine’[3]—compels us to live up to the ideals of the God who said, “יְהִי אוֹר” (yehi or, “Let there be light”) and, through speech, willed light into existence.[4] Whatever God spoke came to be. Through declarative statements, God created a separation between the heavens and the waters, dry land, vegetation, luminous entities in the night sky, marine life, foul, and land animals—including humans.[5]

In the ancient world, humans believed that their own spoken word was imbued with nearly magical and, often irreversible, power.[6] Among the ancient Greeks, a spoken oath was almost always, in the words of Alan Sommerstein, “considered… absolutely binding.”[7] Seeking the very few exceptions to this rule, Sommerstein writes that “[t]he only situation in which a Greek could realistically conceive of an oath not being binding would be if the god in whose name the oath was taken were to be overruled by a more powerful god.”[8]

For our ancestors and their neighbors, oathtaking was most commonly an oral ritual.[9] In the 9^th century B.C.E. in what is now Syria, one Bar Hadad built a monument with an Aramaic inscription and dedicated it to his god Melqart. According to the inscriber, “נזר לה ושמע לקלה” (“[Bar Hadad] made a vow to that [deity], and that [deity] heard his voice”).[10] Making promises orally means that many words once formulated with religious determination in the ancient world have now been lost. Oaths were sworn by both men and women in antiquity, but, as Judith Fletcher summarizes with regard to these solemn statements in ancient Greece, “women’s oaths were… seldom recorded by historians, inscribed on stone, or mentioned in court unless they were in support of a man’s legal agenda.”[11] The oaths that ancient history has left behind for us are thus almost exclusively those that “had some consequences for men’s own lives.”[12]

Photograph of the Melqart stele—including above the Aramaic inscription a graphic depiction of the axe-carrying god Melqart in loincloth, long headdress, and beard—reproduced in greyscale here at on July 27, 2022.

Our Torah reading this week, Mattot–Mas’ei, opens with a series of laws surrounding the inviolability of a vow. Moses reports the Divine command that, when a person makes any kind of sacred vow, “לֹ֥א יַחֵ֖ל דְּבָר֑וֹ כְּכׇל־הַיֹּצֵ֥א מִפִּ֖יו יַעֲשֶֽׂה” (“they shall not desecrate their word; they shall act according to whatever has escaped their mouth”).[13] In the largely patriarchal society inhabited by the scribes who transmitted to us our written Torah, the question was inevitably asked: Do women’s vows have to be taken seriously? Our portion, at first, affirms that the vows of women are generally to be upheld,[14] and the vows of divorced women and widows are always rendered in good standing.[15] But the vows of girls still living with their fathers or of wives living in the domains of their husbands were less secure. The men whose lives and possessions were liable to be affected by the vows of these female Israelites were granted two conditions for overturning the vows in question. These male Israelites could cancel those vows until the end of the day when they first heard the vow uttered,[16] or, if the vow was clearly self-destructive, the vow could be annulled at any time.[17]

Why would the religious gravity of women’s words be surveilled more than the words of men? The Dutch biblical scholar Karel van der Toorn suggested that a financial burden could potentially have been unduly placed on a man in the life of the vowing woman. He writes:

Ordinarily, vows were paid in movable goods, and there is no reason to assume that this was different [for] women. In her case, though… her father or husband… had to furnish the promised goods. Without means of her own, the woman was forced to rely on her father or husband for the fulfillment of her vow.[18]

Whatever the reason, it is clear that many ancient Israelite women lacked full agency over their religious aspirations.

Still, vows held great appeal for women. Female Israelites, though often restricted from public life, were allowed, in the words of the eclectic scholar Jacques Berlinerblau, “to initiate dialogue with Yahweh in privacy and without the prior approval of a male.”[19] In making a vow, Israelite women could take part in “one of the few ‘official’ practices” of the Israelite religion.[20] The narrative of I Samuel 1, often read during Rosh HaShanah, depicts the childless Hannah[21] vowing that whatever son may come from her would serve her God.[22] Even among women in ancient neighboring nations, vows were popular. Berlinerblau calculates that, “vows made by women, while not compromising nearly one half of all Phoenician and Punic votive texts, nevertheless occur frequently enough to indicate that women in these cultures did actively participate in the votive system.”[23]

Widespread as women’s vows may have been, the story of Hannah itself demonstrates a variety of struggles women may have anticipated when making vows. Hannah’s husband Elkanah and she appear never to engage in dialogue with one another prior to Samuel’s birth,[24] and our author makes no mention of Elkanah’s presence while she makes her vow.[25] In the absence of her husband, Eli the priest was “שֹׁמֵ֥ר אֶת־פִּֽיהָ” (“watching her mouth”)[26] and disturbed that “שְׂפָתֶ֣יהָ נָּע֔וֹת וְקוֹלָ֖הּ לֹ֣א יִשָּׁמֵ֑עַ” (“her lips were moving, but her voice could not be heard”).[27] With her vow being inaudible—perhaps so as to avoid the intervention of any man of greater autonomy in her world—Hannah could protect her prayers and devotion from ancient legal mechanisms that could have overturned her words.

Words of vows were not to be taken lightly; thus Israelite men’s vows could not be revoked.[28] But the devotions of women, if overheard, could be overruled.[29] It is simply impossible for me to read these words that legislate inequality and to attribute them to God’s will alone.

For centuries, biblical scholars have posited that, in all likelihood, our Torah was not a uniform document at first but now constitutes a collection of multiple texts by multiple authors.[30] I do not know if the single verse that states that the vow of every Israelite—or Israelite man—is irrevocable comes from the same mind that dedicated 13 verses to the limited circumstances that frequently render female Israelites’ vows precarious.[31] The former seems concerned with spiritual sincerity, and the latter seems bogged down by an obsession to control women. The final redactor of our text however permitted several times, amidst the verses limiting women’s vows, the very idea of a god who regrets this imbalanced system.

Our text includes the phrase “יִסְלַח לָהּ” (“God will forgive her”) each time that a man is granted the right to cancel the vow of the woman.[32] In his classic commentary on Numbers, Rabbi Jacob Milgrom adduces: “[I]f the woman is thwarted from fulfilling her vow by her father or husband… God will automatically forgive her.”[33] But the Torah’s text here makes no mention of specific offerings that accompany women’s—or men’s—vows. It seems to me that God is not merely forgiving women for having made a vow that is not to be fulfilled; it appears as if God is apologizing to women for having created a world so flawed that patriarchy even upsets the holiness of women’s words. God’s forgiveness here stems from zero accusation levied against the woman; this forgiveness yields a compassionate reply from a God who spoke a world into being but has yet to speak equality into being.

Words create our worlds. Censoring each other’s words means eroding not only freedom of speech but chipping away at a new world of opportunity on the precipice of being born. Though words can be dangerous when used violently or falsely, they are among the few divine instruments that separate human beings from most animals.[34] Our religious aspiration to walk in God’s ways requires us to cultivate a society that encourages each of us to talk in God’s ways. God may not have spoken gender equality into existence, but the God who forgives us for living in circumstances beyond our control turns to us and asks us to speak a more equitable world into existence.

[1] Bob Dylan, “Everything Is Broken,” on Bob Dylan, Oh Mercy (produced by Daniel Lanois; Columbia Records, 1989).

[2] This prayer typically marks in prayerbooks of predominantly Ashkenazic communities the beginning of פְּסוּקֵי דְּזִמְרָה (Pesukey DeZimrah, “Verses of Song”), following the preliminary בִּרְכוֹת הַשַּׁחַר (Birkhot HaShachar, “The Blessings of the Dawn”) and preceding the ‘morning service proper’ of שַׁחֲרִית (Shacharit, “Morning [Prayer]”).

[3] Jews find roots for this idea in Leviticus 19:2 and 20:26 and, later, Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 14a. Christian scholars often cite, in addition to the passages in Leviticus, Ephesians 5:1.

[4] Genesis 1:3.

[5] Cf. Genesis 1:6, 1:9, 1:11, 1:14, 1:20, 1:24, and 1:26.

[6] It should be noted that we know more about spoken language from antiquity than about signed language in ancient history. One of the earliest recorded references to sign language, though mentioned derogatorily, comes from the 5^th century B.C.E., from Greek philosopher Plato’s work Cratylus, where, at 422e, an incredulous Socrates tried to imagine his own life without using spoken words.

[7] A. H. Sommerstein, “Were oaths always totally binding?” in Alan H. Sommerstein and Isabelle C. Torrance (eds.), Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece (Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter, 2014), p. 281.

[8] Ibid., p. 285.

[9] Far to the east of ancient Israel, neo-Sumer in modern-day Iraq was known for its culture of written vows. Cf. Jacques Berlinerblau, The Vow and the ‘Popular Religious Groups’ of Ancient Israel: A Philological and Sociological Inquiry (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), pp. 90–92.

[10] The original text of this stele is reproduced in Berlinerblau, p. 62.

[11] Judith Fletcher, “Women and Oaths,” in Sommerstein and Torrance, pp. 156–179, esp. p. 178.

[12] Ibid., esp. p. 179.

[13] Numbers 30:3

[14] Ibid. 30:5.

[15] Ibid. 30:10.

[16] Ibid. 30:6, 30:9, 30:13.

[17] Ibid. 30:14.

[18] Karel van der Toorn, “Female Prostitution in Payment of Vows in Ancient Israel,” in Journal of Biblical Literature 108:2 (Summer 1989), pp. 193–205, esp. p. 200.

[19] Berlinerblau, p. 138.

[20] Ibid., p. 147.

[21] Cf. I Samuel 1:2.

[22] Cf. I Samuel 1:11.

[23] Berlinerblau, p. 139.

[24] Note that Hannah never responds to Elkaneh with words after he addresses her in I Samuel 1:8. In the next verse, her mouth emits no words and only opens to accept food and drink.

[25] Cf. I Samuel 1:9–18.

[26] Ibid. 1:12.

[27] Ibid. 1:13.

[28] Numbers 30:3.

[29] Ibid 30:4–16.

[30] This idea was stated nearly a millennium ago by the Iberian grammarian of the 11^th and 12^th centuries C.E. Abraham ibn Ezra in his commentary on Genesis 12:6. Cf. Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, “Authorship of the Torah: The Position of Ibn Ezra and Yehuda HaChasid,” accessed at https://www.thetorah.com/article/authorship-of-the-torah-the-position-of-ibn-ezra-and-yehuda-hachasid on July 29, 2022.

[31] Cf. Numbers 30:3 contra ibid. 30:4–16.

[32] Ibid. 30:6, 30:9, and 30:13.

[33] Jacob Milgrom, The JPS Torah Commentary: Numbers (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1990) p. 252 on Numbers 30:6, s.v. “forgive.”

[34] Communication—whether signed manually or spoken aurally—is not exclusive to human beings. While many forms of communication between a variety of species rest on non-verbal cues, the former Chimpanzee and Human Communications Institute at Central Washington University housed five chimpanzees who communicated with one another through sign language. Cf. e.g. “Washoe, a Chimp of Many Words, Dies at 42” as accessed at https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/science/01chimp.html on July 29, 2022.