In this week’s Parsha, Matos-Masei, the Jewish people stand on the bank of the Jordan river.  They have engaged in battle with the nations on the eastern side of that river, have survived the spiritual onslaught of the Moabites in last week’s parsha, and now they are poised to enter the land.   In these two parshiot Moshe will review where the Jewish people have been, the oases in the desert they stopped at, the wars they fought, the challenges they survived, and give them words of rebuke and encouragement for entering the land as he will do throughout the book of Devarim, which we will begin to read next shabbat.

Moshe begins this Parsha with commandments about vows-  that they must be kept, who can make them and who can undo them.  The laws of vows are introduced with the following verse:  “Moses spoke to the heads of the Israelite tribes, saying, This is what the Lord has commanded.  If a person 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.”  I think three questions emerge: Why teach this now?  What do vows have to do with entering the Land of Israel? Why address these laws specifically to the heads of the tribes, when other laws in the Torah are not specifically addressed to them?

The Jewish people have been traveling in the desert for 40 years due to the failure of the meraglim, the spies, who in the previous generation were the heads of their tribes. Now a new generation has come to the land.  We can imagine how nervous Moshe must be that the heads of the tribes of the Jewish people will make the same mistake they did last time around.  He begins by addressing the heads of the tribes -a new generation of would be meraglim.  He gives them the laws of vows because a vow highlights the power of the tongue.   Through a vow one is able to make a new Torah law.  Yesterday, I was allowed whatever the Torah permitted, but if today, for example, I take a vow forbidding meat upon myself -though it impacts no one else- it is forbidden to me as if it were pork.  The power of God’s speech creates the world in Birashit, gives the Torah in Shemot, and here God imbues the human being with the power to create new Torah, a 614th commandment, by mere speech.   Just as the speech of the spies in Shemot could destroy, and doom the Jewish people to 40 years in the desert, so too Moshe says to this generation of leaders, you can create or you can destroy through your tongue, such is the power of your speech.

We live in a world divided by speech.  Often I bemone to myself that various political factions all want to make the world a better place, help the needy, and make us a country which is safer from disease.   But alas, the locking of horns in the public discourse dooms practical solutions to be ever mired in the mud of partisan difference.  Perhaps it is our obligation, in the spaces of our private and interpersonal lives, to heal our own speech, to see the bigger picture and to put into practice what we preach.  Perhaps in this way our personal and interpersonal uses of speech and action can in turn positively impact the matrix of our culture, and bring  about a greater good through sensitivity to speech, for our community, our nation and our world.