Kids' Promises

Here and there, one of my older daughters, ages 8 and 10 will make a vow that I think even they clearly know they have no chance of keeping. In the heat of the moment, or the midst of a fight they'll promise to never be friends, or never speak again, or never give each other anything AGAIN forever more.

It is at times like these that I'm reminded of the mandate uniquely designed for fathers to annul their children's vows. The immense authority I have is astounding; I can enable my children to speak to each other again, lend out their pencil cases, and even share candy with each other. From my mighty pedestal, I reign over my children and rein in their wanton abuses and careless, and frivolously made otherwise binding commitments.

What really though is at the heart of this ritual, and could my underage daughters truly make any life-altering commitments that truly would require my ratification, or annulment? Is it not implicitly understood, even by my children themselves, that they have no intent to keep their promises, adhere to their vows and not effectuate any form of binding transactional commitment?

That notwithstanding, every time – not my youngest daughter who is three – but my two oldest daughters make some commitment that in the heat of the moment they deem unconditionally binding, I try to somehow turn it into an educational lesson, to teach them the power of their words, the potential they have for irrevocability.

The annulment made on the part of a father is very different from that of a beit din headed by a Torah scholar, both in form and purpose, but regardless throughout the Prophets the conception was that a vow could not be annulled. Saul was willing to put his son Yonatan to death for eating honey at a time of battle when all the other soldiers, save him, had heard the holy injunction the army in its entirety had taken upon themselves, thus refraining from eating until the cessation of the war. Similarly, Yiftah's daughter took it as a given that her father had the right to, even unintentionally put an egregious halt to her life, placing her in utter seclusion, leaving her "forever a virgin", after having offered the first being that would greet him upon his return from battle as a "sacrifice to God." The sages themselves state that the concession rabbis and scholars, and courts of law have to annul vows as if they had never come into effect from the get-go is like hot air, ephemeral and with little validity.

Thus, though they are two entirely separate entities, the Torah-sanctioned right, and maybe even prerogative that a father has to annul his daughters' vows, as opposed to that which is transacted on the part of a court of Jewish law, it is important to instill in children a small measure of gravity regarding the importance and potency of the words that they, and sometimes we as adults use so frivolously and flippantly.