Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 11 July 2026¹

• In March 1922, the Canadian province of Nova Scotia decided to follow most of the rest of North America and switch to driving on the right.²
• The old rule of driving on the left was set out in two different laws: one directing motor vehicles to stick to the left,³ and another, older, one directing carriages and livestock to stick to the left.⁴
• The grand plan was for the change to come into effect from 1 January 1923. Unfortunately, the Nova Scotian government made a mistake. The older carriages-and-livestock law was amended to come into force in the new year.⁵ The newer motor vehicles law was amended to come into force immediately.⁶ So, for the second half of 1922, cars were to drive on the right while horses-and-carts drove on the left.⁷
• The obvious solution to this disaster would be for the Nova Scotian legislature to sort out the mess. But, unfortunately, they’d packed up and gone home for the season – Nova Scotia is a small place without full-time MPs – so that wasn’t an option.⁸ The law was the law, and the law was an ass.
• So, the Premier of Nova Scotia had to go, cap-in-hand, to the Governor-General of Canada, and beg him to disallow the amendments:⁹ the equivalent of the King refusing royal assent to an Act of Parliament.¹⁰ This was enormously embarrassing. The royal power to overturn legislation was a controversial one – provinces were always rallying against it as overbearing and an affront to democracy.¹¹ Actively asking for it to be invoked was unprecedented.¹²
• But then again, the power to make law – to exercise coercive control over people’s lives – is a momentous one, and should be both constrained and reversible. As a newspaper in Montreal put it at the time, why would anyone argue that the principle of democracy gave Nova Scotia “a right to misgovern itself”¹³ by having traffic drive on both sides of the road at once?
• And as we remind ourselves of just how important it is to have mechanisms in place to save people from the consequences of their own mistakes, we come to our parashah this morning. It’s all about the annulment of vows.
• To understand the concept fully, it’s important to recognise just how significant a biblical vow, or נדר, is. A נדר is more consequential than any new year’s resolution, any money-back guarantee, even any contract of employment. A נדר effectively creates a new, personalised law for the individual in question, with the full force of the Torah. If Brian vows to give up eating chocolate, then for him chocolate has the same halachic prohibition as pork and adultery. If Laura vows to go for a jog every evening, jogging becomes a 614th commandment for her, to be enforced in just the same way.¹⁴
• These vows are so incredibly serious that when Israelis make casual promises (‘I’ll give you a lift home after the party’) they often add the phrase בלי נדר, “not a vow”, to make absolutely clear that they don’t intend to be biblically bound by their words.
• It seems like a no-brainer, then, that there should be some constraint on נדר-making. Laura’s נדר to jog every evening is absolutely binding, even if one evening she happens to be visiting a relative in hospital – or in hospital herself. People who make vows that are unwise, ill-considered or just plain silly need to be able to escape the eternal consequences of their mistake.
• Thus the Torah provides Laura with just such a get-out. Her father (if she’s unmarried) or her husband (if not) can cancel her jogging vow.¹⁵
• So that’s alright then. Ah, no, wait a minute. The biblical get-out clause only applies to women. The Torah assumes that women’s vows are likely to be frivolous, pointless and inconvenient for their menfolk. A 16th-century responsum relates the case of a wife who vowed never to mend her husband’s clothes ever again after he criticised her sewing; we’re told that “he annulled her נדר immediately”.¹⁶ Phew. He dodged a bullet there!
• The Torah: a women’s commentary explains that a man would typically exercise this power “to regulate the impact that [her] vow would have upon the household”.¹⁷
• Yet common sense tells us that men are at least as likely as women to make vows that affect others adversely, if not more so. In the book of Judges, the Israelite military commander Yiftach vowed that, if he won a particular battle, he would sacrifice “whatever comes out of the door of my house … when I get home”,¹⁸ which inevitably turned out to be his daughter. Well, a vow’s a vow, so he sacrificed the poor girl.¹⁹ And his wife had no power to annul the נדר because it never occurred to the authors of the Torah that a man might do something so unutterably stupid.
• Fortunately, by the 2nd century, the rabbis did realise that men were capable of great stupidity, and they set up a system whereby male vows could be overturned.²⁰ Rather like the Governor-General of Canada swooping in to save the day by cancelling a badly-written piece of legislation, the rabbis say that any three reasonably-educated men can release a man who has made a vow that was ill-informed – or that he simply regrets.
• In a way, the rabbis who invented this system were being very cheeky. The biblical text does not give any hint whatsoever that there should be such an opt-out. Women’s vows are binding unless annulled by fathers or husbands; other vows are binding, end of. So how can we justify this sweeping rabbinic exemption to the plain language of the book of Numbers?
• The Emet L’Ya’akov argues that the power to make Toraitically binding vows is such an extraordinary one – almost on a par with those of God – that we must assume that the Bible intended, implicitly, to restrict it to people with a certain level of maturity.²¹ The Kli Yakar says we assume that every man taking a vow does so on the condition that it will meet with general approval, and if their peers disapprove of it, that condition is not met so there is no valid vow.²²
• Those are both very serviceable arguments, and there’s not actually much difference between them. The consistent theme is that with power comes, first, responsibility and, second, accountability. God never intended to grant humans God-like powers to be exercised with God-like libertinism – not even to men!
• This might seem like an infringement of individual autonomy: why should someone who makes a vow have it cancelled by others who think they know better? And when the rules were gendered – female נדרים could be cancelled by know-it-all men – that was indeed unacceptable. But a universal system to protect people from themselves is eminently sensible, just as the Canadian Governor-General’s right to strike out dangerous laws was entirely appropriate.
• The Torah was determined that only women’s vows be subject to cancellation, and by capricious husbands at that, while men’s were permanently and inescapably binding. The rabbis uprooted that inequality, boldly and unashamedly. Judaism developed and moved forward. In very small baby-steps, but nonetheless, it moved.
• And Judaism always has moved. Reading biblical and rabbinic literature, not to mention the history of our own non-Orthodox world, sometimes one sees Jewish norms leaning in a disturbingly conservative direction. And sometimes one sees great swings towards enlightenment. At times, rather like traffic in 1922 Nova Scotia, Judaism has tilted to both right and left and appeared alarmingly close to crashing. But it’s always held itself together, and it’s always kept moving forward. And it will always do so. That is a vow. בלי נדר.

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Shavua tov!

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Notes

1. Numbers 30:2-15. ↩︎
2. “The rule of the road”, the St John, New Brunswick Daily Telegraph, 30 March 1922 @p6. ↩︎
3. Acts of Nova Scotia (1918) @ch12. ↩︎
4. Revised Statutes of Nova Scotia (1900) @ch81. ↩︎
5. Statutes of Nova Scotia (1922) @ch14. ↩︎
6. Statutes of Nova Scotia (1922) @ch40. ↩︎
7. “Dangerous confusion”, the Halifax Evening Mail, 20 July 1922 @p14. The same newspaper published the rather splendid cartoon at the top of this sermon: 22 July 1922 @p13. ↩︎
8. Report from the Premier of Nova Scotia, unpublished Sessional Papers of the 2nd session of the 14th Canadian Parliament @135:7. ↩︎
9. Ibid. ↩︎
10. See generally G V LaForest, Disallowance and Reservation of Provincial Legislation (Ottawa: Department of Justice, 1955). ↩︎
11. Ibid: 8, 71; the Halifax Evening Mail, 17 August 1922 @p1. ↩︎
12. W P M Kennedy, “The disallowance of provincial acts in the Dominion of Canada”, Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law 6 (1924), 81-94 @p93. ↩︎
13. The Montreal Gazette, 11 August 1922 @p10. ↩︎
14. Emet L’Ya’akov to Numbers 30:2 ↩︎
15. Numbers 30:6, 9 ↩︎
16. Radbaz @5:2085. ↩︎
17. The Torah: a women’s commentary @p992. ↩︎
18. Judges 11:30-31. ↩︎
19. Judges 11:34-39 ↩︎
20. See eg Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh Dei’ah 228 ↩︎
21. Emet L’Ya’akov to Numbers 30:2 @n2 ↩︎
22. Kli Yakar to Numbers 30:3 ↩︎