Q&A: Nedarim 8a
Nedarim 8a
Question
A. “From where do we know that one may take an oath to fulfill a commandment? As it is stated: ‘I have sworn, and I will fulfill it, to keep Your righteous ordinances.’ But is he not already sworn and standing from Mount Sinai? Rather, this teaches us that a person is permitted to spur himself on.” It is difficult for me: whichever way you take it, if what the children of Israel swore to fulfill the commandments really is an oath, then it follows that for every prohibition or positive commandment a person also violates “he shall not profane his word” and is liable for lashes. And if it is not really an oath but only an admonition, then how can one derive from it the laws of oaths?
B. “Mar Rav Yosef said: If they excommunicated him in a dream, he needs ten people to release him,” and Maimonides ruled this as well. I wanted to know the Rabbi’s view on the laws concerning dreams?
Answer
A very good question. I have noted more than once in the past that it is unlikely that there really was an oath there. Nowhere is it described that they swore. This is a legal fiction that helps us handle our obligation to observe the commandments in a systematic halakhic way (search the site for “fictions”). Beyond that, I brought the question of the Mishneh LaMelekh: how can this oath be binding, seeing that it preceded the Torah, while the binding force of an oath itself was only introduced in the Torah. Following the Avnei Nezer, Yoreh De’ah sec. 306, I explained that this is a pre-Sinai oath, like the oaths of the Patriarchs, and even minors and gentiles are bound by it; but there is no halakhic prohibition here and no lashes, unlike an oath with explicit articulation and the like, as Jewish law defines it. You can search for that as well.
See the article “A Good Measure,” 5767, Parashat Miketz.