NOTES for Deu 23:23

A person could designate something from his property as a voluntary offering, that is, a sacrifice to God. This did not mean that he had to go at once to the nearest altar and bring what he had promised; but what was dedicated to God in this way became kadosh from the moment it was declared. A lamb could keep running with the flock for months, but it no longer belonged to its former owner, though he still remained responsible for it. That lamb could no longer be eaten or sold; at some point it could only actually be offered in sacrifice. A decision spoken before God cannot be revoked!

The same principle is applied here to every vow made to God (see v. 21), but this verse can also be understood more broadly: everything that is said or promised is, one way or another, said or promised before God, whether or not a person swore an oath. Therefore it should be fulfilled in the same way promises of sacrifice are fulfilled. No "I changed my mind" is accepted. Jesus would later say the same thing: "Let what you say be simply 'Yes' or 'No'; anything more than this comes from evil" (Matt. 5:37).

Some norms of the Torah and, in particular, of the Book of Deuteronomy may seem strange. Not cruel, but precisely strange, awkward, meaningless. What, for example, does physical mutilation have to do with the possibility of standing before God? After all, this is a spiritual question far more than a physical one. Of course, a Levitical priest could not be physically absolutely helpless - an absolutely helpless person simply could not perform sacrifices - but that is not the case being discussed here, and it is not about physical weakness. One may, of course, think that this is not about ordinary mutilation but about ritual castration, practiced in antiquity in some pagan cults.

Another possibility, however, is a simple reminder that God is always offered the best, not the worst, of what the community has at its disposal. If the Torah forbids sacrificing maimed animals, why should a maimed person perform the sacrifice? This is not about disdain, or humiliation, or the idea that God has no need for a cripple. The question here is whether the sacred service should be entrusted to someone who does not possess the fullness of his own existence, his own life, even if the fullness in question is physical.

This fullness of life, the wholeness of experiencing it, becomes the main meaning of the Torah, its observance, and following it. Here there is both physical hygiene and spiritual-moral hygiene. It is strange to see a prescription about a shovel next to prescriptions forbidding usury or sexual immorality - especially since quite a lot has already been said about both usury and immorality. Here, however, they are spoken of as something ordinary and everyday, something that has become part of daily uncleanness.

Such things are usually present in the life of a person and a society as something inseparable from it and therefore ordinary, as a kind of "acceptable sin." People usually say of such sins: it is bad, of course, but... who is without sin? This is precisely a refusal of repentance, a refusal to resist sin, consent to it and agreement with it. Sometimes such a life in sin may even seem acceptable, but the sacred writer quite unambiguously, and even somewhat naturalistically, dots every i: living this way is the same as living amid one's own unremoved excrement. With all the resulting consequences for spiritual health.