I am very excited for the opportunity to share words of Torah with you. Each week, in this spot, I look to share an idea I've found that speaks to me and that I think will resonate with you as well. This week, I share an excerpt from an article by Rabbi Dr. Mordechai Schiffman entitled ‘Pre-Commit’, which shares a helpful tool for successfully managing our actions. You can see the full article here - https://aish.com/pre-commit/.
Parshat Mattot begins by introducing the laws of vows and oaths. […] A person can even decide, the Talmud notes, to take an oath to perform or not to violate a commandment (Nedarim 8a). This is so even though the person is already obligated by the Torah commandment. The oath functions as an even more intense motivator than the original Biblical law.
In his classic work Michtav Me-Eliyahu, Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler elucidates the psychology behind taking an oath to comply with a mitzvah (4:237). At times, he writes, we become aware of our own laxness in Torah observance and we want to self-correct. Often, we try to fight this desire or weakness head on, but in the moment the yetzer hara is too powerful and we fail. The fix for this circumstance is to force our hand and avoid the self-control battle in the first place. We need to construct the situation in such a way where we are forced to comply. The classic Biblical way to accomplish this is through an oath. People viewed oaths with such awe and trepidation that adding an oath to a desirous behavior was generally a strong enough intervention to force self-compliance. […]
[E]ven though [today] we generally abstain from taking oaths, figuring out other ways to up the ante and solidify our commitment is essential. We need to think of ways, Rabbi Dessler suggests, to in effect bind ourselves to our commitments without taking an oath. […]
In the psychological literature on self-control, this concept is called a pre-commitment device. In a 2002 research article, Israeli-born psychologist Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch define such a strategy as the “voluntary imposition of constraints (that are costly to overcome) on one’s future choices in a strategic attempt to resist future temptations.” The oft-cited paradigm of this technique in Greek mythology is Ulysses, who tied himself to a mast so that he could not be lured by the song of the Sirens.
Pre-commitment devices can potentially help with many self-control battles including procrastination, eating unhealthily, drinking too much alcohol, and over-spending. […] Whether the goal is to improve our self-control, increase the amount of mitzvot we accomplish, or decrease the amount of transgressions we violate, we can look to the message behind oaths, and conceive of different ways to bind ourselves to improvement by pre-committing to progress.
Have a Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Davies
Rabbi@SOICherryHill.org