Rabbi Nathan Roller
חֲלוֹם חָלַמְנוּ עַל מָקוֹם מְיֻחָד
אֵישָׁם בְּצָפוֹן וְאֵישָׁם בַּמַּעֲרָב
We dreamed a dream of a special place.
Somewhere up North and somewhere out west.
These are the opening lines of Himnon Ramah Galim, the Camp Ramah Galim song. I spent the last two weeks there as the Rabbi-in-residence for their first session. And it really is a makom meyuchad: a special place, a singular space.
And an unusual place. Where else does a line-dance break out to a pop song whose lyrics are a single line of the Kaddish? Where else does birkat hamazon rattle the walls of the chadar ochel? Where else can I write a parody of a Gilbert and Sullivan song about the bracha we say after going to the bathroom and get a bunch of campers in the theater program to sing it while marching around with plungers? Where else is one of the morning prayer options called Tefillot Afloat — davening in wetsuits, on boogie boards, catching the early morning waves with the birds and the dolphins?
At camp, the holy and the ordinary don’t take turns. They share everything — the same hour, the same room, the same ocean. The camp song says it plainly: yesh t’fillah ve’gam s’chiya – There is prayer, and also swimming. Ve’gam. And also. That little word might be the secret of the whole place.
The ve’gam is asked to hold something stranger than the combination of prayer and swimming. Camp is a place dedicated to cultivating Jewish joy. And because that project happens in summer, it collides, every year, with one of the saddest seasons of the Jewish calendar. My two weeks at camp included the 17th of Tammuz. The Three Weeks came to camp. Bein Hametzarim — the narrow places — arrived right on schedule, in a place that is anything but narrow. The joy of summer camp and the mourning of the Jewish people, in the same makom meyuchad. And also.
And so, on the 17tht of Tammuz, during the dinner hour, I led a teaching with campers and staff who had chosen to fast. I opened with the Mishnah, Taanit 4:6, that gives the day its weight: five calamities befell our ancestors on the 17th of Tammuz. Moses, seeing the sin of the golden calf, shattered the first set of tablets. The daily offering ceased. The walls of Jerusalem were breached. Apostomos burned a Torah scroll. And an idol was set up in the sanctuary. A day of breaches and breakings.
Four of these were things that were done to us. They are clearly losses, and we mourn them. But the first — the oldest of them — is something that Moses did himself in response to something the people had done. This is what I focused on that evening. When Moses later recounts that day, he says he grasped the two tablets before he threw them down. But two verses earlier, the Torah has already told us they were in his hands. Why grasp what you already hold?
The Or HaChaim offers an image that is hard to put down once you’ve heard it: “Perhaps as long as the Israelites had not yet been guilty of sin, the Tablets were suspended in the air slightly above Moses’ hands.” Only when Israel made the calf did they lose their holiness and fall, and Moses had to grip them.
Hold onto that image of the hovering tablets. Or at least keep it floating before you. We will need it again.
Because there is something strange about the first 17th of Tammuz calamity. When Moses shattered the tablets, God approved.
Reish Lakish teaches in the Talmud, Shabbat 87a, that when God told Moses to carve a second set of tablets, God describes the first set: asher shibarta — “which you broke.” And Reish Lakish hears in that word an affirmation: asher becomes yishar. Yishar kochacha she’shibarta. May your strength be true — for having broken them.
Yasher koach. We say it to each other all the time, after aliyot, after leading. Good job, more power to you. According to Reish Lakish, the first yasher koach in our tradition was spoken by God, to Moses, congratulating him for breaking the very word of God!
So every year we enter the 3 weeks with a fast that commemorates a breaking that Heaven applauded.
And then this morning we heard Jeremiah. This haftarah is the second of the Tlata d’Puranuta, the three haftarot of calamity that carry us from the seventeenth of Tammuz to Tisha B’Av. And at its center, God says: “Me they have forsaken, the fount of living waters, to hew for themselves cisterns — borot nishbarim — broken cisterns, that cannot hold water.” I have just spent two weeks beside the Pacific, at a camp named for the waves, watching young people pray in the largest body of living water on the planet. And I come home to this verse.
Nishbarim. Broken. It is the same root — shin, bet, resh — that God spoke on the mountain. Asher shibarta. Borot nishbarim. Two breakings. One receives a yasher koach. The other is the indictment of a generation. So this season of breaking puts a question before us: what makes one breaking faithful, and another breaking a catastrophe?
Perhaps our Torah reading today can help us. Mattot opens: when a man vows a vow to Adonai, lo yachel devaro — he shall not break his word; whatever comes out of his mouth, he shall do.
Lo yachel — the root is chet, lamed, lamed. Literally to profane. It is the root of chol, the ordinary, and of challal — hollow.
Now, hollowness is not the enemy per se. Think about what a cistern is. To make a bor, you take solid rock and carve out a hollow. The emptiness is the whole point. The hollow is what holds. And a word works the same way. A vow carves out an empty space in the future — a space that only a deed can fill. K’chol hayotzei mipiv ya’aseh – whatever comes out of his mouth, he shall do. The doing fills the hollow that the spoken word carved out.
So what went wrong in Jeremiah? Listen to how the verse about the cisterns ends: borot nishbarim asher lo yachilu ha-mayim — broken cisterns, that cannot hold the water. Carved, but cracked. The hollow is there; the holding is gone. Everything poured in seeps away. Lo yachilu. Now listen again to the Torah: lo yachel devaro—do not hollow out your word. Lo yachel. Lo yachilu. They are not the same root but the ear makes the connection. A word hollowed out, a promise unfulfilled. A cistern carved, but unable to hold. Lo yachel, lo yachilu. The Torah and the prophet arrive at the same sound from two different directions, and together they teach one thing: a profaned word is a broken cistern. Every relationship is built out of these carved vessels. Promises. Blessings. Apologies. Commitments. When the words crack, trust leaks away.
Our parsha continues. A man’s word binds absolutely, and there seems to be no release mechanism. A woman’s word — a daughter in her father’s house, a wife in her husband’s — can be annulled by the man, on the day he hears it. This law is asymmetric. Her word is subject to his power, exercised without her consent. This is highly problematic and I am not going to defend it.
But notice what the Torah has admitted, despite itself: a word can be unbound. The possibility is real — just locked inside a hierarchy, as power one person holds over another.
The rabbis would not leave it there. Because they know it is impossible to live in a world where every word we utter binds us unconditionally. Out of nothing, they built a system of hatarat nedarim — the release of vows. And the Mishnah itself, Chagigah 1:8 admits: heter nedarim porchin ba’avir v’ein lahem al mah she’yismochu — The laws concerning the dissolution of vows hover in the air and have nothing to rest on. For a legal tradition based on the words of the Torah, that is an astonishing admission. An entire body of law, floating, with no verse supporting it.
This brings us back to the floating tablets. They hovered above Moses’s hands as long as the relationship held. They fell when the bond broke — and what falls must be gripped, and what is gripped may shatter. And the laws of release hover still. Maybe that is the secret hiding inside the Mishnah’s confession: hatarat nedarim rests on no verse because it does not rest on text at all. It rests on relationship.
And look at what the rabbis changed as they built it. In their hands, release is not something done to you. It is something you seek. You come to the sage. You name your regret. Nothing happens to your word without you. Every feature of the Torah’s mechanism that was power over another, the rabbis rebuilt as help sought from another. They did not expand the law of a man canceling a woman’s vow. They transformed it entirely.
And in transforming it they understood something true about us. Lo yachel devaro — you cannot unbind your own word alone. Not because the law forbids it, but because it’s impossible. Once our words are out in the world we need others to help us make teshuvah and return. All of us know what it is to be held by a promise. The “never again” sworn in anger at a sibling, decades ago, still standing guard over a silence. The promise made to a parent that fits a world that no longer exists. The oath we swore to ourselves at twenty about who we would be. The tradition’s answer is not: keep every word forever. The answer is: bring it to someone. Release is possible. It comes through relationship. Not too long from now, on the eve of the holiest night of our year we will come together for this purpose. Kol Nidre is this: an entire community, standing together, seeking release from words.
Which brings us back to the mountain, to the day of the calf. Because Moses did not only break the tablets that day. The Torah says vayechal Moshe et p’nei Adonai — Moses implored God. But the rabbis refuse to hear vayechal as merely “implored.” They hear our verse. Lo yachel devaro. Vayechal Moshe. God had vowed to destroy the people — and Moses declared the vow released. Moses performed hatarat nedarim on the Holy One!
How could he dare? A Midrash on Psalm 90 answers. The psalm is titled Tefillah l’Moshe ish ha-Elohim — a prayer of Moses, the man of God. And the midrash reads ish audaciously. Not just “man of God.” Ish — as in husband. Husband of God. As the ish of our Torah portion can annul a vow, so Moses, as God’s husband annulled the vow of God.
Before Moses says a single word, God says hanicha li — “let Me be, that My anger may blaze against them.” Let Me be — but Moses had not yet prayed at all. The Rabbis ask: What was God refusing? The Talmud says Moses heard what God said not as a refusal but as an invitation: this thing depends on me! Mi’yad amad v’nitchazek bitfilah — immediately Moses stood, and strengthened himself in prayer. Even here, at the summit of audacity, the release is not imposed. It is invited. God, bound by God’s own vow, turns to the covenant partner. Not even God unbinds God’s own word alone . And nitchazek. We said that this morning when we finished our reading of Bamidbar for the year and called to one another: hazak hazak v’nitchazek. Be strong, be strong, and let us strengthen one another. On the difficult day in the wilderness, Moses did what we do at every ending.
So Moses stood, strengthened. And what did that prayer look like? Rabbi Abbahu, in Berakhot 32a, first admits: were this not written in Scripture, it would be impossible to say. And then he says it. Moses seized the Holy One the way a person seizes his friend by the garment, and said: ein ani manichacha — I will not let You be — until You pardon and forgive them. Hear the two of them. Let Me be, says God. Moses responds: I will not let You be. And notice: a friend’s garment. Not a king’s robe, not a master’s hem. This is what one does with a friend.
All of this on the 17 of Tammuz. Moses performed two breakings — he shattered the tablets, and he annulled the vow — and both were faithful, one of them earning the first yasher koach in history. And notice his hands. The hands that gripped the falling tablets are the hands that seized the garment of God. One grip ended in shattering. One grip ended in release. Both acts of love.
Now we can answer the question: what makes one breaking faithful, and another a catastrophe? Moses broke toward God. The cisterns break away from God. The tablets were shattered, and the covenant survived. The cisterns are intact, self-made, yet hold nothing.
So maybe the Three Weeks do belong at Camp after all. Maybe the strangest thing about Camp is not strange. In the happiest of places, we carry the saddest of seasons, because our tradition has always known that breaking and faithfulness can share a single day.
Chalom chalamnu al makom meyuchad
We dreamed a dream of a special place.
That is the opening of Ramah Galim’s song. And listen further, to the final verse, it’s clear the kids have been singing the answer all summer: Yad beyad, ve’lev el lev — hand in hand, heart to heart — matarah yechida: livnot poh beyachad kehillah kedosha. A singular goal: to build here, together, a holy community.
A kehillah kedosha is not a community that never breaks. Words are said in anger or haste, and we need others to forgive us, to release us from our bonds. A community bound strongly enough — hand in hand, heart to heart — is what makes release possible.
That is what I saw at camp. Not perfection. Relationships constantly repaired. Apologies offered. Counselors beginning again. Campers trying again after hurting one another. A community where joy isn’t the absence of breaking but the confidence that breaking won’t be the end.
None of us can unbind our own words alone. And none of us may unbind another’s without them. But together we can be made whole again.
May we be strong enough to hold the words that should hold. May we be brave enough to seek release from the words that should not. May the power of release always hover here among us, resting on nothing but the bonds between us — yad beyad, lev el lev. And may we be for one another what Moses was for God on the mountain — the partner who hears “let Me be” and understands it to mean “help me.” Let’s dream a dream of a special place — and build it here, together.