Our Gemara on Amud Aleph discusses the halachic principle of an oath made in vain. Various oaths fit this category, such as swearing to affirm something obviously false or, ironically, the opposite—affirming something already well-known and obviously true (see Rambam Shavuos 1:5 and Shulchan Aruch YD 236:4). To make an oath for no purpose is considered a disrespectful act, as it invokes God’s name over a trivial matter.

Likkutei Halachos (Laws of Oaths, Chapter 2) contemplates the implications of these Halachos. As it turns out, swearing about something true but completely unnecessary to affirm is more of a violation than making an oath over something one believes is true, even if it is not. (As we have seen in blog post Psychology of the Daf Shavuos 26, an oath must be made with full intention to incur liability.) How, then, do we explain the moral justice of considering an unnecessary oath to be a greater desecration than an inadvertently false oath?

He suggests the following: There are heretical schools of thought that might maintain that if God is omniscient and omnipotent, by all logic, nothing we can or should do ought to be relevant to Him. While there is some logic to that argument, the Jewish people have a tradition that the opposite is true. Whether it makes sense or not, God, in a certain way, wants our actions through Torah and mitzvos. He says this is a fundamental Torah principle, and to think otherwise is heretical. 

This idea is symbolically represented in the vain oath. The metaphoric significance is as follows: An oath represents, to humans, an enactment or creation by words alone, similar to God creating everything through His will and metaphorically represented by His spoken commands at creation. Thus, to say that God does not want our mitzvos is similar to an oath in vain, because it makes His actions and words vain. If everything God wills is at least as powerful as an oath, since an oath derives its power from invoking God’s name; therefore, His will and word must be considered as sacred as an oath.

There is compelling resonance to this symbolism that Likkutei Halachos demonstrates; however, we must still try to understand, as a metaphor can only go so far. The Torah laws must make sense. It seems irrational to punish a person for making one kind of oath over another simply because of a symbolic idea represented within the prohibition. We must conclude that there is a deeper attitude in a person who would make an oath in vain. The notion that the word of a person is not sacred, especially when invoking God’s name to sanction it, is the kernel of heresy that leads to the ultimate heresy of rejecting the value and meaning of human behavior to God. Someone unable to appreciate the creative powers and sanctity embedded within human speech, which represents the sacred ability to create that God gave us in His image, is not just symbolically heretical—it is its own heresy in embryonic form. To be the kind of people and civilization that truly believes what we do matters to God starts with believing that even what we say matters, possibly even what we think.