Ants and Brachas

So if you remember we had a problem with the ants a few days ago. We got ourselves into a conundrum as to what to do if we're riding a bike and there are lines of ants on the trail that cannot be avoided and so you don't know if you're going to be smashing an ant and taking its life or not. We realized that when we're walking or running we can avoid those things (if we're paying normal attention) but when we're riding it's a different thing because the interface is different. (And by the way, this of course assumes we don’t want to take any life, no matter how small we consider it to be. It’s a bad thing.) And so the rabbis have an answer, that if we will have faith in them will help us with this issue. And it goes like this: If you make a vow and you keep it then that's a bracha. There’s some shefa there. It may not be a very big amount but you still get some measure of positive boost for it. In fact I wonder if the amount of energy/power/credit you get for focusing on one ant and making a bracha that says “I vow not to destroy that ant” and then doing it has enough power to offset the penalty for taking the life of another ant? And if you manage not to hit any ants, then you come out in the positive side. Maybe just very little, but hey, everything counts. But you can’t do this all day with everything just to get points. You can’t say “I vow not to hit that tree” (and the tree is 5 meters away and you weren’t in any danger of hitting it anyway). If it is an avoidance/negative action then it really has to be an eminent, unavoidable brush with real damage up to death to count. Positive brachas and vows always go together – so you can say “I vow to give charity to this shul” right before you drop the coins in the kiste. And that counts, and you can do as many of those as you want in a day and get credit for them as long as you do them with all the right qualifications and requirements for that mitzvah, including most importantly, your mindset and awareness and joyful attitude (OK, right now, as I’m writing this, an email notification pops up, and its from my attorney in a case with the IRS where the amount in dispute is right at 40 grand. And I don’t really want that much extreme in my life at this point, so it’s always a challenge to resist the fear that the hammer may fall with these types of emails. You don’t really want to open it. But it’s avoidance if you don’t; and avoidance can have a heavy price tag, and besides, I just wrote those words about how important it is to have a joyful attitude and a mindful awareness. So funny how the elevator door opens, God appears from like nowhere and says ‘Pop Quiz time!’) Anyway, what I was saying at the beginning was that we may be able to use the vow and it’s reward to offset eminent danger or ruin. Now, if that is true, that we can offset the life of an ant with a vow not to kill another ant in the same line, then can we scale that up to offsetting larger downfalls with larger vows? Don’t know. Kinda scared to ask anyone about that…