A ma'aseh preserved in the Gaster manuscripts, and recorded as exemplum no. 308 in Moses Gaster's 1924 The Exempla of the Rabbis, tells of a man who made a single vow early in his life: not to take an oath. Not once. Not for any reason. No matter what the world did to him, he would not put his word under the force of a vow.
The world, as it happens, did a great deal to him.
First his wife disappeared — taken, it was reported, by a ship's captain who had put in at their harbor and sailed away with her as the price of passage. Then, on a journey, one of his two children was snatched by a wolf from the edge of the forest. Not long after, the second child fell into a river and was swept away before his father could reach him. The man was left alone, stripped of everything he loved, and still he kept the vow. He did not curse. He did not swear an oath of vengeance. He did not demand of Heaven that he be told why.
Years passed. On another road, in another city, he discovered the wife — alive, honored, and prosperous. She had been rescued, not violated, and had built a good life. The child taken by the wolf had been found and raised by a wealthy household and was now grown. The child lost in the river had been saved by fishermen and brought up by a kind family. Each of them had been preserved. The Rabbis do not tell us that God returned them because the man refused to swear. They tell us that the man refused to swear, and then — in the fullness of time — everything that had been torn from him came back.
The teaching is understated. A vow in Jewish law is a serious thing. Violating one damages the speaker. Making them recklessly damages the world. A person who disciplines his tongue, even under the weight of catastrophe, is preparing a channel through which mercy can eventually find him. The man in this story did not know, in his worst year, that he would ever see any of them again. He kept the vow anyway. The Rabbis tell the story because they want the reader to notice: sometimes the thing you are asked to do is simply to hold your speech steady. The rest of the story may take decades to write.