Yoreh De’ah 203, Laws of Vows
The Torah enabled Jews to obligate or prohibit themselves from what the Torah itself did not address (the possibility to add an oath/vow to a pre-existing obligation will come up later).
In Parshat Matot, Bamidbar 30;3—this week’s parshah, making our current discussion more clearly timely than usual—the Torah says lo yachel devaro, a person cannot break his/her word.
This despite the Torah elsewhere prohibiting bal tosif, adding to the Torah.
The Limited Way Out of a Vow
Still in se’if 1, AH says the Torah created a way to exit an oath/vow, hatarat chacham, a process we will see later in this siman, where a Torah scholar determines the person mistook the situation when s/he vowed. The process only works with the person who took the vow; if a Jew bound someone else with a vow regarding his/her own property, the hatarah would have to be for the person who took the vow (Ruth can
