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[Quick note from Rav Yosef:
I'm so thankful to Abe for summarizing perek 11, and I apologize that I have fallen off the train of late (perakim 9 and 10). Been an intense couple of weeks. I'd vow to be more consistent once we begin Nazir, but vowing seems to be a bad idea :) So, bli neder! ]
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I’m going to preface this summary with a note of context. There are many times which, as modern readers, we need to suspend a lot of today’s sensibilities to find certain mishnayot accessible or understandable. These mishnayot are an extreme case here. I have one or two half-formed ideas to find a way in, but not much more than that. If you see me in shul, I’d love to discuss your thoughts here. And in any case, may HaShem show us the way to learn His Torah.
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If a woman takes a vow to abstain from anything, her husband or father (depending on whose household she is in at the time) may revoke the vow within 24 hours – a process called hafarat nedarim. This last chapter deals with the rules of the husband enacting the hafarat nedarim.
When a husband is mefer a vow, the removal of the vow falls under two classes. The first class is vows that impact the wife personally but do not impact the husband or the marriage – which the husband may undo completely. Other vows are vows “between him and her” – vows that impact the husband or the marriage; these the husband can undo within their marriage – but if they divorce and she remarries, they return in full force. What type of vow is which is a topic of contention in the chapter’s very first Mishnah. For instance, if she decides to stop bathing or adorning herself, the Mishnah’s opening opinion is that this is a general vow of abstaining; Rabbi Yossi, however, sees this as a vow “between him and her” – affecting the character of the marriage. (The topic of “between him and her” is taken up again in Mishnah Eleven.)
The second through fourth Mishnah’s deal with vows that the husband cannot revoke, because—when you scratch the surface of the situation – they’re not really abstaining from things. For a simple example from Mishnah Two: If the wife swears never to buy produce from one shopkeeper out of many local options, the husband cannot be mefer the vow – because the wife could still get produce easily from another store.
Mishnayot Five through Seven deal with addressing confusion about who or what was said.
Mishnah Eight is a bit of a diversion from our chapter, dealing with a loophole allowing a father-in-law who’s vowed never can give anything to his son-in-law to still give a gift to his daughter.
Mishnah Nine and Ten expand on the rule that once the woman is “on her own” – for instance, a widow, who’s neither a member of her father’s house anymore but also no longer married – her vows are her own.
Mishnah Twelve – which closes our chapter and our tractate – deals with three related cases: A kohen’s wife who says she was raped and therefore is no longer allowed to be married to a kohen; any wife who says her husband has stopped having sex with her; and a woman who takes a vow of abstinence. Originally, the Mishnah tells us, these women would be given immediate rights to divorce and for the ketubah to be paid out. However, at a certain point the Rabbis were concerned that such women had found other men and were using false claims to get out of their marriages. Because of these concerns, the Rabbis proposed the kohen’s wife would need to bring proof that she was raped; the communal rabbis would try to work with the couple to revive their marriage; and they advised the husband to be mefer his wife’s vow of chastity.
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