A person makes an oath: “I swear that I will eat this loaf of bread,” and then afterwards he says, “I swear that I will not eat this bread.” The first swear that he makes is a. He said that in the future he’s going to do something. That's the definition of a. The second swear, though, is not a—a vain swear, a swear that's meaningless.
He has the obligation to eat the—the moment he says, “I am making a swear that I'm going to eat that loaf of bread,” that becomes a mitzvah (commandment) for him to do. He then can’t make a swear that’s going to uproot that, to violate that, so it’s a meaningless oath because he’s not allowed to switch the original swear that he had. So how do we apply that? If he ate the loaf of bread, he followed through with his first swear. Then we say, when it comes to the, he fulfilled it. No problem over there. But the second swear, which was that he wasn’t going to eat it, he violated there. He had an original swear that he was going to eat it. Now, when he made a second swear that he wasn’t going to eat it, that’s a meaningless use of a swear, and therefore he was guilty the moment that he made it. It doesn’t matter if he ate the loaf of bread or not. The moment that he made the swear, he violated that. But if he ate the bread, at least he salvages the, and he didn’t do anything wrong in that regard. But if he did not eat the loaf of bread, he violated the as well. He violated both of them. His original swear was that he was going to eat the loaf of bread. He didn’t follow through with that, so therefore he violated it, won, won, the first Shevuah (swear), and it’s a Shevuat Bitui (oath of expression), and he also violated the Shevuat Shav (a vain swear), which he wasn’t allowed to make no matter what because it digressed from the original swear that he made. So therefore, even though he fulfilled that, technically he didn’t eat it. The second swear was that he wasn’t going to eat the loaf of bread, so if he didn’t eat it here, he still violated the Shevuat Shav because the moment he made that swear, it went out of control and against the first swear, and that’s the definition of a Shevuat Shav, a meaningless swear.