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should ask that he be released from his oath by three Torah scholars, heard to the contrary, and it is impossible that they conspired. These # 20818
after which he should report the illness. And it is preferable that he are the Noda Biyehudah’s thoughts on the matter pertaining to our
advise the authorities to examine the driver a second time. In this way, question. (His ultimate ruling was that both women remain agunos.)
he is not really violating his oath because he did not reveal to them the We see from the Noda Biyehudah that there is no situation in the
details of the illness. world where two people resemble each other completely. Despite this,
there are certainly situations where people are not careful enough in
There are other ways to answer my father-in-law’s question of why their observations and mistake two people for each other, especially
does the Gemara ask in maseches Yoma (above) how could Rav Yo- when the two are not standing together. However, when one gives
chanan have violated his oath? If the oath was to nullify the mitzvah testimony in court it is not possible for the witnesses to confuse two
of healing the sick, it was not valid to begin with. One can answer as different people because witnesses must be very exacting. Therefore,
follows: we assume the witnesses lied and we flog them.
The same applies in our case. Since the physician was not careful
1. If one swears not to eat matzah during the whole year, the oath enough in looking at the face of the patient, then he may be mistaken.
is valid and he is forbidden to eat even on the night of Pesach. The driver of the car may really be someone who resembles the pa-
(This law is called an “inclusive oath,” which means that the oath tient he was treating.
includes some parts that are valid and some that are invalid.)
Only if he swears not to eat matzah on the night of Pesach alone 1
is his oath invalidated, as explained in Shulchan Aruch (Orach SuMMaRy and Conclusion
Chayim #385). If so, one can answer that Rav Yochanan swore There is no such thing as two men who are exactly identical. When
not to reveal the secret remedy to anyone - even to healthy peo- one does not look carefully, one might mistake one person for anoth-
ple to whom there is no mitzvah to reveal the remedy. Therefore, er. Therefore, in our case, the physician can rely on the words of the
this is not an oath solely to nullify a mitzvah and therefore it is taxi driver that he is not the epileptic. Moreover, the danger caused by
valid. a driver with epilepsy is not a clear possibility.
2. The mitzvah of healing sick people is derived from the Torah
verse “And you shall restore it to him.” (Devarim 22:2) The Sag-
es explain that this includes restoring one’s lost health (maseches
Sanhedrin 72a). This mitzvah applies when there is a sick person
before us. If there is no sick person before us, we are not obligat-
ed to publicize remedies so that if someone will once deal with
this illness, he will know the remedy, just as it is not a mitzvah
to search in the marketplace to find a lost object.
The Iggros Moshe (Yoreh Deah, Part 2 #151) writes:
There is no obligation on every person to study medicine in order
to heal the sick; the obligation is only to save lives according to the
person’s ability. If he is already a physician, he is obligated to heal the
324 1 Medical-HalacHic Responsa of Rav ZilbeRstein Patient malingering 2 337
