If you read the Rabbinical literature, you will come away with the view that making a vow is a bad thing and should be avoided whenever possible. To this day, Jews often use the expression "bli neder" ("that's not a vow") when saying something like, "Yes, I'll pick you up at noon tomorrow, bli neder".
Without getting into the differences between the different kinds of vows, let's get clear on something. The Rabbinical view of vows is a more lenient view. So much so that there is a tradition on the eve of Yom Kippur for the Jewish men to stand before a group of other Jewish men and recite an ancient Rabbinical declaration to annul any vows made, known or forgotten, so that you will not enter Yom Kippur with any sin, and if God chooses to have you die before you can fulfill that vow, you will not be punished in Gihennom for it, causing your time there to be extended.
(These and many other reasons are given for this annulling of vows, depending on who you are reading or listening to.)
The fact is, there is nothing in the Torah that permits any man to cancel a vow!
Because women are the property of their fathers, and later, the property of their husbands, their male guardians can cancel their vow if the men see fit to do so. "I vow to not have sex with you again until you do something about..." The man can just say, "I annul that vow"!.
Problem solved!
But for the man, there is no such thing.
The tradition that if a man stands before Torah scholars and renounces all known and forgotten vows, that he is forgiven of them is based solely on statements by assorted sages in the Babylonian Talmud ( Chagigah 10a) who gave themselves the power to cancel a vow by finding some odd nuance in a word here or there that could be stretched into becoming what they wanted.
But the fact is, there is no statement in the Torah that tells men that they can have someone cancel a vow, it was a way, however, for the sages to put the Rabbis into a place that was specifically once the domain of the Priesthood; namely, the ability to act as an intermediary between the Jew and God.
Of course, you will have those who will claim, "It's from the Oral Torah!", meaning, is was something that Moses never got around to write down, and so we either have the claim that it was rediscovered later on, or that it is part of an unrecorded oral tradition, and so it must be true.
The problem with this view is that we go from a text that tells us that our word is important to a tradition that tells us that we can break it when it is inconvenient.
Because of that, very religious Jews have taken on the tradition of being symbolically whipped as well as renouncing their vows before a group of scholars.
I explain about that in detail, with photos at: this link.
Here's a sample photo:
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