Dvar Torah on Parshat Naso

This week, in the Parsha of Naso, we have two somewhat strange laws back to back: the law of the sotah - the wife suspected by her husband of committing adultery, and the law of the nazir (nazarite in English, sort of). The former, which certainly raises many problems from a feminist perspective, tells us that when a husband suspects his wife of having been unfaithful, he accuses her, in the Temple, of the crime, and she is forced to either confess or undergo a trial, in which she drinks a concoction which, if she is guilty, will cause her terrible and permanent injury. If she is innocent, she will be fine, and will be blessed with a happy marriage and children. In this discussion, I will not go into the difficult questions of fairness, guilt and innocence, and the obvious one-sidedness of this law.

Immediately following this section is the law of the nazarite: a man or woman who forswears wine, doesn't cut their hair, and stays away from ritual impurity (cemeteries, dead bodies, etc.). This is understood as some sort of monk-like period of abstinence, and was usually only done for a short period of time, as a form of religious experience. The Rabbis explain the juxtaposition of the two sections: when a person sees a sotah - a woman accused of adultery - he should realize that drink may well have caused her to sin, and led her to her current predicament. He or she should therefore foreswear drink, for a time, and become a nazir. The obvious question is this: I can understand encouraging the sotah's drinking partners to become nazirs for a while, but why should someone who just happened to see her have to do this? Why does someone who simply sees her, and is not in any way really connected to her or her behavior, have to take this somewhat drastic step, and become a nazir?

There is a nasty answer: there is something attractive and provocative about a "fallen woman". When we see a "sinner", in the flesh, sin becomes a possibility for us, it becomes real, imaginable. This understanding is what lies behind the kind of denial you get in religious communities - "oh, that? No one in our community does that, our children are immune to that. That's why we don't let them watch TV, go to movies, read books or newspapers, or meet anyone not from our community, to guarantee that they don't even know this behavior is possible." According to this thinking, which, in some circles, is applied to people ranging from divorcees to homosexuals to just plain secular folks, just seeing a sotah is a bad thing, in that it threatens our understanding of the world - we have been taught to not be able to even imagine that people really behave this way, so when we see it, in the flesh, we need to take steps to rebalance our religious and moral equilibrium, and reeducate ourselves away from this newly-attractive possibility; hence the period of being a nazir.

I'd like to suggest a different possibility. Perhaps when we see a sotah we are meant to empathize. Perhaps we are meant to feel her pain, relate to her experience, and assimilate it into our own. The poor woman (assuming she is guilty) was, perhaps, brought to this situation by drink. I am a first-hand witness to her distress, to her misfortune. How can I see her, be here with this real person, and not experience some sense of shared fate with her? This sense of empathy dictates that I do something to recognize that I am not so different from her, and that I, too, could sin in the same way. For this reason I take the vow of the nazarite, to show a shared humanity with the sotah, a shared sense of how delicate a hold I have on the order and happiness in my life, and how easily I could just have a few drinks and lose it.

Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Shimon Felix