Dvar Torah on Parshat Naso

A very common way to start a blues song is "I woke up this morning..." and then go on to something bad happening, like, "...and my baby was gone". You get the idea. Well, I woke up this morning and heard the news on the radio. A policeman from Bat Yam shot his wife and then killed himself, all in front of their two-year-old son. The couple was in their twenties. Then we were told that this was the ninth woman to be murdered this year in Israel by her husband or boy friend. And we aren't even half-way through the year. You ask yourself "what is wrong with people?" And then amend that to "what is wrong with men?"

This week's parsha, Naso, contains one of the stranger and more problematic laws of the Torah: the ceremony of the Sotah, the wayward wife. The law works like this: A husband suspects his wife of adultery with another man. He warns her not to ever be alone with this person. She is then seen by witnesses to have been alone with this other man. At this stage we are suspicious of the wife, assume that she may have committed adultery, and therefore the married couple may not have relations unless and until she undergoes the Sotah ceremony, in which the husband and wife go to the Temple, a sacrifice is offered,  and the accused wife drinks a concoction of water, earth, and the washed-off ink from a parchment on which these laws were written. If she is innocent, all will be well. If she is guilty, she will die a horrible death.

Juxtaposing this with today's awful news, one can go in two directions. On the one hand, perhaps the Torah is being helpful here, giving the jealous husband a legal, ritualized way to deal with his lack of trust in his wife. No guns, no knives, just go to the Temple and the priests will handle it. Hopefully, the husband is being a jerk, and he will now have official, divine proof of how big a jerk he has been and they will live happily ever after. If, sadly, his wife is an adulteress, well, God will punish her, which is unpleasant but feels a bit more reasonable than what happened today in Bat Yam. Maybe this is all a good thing.

On the other hand, does not the Torah, with the law of Sotah, legitimize the dynamic of men punishing women, of men feeling and exercising a sense of ownership over women, and of assuming their wives possess a rampant and uncontrollable sexuality? And why is the ritual so one-sided: what about a man who is committing adultery? Why can't a jealous wife demand this kind of test for her husband? Better yet, what about the man who, in the case when the woman is guilty and dies, sinned with her? Is he to get off scot-free? And does not her horrible death, if guilty - "and the accursed waters will enter her and be bitter, and her belly shall swell and her thigh shall fall away" - ultimately legitimize violence towards women whom men suspect of dishonoring them? Is Sotah a solution, or part of the problem?

Happily, the Rabbis did feel that that the downside of this ritual trial by ordeal outweighs whatever positive influences it might have, and therefore did a remarkable job of creatively re-reading it. The first thing they did was allow the accused wife to opt out: she can deny her guilt and simply refuse to participate in the ceremony, and accept a divorce, or even admit she was guilty and accept a divorce (without witnesses to the actual adultery she can not be punished any more severely than that, even if she confesses).

Next, the Rabbis read the verses in our parsha to tell us that if she is guilty, and the waters do their work on her, then not only does she die, but her lover dies as well, the same horrible death. Hey, fair is fair. Then the Rabbis add this zinger: if the suspicious husband, at any time in his life, committed any forbidden sexual act, the waters will not work on the accused wife. This goes a very long way towards removing one of the more annoying features of this law: the sense that only women are ever guilty of adultery, and men can always get away with it. This new wrinkle means that that particular hypocrisy is unacceptable: a husband who has been unfaithful, or guilty of any forbidden liaison, loses the right that the Sotah ceremony gives him to publicly and ritually punish his wife for the same sin - even if she is guilty, the waters will not work.

Then we are told by the Mishna (Tractate Sotah, 47a) about a fascinating historical development: "From the time that there were a lot of adulterers, the cursed waters were suspended." The explanation is this: at one time Jewish husbands were regularly guilty of committing adultery. This meant, according to the laws above, that the waters would not work on their wives even if they were guilty. This would lead to a strange situation: the guilty wives would get off and, not knowing that the reason was their husbands own guilt, would doubt the essential efficacy of the ceremony, and everyone would feel that you could blithely get away with being unfaithful. So, rather than allow the regular failure of the ceremony, due to the high percentage of philandering husbands, to have this negative social impact, the entire ceremony was suspended.

What we have here is a dynamic wherein the Rabbis, through a close and creative reading of the original Biblical text, strip the Sotah  ceremony of most of its offensive features, make it about as egalitarian as they could and then, ultimately, do away with it. The obvious question here (as well as regarding a good number of laws with similar histories of Rabbinic activism) is this: if the Torah wanted a world in which the Sotah  ceremony takes place, in which jealous, possessive husbands have this avenue for dealing with their jealousy, even with all its shortcomings, how can the Rabbis impose their feminist, egalitarian reading on the relevant text, and thereby first neuter and then completely erase the law from the books? Maybe the Torah feels that without the safety valve of Sotah, husbands, unable to control their jealous and overbearing natures, will be murdering their wives at a frightening pace.  What dynamic allows the Rabbis to so totally subvert the plain meaning of this ritual?

I think the answer is this: the Torah gives us a choice. When faced with a legal framework, like the laws of the sotah, we can simply leave it as read, and go along with the plain sense and thrust of Biblical law. We can live in the brutish world the Torah legislates for. However, when our sensibilities, our sense of fairness, of right and wrong, and of equality before the law, compel us to re-read the Torah, so as to bring it into line with those higher sensibilities, we seem to be abundantly able to do so, thank God. The Rabbis consistently find in the Torah itself, among those very verses which so vex our natural moral sense, a path to a reading which is in line with what we know to be right and wrong. The Torah allows us to be the third-rate people described in the simple reading of the laws of Sotah - jealous, angry, hypocritical and chauvinistic - and legislates for people like that. But the Torah also challenges us to read the text in line with our higher sensibilities, and become better people, living in a better, more equal and equitable society.  

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Shimon Felix