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| Fri, 10 May 2024 10:28:28 -0500 — |
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D'var: Parashat Nasso 5783 Commentary by Michael Goldstein Friday, May 26, 2023 |
| Numbers 4:21 — 7:89 |
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In Parashat Nasso, God tells Moses to conduct a census of the Gershonite, Merarite, and Koathite males between the ages of 30 and 50 and details their duties in the Mishkan. God tells Moses what to do with ritually unclean people and repentant individuals. He also describes the sotah ordeal, to which women suspected of adultery by their husbands were to be subjected. God explains the obligations of a nazirite vow, including abstaining from alcohol and not cutting one’s hair. He tells Moses to teach Aaron and his sons the Priestly Blessing. Moses consecrates the Sanctuary, and the tribal chieftains bring offerings.
About the sotah ordeal… According to the Torah, it applies when a man suspects his wife of being unfaithful and warns her not to seclude herself with a particular man. If she ignores the warning, she becomes subject to the sotah ritual. The ordeal involves her drinking a concoction of water, a little dirt from the Mishkan’s floor, a bitter herb, and the rubbed-off dried ink from the scroll that contains the curse and includes God’s name. The Torah calls it bitter water. If the woman is guilty, she and the man with whom she sinned will suffer terrible deaths. But if she is innocent, she will not only not suffer ill effects, but will be blessed with children if she was childless or with healthy ones if previous children were sickly. When I first read this Parashat, I grew angry at the unfairness of the sotah law. After all, only women accused by their husbands would be subject to it. Of course, I also thought of the Salem Witch Trials, though there were a few men among the more than 200 people who were accused of witchcraft. However, I did some research. The sotah drink ingredients are, if unpleasant, harmless, so it would take divine intervention to bring about the punishment. That’s why the Torah says to include the ink that had God’s name. Understanding that is the beginning of appreciating why the ritual existed and why, unlike every other law in the Torah, it was not a trial, but an ordeal. When a punishable Torah law was intentionally broken in ancient times and witnesses attested to it, a court would mete out the punishment. If there were no qualified witnesses, the crime was ignored by the court. So why is a woman subjected to this ritual on only her husband’s suspicion? Well, actually, she isn’t automatically subjected, according to the Mishnah. If she chooses to simply dissolve her marriage and forfeit the financial support promised to her in their Ketubah, the husband must grant her a divorce. The ritual is not intended to punish the woman if she is guilty. It is intended to absolve her if she is innocent, and preserve her marriage. The entire point of the ritual, in other words, is to convince a husband who has every reason to be suspicious of his wife’s fidelity, since she secluded herself with another man, that she is not unfaithful. God is involved only to convince her husband that his wife is not adulterous. She may still have done something wrong, but her husband’s suspicions have been divinely overcome. The Talmudic maxim most associated with the sotah law is: So great is peace between a man and his wife that the Torah commands that the name of the Holy One, Blessed be He, written in sanctity, should be erased into the sotah water. Please keep in mind Judaism’s insistence that God’s name is too sacred to be pronounced out loud. Books containing God’s name can never be thrown out. Instead they are buried with full funeral rites or stored forever. Such is the reverence traditional Jews have always accorded to God’s name. Yet here, in the Torah itself, a ritual requires God’s name to be erased publicly! Regardless, however, this ritual and some other scriptural dictums are still anathema to me. We can and should acknowledge the pain they have caused and continue to cause. The official suspension of the sotah ritual a couple of thousand years ago is an example of religious and legal change taking place. For those of us who see Judaism as a path that embraces change, that’s crucial. So here is the message I find in this Parashat: The God of Israel mandates beliefs and morals that are not immutable and unchanging. Instead, God, as portrayed in the Torah, is passionately involved in relationships with the Jewish people and, in fact, with all humanity. Morality, at its core, is about how we relate to others. At its best, morality is in the service of compassionate and caring human life. Michael Goldstein |
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