Naso (Numbers 4:21-7:89) June 11, 2022/12 Sivan 5782

This week, we read the longest parasha in the whole of the Torah, Naso. The portion starts with a continuation of the census from last week, finishing up the enumeration of the Levites and their tasks; from there, we are commanded regarding interpersonal sins - one who commits a sin against another person must pay restitution in the value of the wrongdoing plus one-fifth of the aggregate value (that is, if the monetary value of the sin is $100, the added fine is $25 so that the value of the supplemental damages is one-fifth of the total amount of restitution paid). The parasha also includes the laws of the Nazarite, the Priestly Blessing, and the narrative of the consecration of the Tabernacle. And then, stuck in the middle of all this is the ritual of the Sotah, the accused adulteress. Also known as the Ordeal of the Bitter Water, the Sotah ritual is among the strangest ceremonies prescribed in the Torah, and it was abolished by an edict of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, though that became a moot point with the destruction of the Second Temple in his lifetime. Nevertheless, there is an entire tractate of Talmud dedicated to it (along with a few other speech-related rituals), so clearly it must have piqued some interest, and it even finds its way into contemporary political discussions with its connection to the abortion debate.

The ceremony is invoked when a man suspects his wife of adultery, but there are no witnesses to confirm an act of unfaithfulness took place. In the Talmud, it is explained that, as a prerequisite to the whole ordeal, the man must have admonished his wife not to seclude herself with so-and-so, and then she subsequently secludes herself with so-and-so. So we're not talking about a general suspicion of adultery, there has to be a specific man with whom the husband suspects his wife is adultering. So the husband accuses his wife of cheating, and she denies it. It should be noted here that even though adultery is a capital crime for both parties, admitting to infidelity results only in the woman being divorced and losing the value of her ketubah - halakhic protection against self-incrimination is more absolute than the fifth amendment. Confessions are not admissible as evidence under Jewish law. If the man suspects his wife is unfaithful but she maintains her innocence, God has to get involved. So, the couple go to the Temple in Jerusalem, and the priest conducts a trial by ordeal, letting God determine the facts. The woman is partially stripped (her clothing is ripped open, but it is first secured to ensure that her modesty is preserved), has her hair messed up, and then the priest administers an oath to her about the workings of the ordeal. He writes the text of the oath on a parchment, then scrapes the dried ink off and mixes it into water and dust. The woman then drinks the potion, and one of two things happens. If she has been faithful to her husband, nothing happens and she goes on to live a normal life. On the other hand, if she has adultered, she suffers some sort of internal hemorrhage, causing her to miscarry any pregnancy she might have and then die (and Maimonides explains that if she dies, so does her partner). If this sounds to you like some sort of absurd hocus pocus, you are not alone. Some contemporary commentators have therefore interpreted the ritual as non-fatal, with the titular water being an abortifacient (hence the existence of the ceremony being wielded in 21st century abortion policy debates - if abortion is prescribed by the Bible in some situations, religious arguments against the practice are harder to justify). However, that interpretation doesn't really make sense to me. We have a whole corpus of oral tradition which specifies that the "yes adultery" outcome of the ordeal is the woman's death, and the ingredients of the potion are explicit - water, dust, and ink - which don't combine into a miscarriage-causing drug, so interpreting the ceremony as "here's how to abort your wife's illegitimate fetus" seems a bit of a stretch. I propose there is another reason for the ceremony.

The verses immediately preceding the description of the Sotah ritual deal with repairing the damage caused by interpersonal sins. A midrash on this parasha points out that most things we do that wrong another person are fixable. Stolen goods can be returned, damaged property can be fixed, and so on. The damage that adultery causes to a relationship is not so easily fixed. Trust is much harder, if not impossible, to rebuild once it is lost. Because the Sotah ritual applies only in cases of suspected adultery and not where there is evidence, it can serve to reassure the husband. There is only one realistic outcome of the ordeal. The woman will survive (it's possible that she might get sick from drinking dirt and ink water, but that is not supernatural death as predicted by the curse). Once the woman drinks the water and lives, the husband can now be reassured that his wife was faithful to him, and the trust in their relationship can remain (mostly) intact. The point of the ceremony is not a magical trial through which God will reveal the truth and punish unfaithful wives, it's an elephant stick (as in the story of the man walking in Times Square carrying a large stick. A passerby asks him about his odd choice of accessory, to which he says "It's to keep the elephants away". The second man points out that there are no elephants in Midtown Manhattan, and the first man says "See, it's working"). There is not going to be a string of women suffering magical deaths. Not because of the unfailing faithfulness of Jewish wives but because neither hocus nor pocus is the basis of a judicial system. The ordeal of the Sotah is, in essence, saying to the jealous husband, "Unproven suspicion is not a reason to permanently damage your marriage."Additionally, the whole ordeal only works when the man has never been unfaithful to his wife; if he has ever cheated on her or committed any other sexual impropriety, the water has no effect (not that it had any effect in the first place). A jealous husband has to consider his own past fidelity before attempting to enforce this magical ceremony on his wife. Is his history so unblemished that he needs to give in to his suspicion? It is a better option to learn not to give in to our unfounded jealousy, after all, marriage is supposed to be based on trust.