(no subject)

[seekingferret]

I'm interested in people's thoughts on sotah, which was in this week's parsha. It was addressed in an adorably awkward way by the Bar Mitzvah boy. It's full of layers of uncomfortable, ideas where I'm not sure if I should say "wow, that is incredibly progressive for an ancient civilization" or "wow, that is really inhumane and awful."

I was really struck by the "and the husband is seized by the spirit of jealousy and warns his wife" passage, which is interpreted in a very blame-the-wife way by most traditional commentators, but which seems to me as a warning that the very easy and obvious way to avoid this horribly emotionally traumatic and gruesome experience is for the husbands to fucking trust their wives and not get jealous. There is a lot of similar legal thinking in the Talmud on other issues; it's notably lacking here.

In any case, there is so much here that I don't understand. I'd appreciate any angles on the sotah that work for you.

Comments

[schemingreader]

I think the first thing is not to confuse understanding the parashah with approving of it or reconciling it with your values!

The next thing is to read Rashi. Please don't think my Rashi script is as awesome as all that, I'm using this interlinear translation, which has lovely, legible, voweled Hebrew. (The Torah test also has the ta'amei ha-mikrah. Can't say enough about how much this book has helped me.)

With a lot of parashiot, he reveals a strong tendency to want things to be fairer for women than they are in the text. Which is nice, since he's standard commentator everyone reads. Now with the story of the sotah, he's down with the whole supernatural guilt thing, for the most part, and takes this as an opportunity to inveigh against adultery. But, unlike the text on which he's commenting, he makes sure to include a lot of general praise of Jewish women--basically saying that ordinarily, Jewish women are not adulterous. See for example what he says about the mayim kedoshim being like the mirrors of the Israelite women in Egypt at Numbers 5:17 and his comment on why no frankincense at Numbers 5:15.

Then also, Rashi thinks in Numbers 5:22, the reason beten and yerech are not given a feminine suffix is that they are the beten and yerech of the male adulterer. He basically assumes the text has to be fairer to the woman than it looks to me. Even the words he uses to mean adulterer and adulteress--the adulterer is a boel, but the adulteress isn't a boelet, she's a nivelet--he's someone who has done adultery and she's someone on whom adultery has been done.

I think further that the sotah story fits into the parashah that has the sections on how to make restitution when you realize you've cheated someone (Numbers 5: 6-9) and also, the Nazirite vows. I see a theme of how to make things right when you feel guilty about something you've done wrong. The nazir is kind of a mysterious person--what's the purpose of this temporary monasticism? Perhaps it's an alternative to the sotah, or maybe the original readers of the text saw all three as equally valid ways to make up for something that feels like it can't be fixed. The sotah story looks different if you assume that the sotah, after her humiliation, would always be vindicated because she would not explode.

[seekingferret]

The sotah story looks different if you assume that the sotah, after her humiliation, would always be vindicated because she would not explode.

Yes, I was thinking about that approach, but I run into a big problem with it because I can't imagine that if my husband had accused me of adultery in such a fashion where he would subject me to sotah, that vindication would be enough. I don't think I could continue living with the man who had made me endure that. I can't imagine a healthy post-sotah marriage, regardless of how the ceremony turns out.

It's not hard to read into the text a desperation on the Torah's part to avoid having to use this procedure ever. It really isn't. But the question becomes if this is a procedure you're never supposed to use, why is it there? Why does it exist as a vile tool for a cruel husband to use against his wife? Why even open the possibility?

I've seen drashes that suggest that it's designed for the husband who does love his wife, and only needs convincing that she's not cheating on him to treat her kindly, or that it's designed to make the husband realize what a horrible thing he's assumed of her and repent his jealousy and mistrust, but the husband is never directly put at risk by the sotah procedure. The Torah is very clear that the husband is not to be assigned blame for doing this.

[schemingreader]

I don't think everything in the Torah has to conform to Jewish values. You know what example I'm going to pick, I'm sure: the stoning of the rebellious son. Is the Torah text expressing discomfort with stoning the rebellious son? I don't think so. Is the Mishnah? Well? YES! There is no reading of the rebellious child text that actually gives someone permission to kill your miserable, rotten kid when he's at his worst in adolescence.

I think of myself as post-denominational these days, but I grew up in the Reform movement, where people basically rejected the importance of commentaries as a form of mediation. (And how Protestant was that!) Really, though, the Torah text itself isn't "Jewish." It's the Torah...process, that's Jewish. The problem with the rejection of the Sinaitic origins of oral Torah is that it makes the reader feel isolated and cut off from the Torah. I don't really know any Jews who can relate to the sotah story, but we can feel a lot closer to a chain of tradition when we engage the commentators' concerns about the text. Reading Rashi, I feel that there's someone with me, even when I don't agree with the reading. Someone has been doing the same making sense of the text that we're trying to do, and we're just joining that party.

[seekingferret]

I don't think I've ever claimed the Torah as written should conform with Jewish values. I look to Devarim 29:28 for guidance on that, with its distinction between nistar and nigla' pointing to a fairly clear reason why that wouldn't be the case. I do expect the Talmud, by and large, to conform with Jewish values. And I place far more importance on the input of the mefarshim than you do, as a fairly tradition-minded Jew. You don't need to convince me of the importance of studying Rashi. I've defended Rashi in virtually the same terms to other people.

Your example of the rebellious son is a relevant one for exactly the reason you pinpoint. The Tannaim recognized that the Torah pshat is problematic, and so they emended our understanding of it. They required witnesses and warnings, and they defined rebellion in complicated, esoteric, essentially unprovable ways. Similarly, the halacha to stone the blasphemer would seem to require us to kill just about everyone around us these days, but the Rabbis teach that in order to qualify as a blasphemer one must be a significant Torah scholar, in addition to receiving warnings and having witnesses.

Meanwhile, there isn't the same effort made with sotah, to reinforce the idea that these are rules that should never be enforced. And much of the reason is that it's a lot harder to do. The Torah is extremely specific, extremely detailed, and it short-circuits many of those common mitigations. For example, this is one of the rare cases where only one witness is required. For example, as wikipedia notes, unlike the case of pre-marital violations, in this case there is to be no punishment for a husband making a false accusation. For example, the procedure for determining justice requires a priest, so this can't all be handled in the discreet manner of the beis din. All of those techniques I mentioned in the last paragraph can't be done in this case, they're explicitly ruled out by the Torah text. Which I think is really, really fascinating, and in some sense it's amazing because it offers tacit validation of those techniques in those other cases. And on the other hand, unlike the blasphemer case the sotah is explicit that the woman needs to have been warned by her husband first.

I bet there are important midrashic interpretations of the sotah. I wonder if the story makes more sense if we're considering not a real marriage but the marriage of Israel and Hashem.

[seekingferret]

One thing the bar mitzvah kid said that I thought was really insightful was that the sin of the sotah is not the adultery. The Torah has other procedures and other punishments for adulterers. The sin of the sotah is lying about it. That made a lot of sense to me, though it's worth digging further into why lying about this particular sin is punished differently than lying about committing other sins.