2025 has been a bad year for bodily autonomy. As more U.S. laws restrict abortion and violate trans people’s human rights, both cis and trans women are increasingly threatened by state surveillance of their bodies. Pregnant women and people of all genders are being denied life-saving abortion care and arrested for miscarriage. A trans woman was arrested for using the women’s bathroom, and bans on trans girls in girls’ sports exclude trans athletes and open the door for invasive exams on all youth to “prove” their “biological sex.” This dangerous surveillance finds a striking parallel in this week’s Torah portion.
Parshat Naso includes the trial of a suspected adulteress (Numbers 5:11-31) whose jealous husband brings her “to the priest.” (Numbers 5:15) The priest, mixing sacred water with dust from the Tabernacle floor, calls for the woman to “be immune to harm from this water” if she has “not gone astray” (Numbers 5:19), but curses her to suffer divinely-inflicted thigh-sagging and belly distension if she has been unfaithful. After the priest writes these curses and dissolves them in the water, he “make[s] the woman drink.” (Numbers 5:26) Sagging and distension “prove” her guilt, while remaining “unharmed and able to retain seed” “proves” her innocence. (Numbers 5:28)
Scholars have opposite responses to this curious patriarchal ritual. Jacob Milgrom highlights how the text describes the suspected infidelity without using the precise legal term for committing adultery (na’af) that appears in the Decalogue (Exodus 20:13; Deuteronomy 5:17) and the Priestly Code (Leviticus 20:10). By dissociating the woman’s actions from the capital crime of “adultery” and judging her guilt by magical means, the priestly legislator “remove[s her] sentencing and punishing … from human hands and thereby guarantee[s] that she would not be put to death. Her public ordeal was meant not to humiliate her but to protect her,” Milgrom reasons. Other scholars like Alice Bach resist the modern “agenda of normalizing the text,” questioning how its defenders can ignore “the possibility of vengeance as the husband’s motive” and the “shrinking genitalia and distended womb” violently inflicted on the woman.
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This specter of gendered violence does not hover in a vacuum. While the Torah, with egalitarian severity, mandates capital punishment for men and women who commit adultery (Leviticus 20:10, Deuteronomy 22:22), its definition of adultery reflects women’s disempowered position. Unlike the term’s modern egalitarian definition, in the Hebrew Bible, “adultery” means “voluntary sexual relations between a married or engaged woman and a man other than her husband or fiancé” — not “the extramarital relations of a married person.” (Jeffrey H. Tigay) A married man can have sex with any woman “unclaimed” by another man. A married woman can only have sex with her husband.
This polygynous double standard reflects patrilineal inheritance norms and the pressure they create to control paternity. Rejecting the contemporary echo of this double standard and other “restrictive rules concerning human sexuality that limited or eliminated … [human] freedom, equality, and empowerment” inspired the Association of Humanistic Rabbis’ statement on twenty-first century sexual ethics. This 2018 statement affirms the right of all adults to affirmatively consent to as many or as few sexual, romantic, or other relationships with other affirmatively consenting adults as they choose. It also affirms the right to revoke that consent at any time, and condemns sexual coercion and violence.
How do the ancient rabbis respond to Naso? Updating the ritual of the bitter waters to fit their post-Temple reality, they both soften and harden the biblical legislation. They require a jealous husband to jump through more hoops before subjecting his wife to the ordeal (Mishnah Sotah 1:1) — and suggest that divorce, not death, may be the appropriate punishment for her infidelity (Mishnah Sotah 1:5, 6:1). Yet they also dial up the ritual’s violence, describing how the guilty woman’s “face turns green and her eyes bulge, and her [skin becomes] full of [protruding] veins, and [the people standing in the Temple] say: Remove her, [so] that she does not render the Temple courtyard impure [by dying there].” (Mishnah Sotah 3:4)
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The Mishnah piles on other exegetical elaborations before revealing its buried lead. “From [the time] when adulterers proliferated,” it reads, “[the performance of the ritual of] the bitter waters was nullified.” (Mishnah Sotah 9:9) When did the ritual stop? Whether it ceased after the First Temple’s destruction or, less likely, endured into the Second Temple period, the rabbis’ characterization of it is more ideological than historical. Like many alternate histories, theirs is anchored in what Ishay Rosen-Tsvi describes as a longing for “a regulated world in which deviation is punishable” and “in which crimes are an abnormality.”
This “regulated world” is only idyllic if you are the monitor and punisher of “deviation,” not the monitored and punished. For the wife suspected of exercising sexual agency and violently “tested” by her jealous husband, for the pregnant person whose pregnancy loss is tracked and who is blamed and arrested for it, and for the trans woman whose embodied self-actualization marks her for surveillance and exclusion from public life by bigots, the longing instead is for a world that affirms the dignity of all people.
Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow writes, “The project of creating a feminist Judaism fits into a larger project of creating a world in which all women, and all people, have both the basic resources they need to survive, and the opportunity to name and shape the structures of meaning that give substance to their lives.” What does this project look like? Reenvisioning our sexual ethics to prioritize freedom and empowerment while centering consent and care. Transforming our laws and infrastructure to support pregnant people — whether they abort, miscarry, or carry their pregnancies to term. Reshaping our laws and culture to protect people of all gender identities, ensuring that access to every sphere of life and expression is inviolable. Let us create a world in which all women, and all people, can be safe in their bodies, free from patriarchal surveillance and violence.
Rabbi Eva Cohen leads Or Emet: Minnesota Congregation for Humanistic Judaism. She received her MA in Classical and Near Eastern Studies from the University of Minnesota — Twin Cities in 2020 and rabbinic ordination from the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism (IISHJ) in 2024. She lives with her husband and daughter in Minneapolis, MN, and moonlights as a visual artist.