Parshat Naso deals with head-counts, consecrations, restitutions, sacrifices, impurities, vows, and blessings. At the center of this heavy content we read about the ritual of the “sotah” — a woman suspected of adultery by her husband, who brings her to the priest for a — dubious — ritual of fact-finding. (Numbers 5:12-15)
“Sotah” comes from the Hebrew root סטה, which gives modern Hebrew words like “to go astray, to digress” or the more drastic “pervert, perverse, deviant.” It is one of those instances when I wonder just how much more visceral the Torah must sound to native Hebrew speakers.
Once the woman is brought before the priest, the Torah outlines the procedure, which is infamous for requiring her to drink a concoction of bitter waters that either won’t affect her — thus proving her innocence — or,
as the priest goes on to say to the woman: ’May THE ETERNAL make you a curse and an imprecation among your people, as THE ETERNAL causes your thigh to sag and your belly to distend; may this water that induces the spell enter your body, causing the belly to distend and the thigh to sag.’ And the woman shall say: ‘Amen, Amen.’ (Numbers 5:19-22)
Amen, Amen. I agree. I believe in the legitimacy of this procedure. I defer to you, High Priest. And God be with me.
Tractate Sotah in the Talmud discusses the details of the ritual, and we learn that the ingestion of the bitter waters is only the last step in a process designed to humiliate and wear out the designated antagonist, the suspected woman. For example, pages 7a-8a describe two scenarios that make clear how the woman doesn’t have a dignified choice.
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In the other scenario, she insists on her innocence, which leads to the ordeal of going through the actual ritual:
The priest grabs hold of her clothing and pulls them, unconcerned about what happens to the clothing. If the clothes are torn, so they are torn; if the stitches come apart, so they come apart. And he pulls her clothing until he reveals her heart [i.e., her chest]. And then he unbraids her hair. (Sotah, 7a/b)
The woman is shamed in public. Covering one’s head is very important in traditional Judaism. Men wear a kippah or hat; married women often cover their hair in one way or another. The precious significance of our hair finds expression in different realms as well: (Male) mourners or people ostracized from the community don’t cut their hair; they leave their head uncovered, let their hair go wild and unkempt, or are forbidden from putting on tefillin. From a secular perspective, when people begin to lose their hair, it is a sensitive matter. Baldness may appear like a symbol of vulnerability. It might almost feel like being naked — and in fact the analogy works in the case of the suspected woman: By ripping her clothes and by uncovering and unbraiding her hair, her honor is taken away, her status tainted. Her appearance is turned into that of an outcast, and her naked vulnerability is doubly exposed.
After wearing her out in such a manner, the woman is asked once more to admit to her guilt before she is made to drink the mixture. Why? Because the curse the priest spoke to the woman (“May THE ETERNAL make you a curse, etc. …” ) will be written on parchment and then dissolved into the bitter waters, thus destroying the name of God. Hence the logic is that it is better to confess before the priest must commit a sacrilege for the sake of truth-finding. Once that’s done, the woman must swallow it, because otherwise the priest would have erased the name of God in vain. In modern terms, that’s abusive coercion and victim-blaming: You made me do this. Because of you, I had to dissolve the name of God. And it is your fault if drinking the mixture harmed you, because you deserve it.
Amen, Amen.
There are more details than the ones I sum up here, but let’s focus on the Catch-22 in which the woman finds herself.
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The classical rabbis understand this ritual to restore “shalom bayit,” peace in the home, but I find that impossible. If the woman is unharmed by the mix and her innocence therefore restored — how would it be possible to continue living under the same roof in peace, after such public shaming at the request of her husband?
Usually, I am not drawn to comparing archaic procedures and ancient contexts with our modern sensitivities and ethical norms. I generally don’t even feel so outraged as a woman, as I tend to keep these two realities separate. Yet this passage hits a nerve. Also, being in Israel over the last several months has shown me almost daily how easy it is to defile something that’s important to us because of zealotry and jealousy.
Let’s assume the man who suspects his wife of adultery is suspicious because he cares about her, loves her. To be clear, that’s no excuse for bad behavior, but let’s posit that she is precious to him. To free himself from the evil spirit of jealousy he brings a meager “meal-offering of remembrance,” but primarily he subjects his wife to an inhuman procedure that is bound to harm whatever connection there was between them forever. Talk about destroying something you hold dear in order to save it.
I thought about Parshat Naso and these pages from Tractate Sotah as I was walking home from the Pesach seder, long after midnight. Coming from East Talpiot, my path took me along the promenade with the panoramic view of Jerusalem. I noticed that the Temple Mount was lit up more than usual — police spotlights so glaring they felt like an alarm, an S.O.S signal. It was a day after and days before the clashes, raids, and conflicts in and around the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. The Temple Mount, where the sotah was tried near one of the gates of the Temple. I couldn’t help but think how bareheaded and disgraced Jerusalem was sitting there in the middle of the night of redemption, how bereaved, how lonely, and how naked.
Amen, Amen.
Julia Knobloch is a third-year rabbinical student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies. She was a T’ruah summer fellow last year.