Torah Reading: Numbers 4:21 to 7:89
Haftarah: Judges 13:2-12
This week's Torah reading has one of the strangest - and sexist - passages in the Torah (Numbers chapter 5):
11. Then the LORD spoke to Moses, saying,
12. “Speak to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘If any man’s wife goes astray [Hebrew Tee-se-teh] and is unfaithful to him,
13. or if a man has intercourse with her and it is hidden from the eyes of her husband and she is undetected, although she has defiled herself, and there is no witness against her and she has not been caught in the act,
14. or if a spirit of jealousy comes over [Hebrew 'abar'] him and he is jealous of his wife when she has defiled herself, or if a spirit of jealousy comes over [Hebrew 'abar'] him and he is jealous of his wife when she has not defiled herself,
15. the man shall then bring his wife to the priest, and shall bring as an offering for her one-tenth of an ephah of barley meal; he shall not pour oil on it nor put frankincense on it, for it is a grain offering of jealousy, a grain offering of memorial, a reminder of iniquity.
16. ‘Then the priest shall bring her near and have her stand before the LORD,
17. and the priest shall take holy water in an earthenware vessel; and he shall take some of the dust that is on the floor of the tabernacle and put it into the water.
18. The priest shall then have the woman stand before the LORD and let the hair of the woman’s head go loose, and place the grain offering of memorial in her hands, which is the grain offering of jealousy, and in the hand of the priest is to be the water of bitterness that brings a curse.
19. The priest shall have her take an oath and shall say to the woman, “If no man has lain with you and if you have not gone astray into uncleanness, being under the authority of your husband, be immune to this water of bitterness that brings a curse;
20. if you, however, have gone astray, being under the authority of your husband, and if you have defiled yourself and a man other than your husband has had intercourse with you”
21. then the priest shall have the woman swear with the oath of the curse, and the priest shall say to the woman, “the LORD make you a curse and an oath among your people by the LORD’S making your thigh waste away and your abdomen swell;
22. and this water that brings a curse shall go into your stomach, and make your abdomen swell and your thigh waste away.” And the woman shall say, “Amen. Amen.”
23. ‘The priest shall then write these curses on a scroll, and he shall wash them off into the water of bitterness.
24. Then he shall make the woman drink the water of bitterness that brings a curse, so that the water which brings a curse will go into her and cause bitterness.
25. The priest shall take the grain offering of jealousy from the woman’s hand, and he shall wave the grain offering before the LORD and bring it to the altar;
26. and the priest shall take a handful of the grain offering as its memorial offering and offer it up in smoke on the altar, and afterward he shall make the woman drink the water.
27. When he has made her drink the water, then it shall come about, if she has defiled herself and has been unfaithful to her husband, that the water which brings a curse will go into her and cause bitterness, and her abdomen will swell and her thigh will waste away, and the woman will become a curse among her people.
28. But if the woman has not defiled herself and is clean, she will then be free and conceive children.
29. ‘This is the law of jealousy: when a wife, being under the authority of her husband, goes astray and defiles herself,
30. or when a spirit of jealousy comes over a man and he is jealous of his wife, he shall then make the woman stand before the LORD, and the priest shall apply all this law to her.
31. Moreover, the man will be free from guilt, but that woman shall bear her guilt.’”
Numbers 5:11-31.
An entire tractacte of the Talmud, Sotah - a Sotah is a woman suspected of adultery, is devoted to this procedure (although Sotah has many diversions into unrelated Aggadah, stories and moral teachings on unrelated subjects). And the rabbis, enlightened as they were by "modern" Greek and Roman philosophy, went as far as they could go without violating the Torah's commandment, to relieve the woman from this primitive ordeal. First, the husband must suspect that his wife is having an affair with a specific man; a generalized suspicion is not enough. In the presence of two witnesses, he must warn his wife not to see this man in secret. Then, only if two additional witnesses testify that, after the husband warned his wife, they saw the woman alone with her suspected lover long enough for them to have sex, can the husband force his wife to undergo this ordeal. Mishnah Sotah 1:1. Their encounter must be in secret, but be seen by two witnesses; she cannot be forced into the ordeal if she sees the man in public even after she is warned, or if she is seen by only one witness. Mishnah Sotah 1:2. If the man himself has been unfaithful to his wife, even before their marriage but after they became engaged, then he has no right to force her to undergo this ordeal. The local court has no right to conduct this ordeal - the couple must journey to the Temple in Jerusalem.
Before the ordeal begins, the priests encourage her to confess, if she is guilty:
They say to her: My daughter, wine causes much impropriety, as do too many games, as does too much childishness, as does having bad neighbors; make for the Great Name that is written in Holiness, don't erase on the water. And it is said before her things that are not likely to be heard
Mishnah Sotah 1:4. The ordeal only proceeds if she maintains her innocence.
We read in Sotah 3a:
It has been taught: Rabbi Meir used to say: If a person commits a transgression in secret, the Holy One, Blessed be He, proclaims it against him in public; as it is said: And the spirit of jealousy came upon him; and the verb ‘abar' [Numbers 5:14] means nothing but ‘proclaiming’ as it is said: 'And Moses gave commandment, and they caused it to be proclaimed throughout the camp' [Exodus 36:6, Hebrew va-ya-aber-u]. Resh Lakish said: A person does not commit a transgression unless a spirit of folly [sheteh, Numbers 5:12] enters into him; as it is said: If any man's wife go aside [sheteh]. [The word is] written [so that it can be read] sheteh [spirit of folly].
[Note: In the Torah scroll there are no vowels indicating how each consonant is to be pronounced. Thus words in the Hebrew text can often have two or more meanings, and the rabbis enjoyed playing word games to show how both meanings could apply and provide a moral lesson.]
We live in an age when the careers of so many politicians are ruined because their extramarital affairs have come to light. Many of these politicians have run on a political platform that proclaims their political party, and themselves, to be the upholders of "family values." It strikes me as the height of hypocrisy for a person to run for office proclaiming himself or herself Holier Than Thou, all the while he or she is cheating on his or her spouse. It struck me as the height of arrogance for John Edwards in 2008 to hold himself out as a candidate for President while he was cheating on his wife. Had he won the nomination and the affair had come to light, we would now be living under the McCain-Palin administration. As Rabbi Meir taught us almost two millenia ago, these secret liasons have a way of becoming public.
When the rabbis compiled the Book of Sotah, the ordeal described in Numbers chapter 5 had already disappeared, it had disappeared with the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. But today male politicians who have been caught having extramarital affairs put their wives through a new ordeal - they hold a news conference and insist that the wife whom he has humiliated appear at his side, causing her even greater humiliation.
And should adutery disqualify a person from holding office? Should it disqualify Eliot Spitzer? John Ensign? Bill Clinton? Newt Gingrich? Remember that our greatest president since Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, had an extra-marital affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherford. The ordeal of the sotah strikes us today as primitive and absurb, but how much progress have we made since 70 C.E?
Shabbat Shalom