Post by Rabbi Neil on Jun 2, 2020 20:10:14 GMT
In this week’s Torah portion of Naso from the Book of Numbers, we learn of restitution for when one person wrongs another. In it, God says “Say to the Israelites, ‘Any man or woman who wrongs another in any way and so is unfaithful to the Eternal is guilty and must confess the sin they have committed. They must make full restitution for the wrong they have done, and add a fifth of the value to it and give it all to the person they have wrong. But if that person has no close relative to whom restitution can be made for the wrong, the restitution belongs to the Eternal….’” (Num. 5:6-8) In other words, when we wrong a fellow human being, we have to openly confess it and pay reparations. If we are not able to pay reparations to that person because they have died, we still have to pay.
What is so extraordinary about Numbers 5 is that it goes straight from that statement to the ritual of the Sotah, the woman who is suspected of adultery by her jealous husband. That’s an extraordinary transition because Torah obviously does not consider the ritual about her to be wrong in any way. The text that describes the Sotah starts with the presumption of guilt, saying, “If a man’s wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him so that another man has relations with her that are hidden from her husband and her purity is undetected as there is no witness against her…” (5:12) and the continues, “or if feelings of jealousy come over her husband and he suspects his wife and she is impure or if he is jealous and suspects her even though she is not impure (5:14).” Notice the order. She did the act, or she may have done the act. In any of those three cases – where she did something in secret and he doesn’t know, where she did something in secret and he suspects, or where she didn’t do anything but he suspects her anyway – in all three of those cases, the woman is subjected to an extraordinarily humiliating and violent public trial. There’s no question that Torah assumes that the trial is for her own good – that if she is innocent then she will become pregnant and that’s a good thing, therefore the ends justify the means. And if anyone were in any doubt of the violence of the ceremony, one only need to look in Talmud, Tractate Sotah, for the full debasement of the woman in the ritual. If she refuses to drink, they force her and even strip her to humiliate her unless her breasts are attractive in which case the entire ritual will be counterproductive because then the men watching might be attracted to her and that might lead to future infidelity. The entire ritual of the Sotah is a ritual of privileged, legitimized violence against those with less power and Torah sees nothing wrong with it at all.
So, what is it that’s morally wrong, about the ritual of the Sotah? At its core, it is that it starts with the assumption of guilt and ends with the violence justified by that presumption. It is possible that the woman has done something wrong but the immorality is expressed immediately in the fact that mere suspicion is given as the cause for violence and the problem with that is that suspicion is subjective. We see the subjectivity of that at the very start of Tractate Sotah (2a) in Talmud, which discusses the Mishnah that a man can warn his wife to stay away from another man. The Gemara, the commentary on that Mishnah, says that if she nonetheless talks to that man in public then she is still okay but if she secludes herself away with that man for long enough for her to be defiled, then she should be considered a Sotah. Control of another person is a form of violence and control based on mere suspicion and no hard evidence is especially a form of violence. But control is an essential part of the Torah’s gender dynamic which is why the Bible saw nothing problematic, nothing morally wrong, with the ritual of the Sotah. Thousands of years later, we are able to say that presumption is not sufficient cause for violence. Today, we are not only able but we are compelled to say that organized violence against the underprivileged in our society is morally wrong. Committing acts of violence against individuals in the belief that they may be guilty is never moral. Whether it’s a priest physically forcing a woman to drink a potion of dust and dirt, or a police officer kneeling on the neck of an African-America man to the point that he dies, both are violent, immoral acts. The fact that the person in question has been accused of doing something that is considered to be immoral is not justification of violence, which is unquestionably immoral. In both the Sotah and the case of George Floyd, resisting the act by the authority figure is used as justification for further violence. In both cases, physical restraint is justified by the authority figure. Any thought system that has to use violence to uphold its ideals – whether it’s patriarchy or racial superiority – and then creates excuses to perpetuate more violence, is not a moral system. The violence of the system reveals its immorality.
It is not enough to merely end the acts of violence. The Mishnah describes how the ritual of the Sotah had not been performed in a very long time, but then seems to delight in describing the violence of the ritual in great detail. It gets an almost violent pornographic pleasure from the description, all fully justified by the men for whom the system was created and maintained. Similarly, it will not be enough to end police officers kneeling on suspects’ necks because the violence of the system will still remain and will simply be expressed in differing ways elsewhere. The violence of the system is expressed in violence against immigrants. It is expressed in violence against women by restricting the choices they can make about their own bodies. It is expressed in white members of the public calling the police on African-Americans and falsely accusing them of violence. It is expressed in continued violence against the planet. It is expressed in economic violence against the poor. It is expressed in the denial of basic rights like clean water or healthcare from millions of people in this country. These are not unrelated. They are all connected through the violence of this society.
On a daily basis, we are reminded of the violence of America. The corresponding overhaul of American society that continually appears to be so obviously necessary today is even more profound than the overhaul from traditional Judaism to Reform Judaism, which rightly saw the violence of Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism as expressed in rituals like the Sotah and rejected it. This brings us back to our opening verse, to the admission of guilt and its ironic unwitting adjacency to a ritual that is unquestionably immoral to us. It makes us feel better to point the finger and to blame guilt on others while supporting the system of violence that benefits us and that harms others. In this sidrah, we see our society’s willful blindness of its own violence reflected back at us. If there is wisdom in these verses, it is in the need to name the violence of our society in full, not just to be dismayed at specific examples of violence like Rodney King, Eric Garner or George Floyd.
May the events of this week, and the Torah portion of this week, finally point us in the direction of honestly addressing the underlying violence of our society and its assumed cruelty. May we learn from the pain of others our inadvertent but nonetheless constant perpetuation of violence. And after we have named it, may we take concrete steps to overhaul our society so that it is not just violence between societies that ends, but also violence within societies such as our own. May such be God’s will, and let us say, Amen.
What is so extraordinary about Numbers 5 is that it goes straight from that statement to the ritual of the Sotah, the woman who is suspected of adultery by her jealous husband. That’s an extraordinary transition because Torah obviously does not consider the ritual about her to be wrong in any way. The text that describes the Sotah starts with the presumption of guilt, saying, “If a man’s wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him so that another man has relations with her that are hidden from her husband and her purity is undetected as there is no witness against her…” (5:12) and the continues, “or if feelings of jealousy come over her husband and he suspects his wife and she is impure or if he is jealous and suspects her even though she is not impure (5:14).” Notice the order. She did the act, or she may have done the act. In any of those three cases – where she did something in secret and he doesn’t know, where she did something in secret and he suspects, or where she didn’t do anything but he suspects her anyway – in all three of those cases, the woman is subjected to an extraordinarily humiliating and violent public trial. There’s no question that Torah assumes that the trial is for her own good – that if she is innocent then she will become pregnant and that’s a good thing, therefore the ends justify the means. And if anyone were in any doubt of the violence of the ceremony, one only need to look in Talmud, Tractate Sotah, for the full debasement of the woman in the ritual. If she refuses to drink, they force her and even strip her to humiliate her unless her breasts are attractive in which case the entire ritual will be counterproductive because then the men watching might be attracted to her and that might lead to future infidelity. The entire ritual of the Sotah is a ritual of privileged, legitimized violence against those with less power and Torah sees nothing wrong with it at all.
So, what is it that’s morally wrong, about the ritual of the Sotah? At its core, it is that it starts with the assumption of guilt and ends with the violence justified by that presumption. It is possible that the woman has done something wrong but the immorality is expressed immediately in the fact that mere suspicion is given as the cause for violence and the problem with that is that suspicion is subjective. We see the subjectivity of that at the very start of Tractate Sotah (2a) in Talmud, which discusses the Mishnah that a man can warn his wife to stay away from another man. The Gemara, the commentary on that Mishnah, says that if she nonetheless talks to that man in public then she is still okay but if she secludes herself away with that man for long enough for her to be defiled, then she should be considered a Sotah. Control of another person is a form of violence and control based on mere suspicion and no hard evidence is especially a form of violence. But control is an essential part of the Torah’s gender dynamic which is why the Bible saw nothing problematic, nothing morally wrong, with the ritual of the Sotah. Thousands of years later, we are able to say that presumption is not sufficient cause for violence. Today, we are not only able but we are compelled to say that organized violence against the underprivileged in our society is morally wrong. Committing acts of violence against individuals in the belief that they may be guilty is never moral. Whether it’s a priest physically forcing a woman to drink a potion of dust and dirt, or a police officer kneeling on the neck of an African-America man to the point that he dies, both are violent, immoral acts. The fact that the person in question has been accused of doing something that is considered to be immoral is not justification of violence, which is unquestionably immoral. In both the Sotah and the case of George Floyd, resisting the act by the authority figure is used as justification for further violence. In both cases, physical restraint is justified by the authority figure. Any thought system that has to use violence to uphold its ideals – whether it’s patriarchy or racial superiority – and then creates excuses to perpetuate more violence, is not a moral system. The violence of the system reveals its immorality.
It is not enough to merely end the acts of violence. The Mishnah describes how the ritual of the Sotah had not been performed in a very long time, but then seems to delight in describing the violence of the ritual in great detail. It gets an almost violent pornographic pleasure from the description, all fully justified by the men for whom the system was created and maintained. Similarly, it will not be enough to end police officers kneeling on suspects’ necks because the violence of the system will still remain and will simply be expressed in differing ways elsewhere. The violence of the system is expressed in violence against immigrants. It is expressed in violence against women by restricting the choices they can make about their own bodies. It is expressed in white members of the public calling the police on African-Americans and falsely accusing them of violence. It is expressed in continued violence against the planet. It is expressed in economic violence against the poor. It is expressed in the denial of basic rights like clean water or healthcare from millions of people in this country. These are not unrelated. They are all connected through the violence of this society.
On a daily basis, we are reminded of the violence of America. The corresponding overhaul of American society that continually appears to be so obviously necessary today is even more profound than the overhaul from traditional Judaism to Reform Judaism, which rightly saw the violence of Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism as expressed in rituals like the Sotah and rejected it. This brings us back to our opening verse, to the admission of guilt and its ironic unwitting adjacency to a ritual that is unquestionably immoral to us. It makes us feel better to point the finger and to blame guilt on others while supporting the system of violence that benefits us and that harms others. In this sidrah, we see our society’s willful blindness of its own violence reflected back at us. If there is wisdom in these verses, it is in the need to name the violence of our society in full, not just to be dismayed at specific examples of violence like Rodney King, Eric Garner or George Floyd.
May the events of this week, and the Torah portion of this week, finally point us in the direction of honestly addressing the underlying violence of our society and its assumed cruelty. May we learn from the pain of others our inadvertent but nonetheless constant perpetuation of violence. And after we have named it, may we take concrete steps to overhaul our society so that it is not just violence between societies that ends, but also violence within societies such as our own. May such be God’s will, and let us say, Amen.