Bemidbar Cycle Six Naso

Naso

In Naso we experience great beauty and pain. Here we are gifted with the Priestly Blessing, that exquisite verbal tapestry of holy protection. Here, we also experience the Sotah, the suspected adulteress.

 

The Sotah provides modern Jewish women with good reason to be angry and disillusioned. It opens the doors to important questions pertaining to the role of today's woman in prayer services, in the wearing of the tefillin, in rabbinics. In countering the (yes) abuse on the Sotah, it seems like the perfect citation to validate the raising-up of women today (in other words to raise our heads, be counted as well) for example to support the blending of the Imahot into the Avot of the Amidah.

While many of the questions and emotions above are certainly crucial to the development of Judaism, there is much more to the Sotah than meets the eye. The Sotah does stand as an example of the misused feminine, not only by men but more importantly by modern women. Please do not misunderstand me.  Stand she does, an aching representation of the degradation of women by men throughout the centuries. But also stand she does, the exquisite representation of her concealed powers, of miracles and gevurah, of prophecy. Downplaying these powers (and focusing on her abuse) cannot raise-up women. The only way to really raise-up women (and it is time) is to focus on the concealed metaphor of the Sotah. In the end, she is the connecting agent between God and man.  She is an example to all women of not how low we can go but how high.

This is what we read. A woman, if she is suspected of being an adulteress by her husband (the amount of witnesses necessary fluctuates depending on the Talmudic rabbi) becomes the subject of humiliation. To be direct, after her head is bared, she is to hold in her hands a barley offering. Then, she has to drink water mixed with the dust of the Tabernacle floor. Then, the priest elevates the meal offering and burns it on the altar. And finally, it seems, if she has betrayed her husband her belly will distend and her thighs will sag. It's a horrific scene.

How do we as a modern community take these lines and digest them themselves?

 

In the tractate Sotah, Raba specifies that dust of the floor is important: It reveals if the Sotah's  son will be like Avraham (of dust and ashes) or of someone else (of simply dust). The use of dust to determine the Sotah’s innocence or guilt is seen as a reward to honor Avraham.

So on a basic level it looks pretty bad for the Sotah. She has to literally eat dust. And not only that, this use of dust is a reward given to us by God to honor our patriarch.

However Raba continues to say that the descendents of Avraham also receive other rewards to honor him. We receive both the thread of blue (for our tallith) and the tefillin. 

Then we immediately learn from R Meir: Why is blue specified from all the varieties of colors? Because blue resembles [the color of] the sea, and the sea resembles [the color of  heaven, and heaven resembles [the color of] the Throne of Glory, as it is said: And they saw the God of Israel and there was under His feet as it were a paved work of sapphire stone, and as it were the very heaven for clearness and it is written: The likeness of a throne as the appearance of a sapphire stone

Why, in mentioning the dust do the rabbis take so many efforts to immediately lead us to the concept of enlightenment and the sapphire stone?  Could it be that the Sotah, in revealing humanity’s most base shadow is also revealing her sacred connection to God?

I believe so.

 

Through the concept of rewards therefore the Talmudic rabbis show the abuse of the Sotah and also her concealed and powerful divine connection. 

 

Dust and sapphire stones here are intertwined, inter-dependent. Just as in everyday life our greatest joys are mixed with our greatest sorrows, our strengths are mixed with our weaknesses and our curses are mixed with our blessings. What the Sotah does is to enable discernment. She allows us to see how they...within her very physicality...can be envisioned on earth.  She is transparent, real in her suffering, real in her concealed joy and love. She creates boundaries between darkness and light by showing those boundaries within her very body.

 

In the end, the Sotah is the Jewish Statue of Liberty. She stands alone holding up her lamp so we who are wandering in the dark can attain our inner and outer freedom. She becomes filthy dirty from the exhaust from ferry boats and airplanes, gets crawled on by millions of visitors a year, gets painted with the excrement of pigeons, and is the first to fall in spectacular films as if to get us to all think: Wow if she's falling things must be really bad.  That’s because we don’t want her to fall.  As abused as she is, we need her light and qualities of transparency and discernment so we can see ourselves. Concealed under all the pollution, under all the definitions, she is a heroine, a prophetess, a visionary. She is beauty personified. If you squint you can probably see that she could be after all wearing tefillin! In all though, she is beyond name, and certainly beyond any name we can bring to Avot. And so it is for all women.

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