Love is turtle doves and sunset strolls … but only in the
movies. In real life, love is
enthralling and uplifting but also frustrating and disappointing. Mature love withstands these and goes on
loving anyway. As it is between people,
so it is with the Torah.
Parshat Naso describes a ritual to determine a wife’s
fidelity. If her husband accuses her of
cheating but has no witness, he can force her to drink a noxious potion in
sight of the priest. If she has had sex
with a man other than her husband, the reaction will be painful: “her body shall distend and her thigh shall
sag; and the wife shall become a curse among her people” (Numbers 5:27). If she hasn’t, she will be unharmed.
The ordeal outlined this week relies on superstition and
psychology. More than this, it is
patriarchal and painful. “The unequal
application of the ritual to women and not men, the lack of due process, the
physical and emotional humiliation – all of these combine to make this passage
a challenging place in which to find meaning,” Lisa J. Grushcow observes in The
Torah: Women’s Torah Commentary.
True love means speaking up when we’re upset. True love means giving the gentle
rebuke. Otherwise it’s not love, but a
false friendliness that melts like paper in the rain. Honesty is scary, but also necessary for
love.
And so I must declare that Parshat Naso is the painful practice
of another time and place. Even the
Talmud’s declaration that the ordeal was an “unusual and infrequent event” (Sotah
1:1) is not enough to mitigate its hatefulness.
I understand the Torah to be profound and beautiful and
instructive. It is infinitely
meaningful. I also understand that it sometimes
fails to meet basic ethical standards.
The ordeal of the sotah ordeal is one of these times.
We modern Jews need not chose only between the extremes of
swallowing the Torah whole or spitting it out altogether. While we could use this passage as a basis to
reject the entire Torah, it would be far more productive to use it as a prompt
for study and action – to understand the psychology of spousal abuse, for
example, or to help out in a shelter.
It is no rejection to point out a failure. If we do not decry, we do not love.
No comments:
Post a Comment