One Night Shtender

Do you know a teen who likes to debate? Try out for our Moot Beit Din team. The topic this year is should education be funded by gambling. For more information go to our website https://hebrewcollege.edu/programs/teen-beit-midrash/

The kids are home from camp. What are you doing about their Jewish education this year? Come check out Teen Beit Midrash of Hebrew College Teen Learning. We are a pluralistic, inclusive Jewish teen online and in-person community with a focus on traditional text. We have info session for the next three weeks. Find out more here: https://linktr.ee/teenbeitmidrash

# Jewishteens

Naso
I recently read an article in the New Yorker about the conviction of an English neonatal nurse named Lucy Letby who was convicted of murdering many babies in her care. Letby maintains her innocence. Rachel Aviv, the author of the article, argues that although Letby was on duty when the babies died, correlation does not spell causation. Aviv asserts that the statistics used to convict Letby, after a ten month trial, were shoddy and that many people were more interested in accusing Letby than examining the flaws in the National Health system’s funding and care. But most interesting, to me, was that once people started accusing the nurse of misbehavior, the more people saw malfeasance. Whether or not the accusations are true, the young nurse experienced public humiliation, psychological trauma and will probably spend the rest of her life in prison.

This story reminded me of the sotah system in our parsha, which allows a jealous husband to subject his wife to a trial by ordeal if he suspects her of adultery. After being publicly humiliated she was made to drink water which contained the ink from a scroll on which the name of God had been written. If she were guilty, her belly would distend and thighs would sag, which was probably a euphemism for some failure of her sexual organs (Bamidbar 5:22). If she were innocent she would soon become pregnant and her husband could never divorce her. According to the Talmud the ritual included a kohen partially stripping her and shaming her even before she drank the water. Even if she was innocent, she had to endure the ordeal. Curiously, the description of the sotah follows a verse that admonishes both men and women to take responsibility for the wrongs against each other stating that such offenses are “a breaking faith with God” (Bamidbar 5:6). Like nurse Letby, the sotah was punished even before her trial began.

The scholar Jacob Milgrom says that the sotah ritual was probably adopted from surrounding cultures to prevent the lynching of suspected adulterors. But it is not clear how often it was practiced. Mishnah Eduyot 5:6 quotes Rabbi Akavia ben Mahalalel, who lived in the early first century CE, in saying that the sotah ritual did not apply to converts or freed slaves. Contemporary rabbis disagreed, citing a case of a woman named Karkemit who was made to drink the waters by Shemaiah and Avtalion, great rabbis who lived a century before. Akavia ben Mahalalel asserted that that case had been just for show and was just plain water. The rabbis showed their disagreement by excommunicating him. Was Karkemit the last sotah? In Mishnah Sotah 9:9 Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who lived fifty years later, maintained that the ritual was discontinued because “adulterers proliferated” but it is not clear when that occurred.

Whether or not sotah was ever enacted, vilifying women to avoid accountability is an ancient practice that persists today. The Mishnah Sotah 5:1 says that “just as the water evaluates her fidelity, so too, the water evaluates his”. Maybe we read about sotah every year to remind us that we have to examine all sides more carefully to get closer to justice and not ruin women’s lives with innuendos that, repeated enough, come to be believed.
Shabbat shalom with love,
Rabba Claudia Marbach