Love Through Self-Sacrifice
Rabbi Tom Samuels
I am in love with the Torah. We are a wonderful team. A great partnership. We foster each other’s best qualities. And our feasts of Talmudic discourse and theological exploration are so much fun. But I must be honest. There are times when I struggle with the words of the Torah. This Shabbat’s Torah portion, Nasso, is one of those occasions.
We read about the case of the Sotah, the “Unfaithful Wife.” According to the Torah, if a husband suspects his wife of adultery, even without a shred of evidence to back his claim - the Torah’s words are, “the spirit of jealousy passes onto him” - his legal remedy is to take his wife to the local priest where she is publicly shamed and forced to drink a magical potion called “The “Bitter Waters.”
The drink is a test: If she is innocent, then the potion will have no effect on her. If, however, she is guilty, then the potion will result in a long and painful illness, where her stomach swells her uterus ruptures, and eventually she dies.
A first glance, through a literal reading of the text, (what the rabbis called the “Peshat”), the Sotah is problematic to my sense of fairness, justice and equality. After all, according to the text, the woman is presumed guilty from the start. She has no voice, no agency. Her very life is at the whim of her husband and the priest.
And then I am reminded of the famous line from the Talmud, that there are “70 faces to the Torah.” That there is so much more than simply the sola scriptura, the text as an end unto itself. That implicit within the Torah there are infinite possibilities for re-contextualizing the text. An endless well of interpretations and potential meanings.
The rabbis named this rabbinic style of textual interpretation as Midrash. Professor Norman Cohen compares the Midrashic process to giving birth to a child: “Once the umbilical cord is severed, the text takes on a life of its own. It can grow, expand, and change as readers of every age interact with it.”
This pedagogy for textual reinterpretation can be applied to our Torah portion’s case of the Sotah, the “Unfaithful Wife.” For example, in the 5th century collection of rabbinical homiletics called Leviticus Rabba, the rabbis extrapolate on the Divine ingredients that went in making the "Bitter Waters" concoction:
“So great is peace, that God says that The Great Name, which was written in holiness, should be erased in the water (i.e. the Bitter Water for the Sotah) in order to bring peace between a man his wife.” (Leviticus Rabbah 9:9)
God, the Sages imagine, burns the segments of His sacred Torah’s parchment that deal with the Sotah, and then dissolves the resultant ashes into the "Bitter Waters" for her to drink. In other words, God inserts Himself in to this human drama, and sacrifices a part of the God-self for the sake of bringing about resolution between the husband and the wife, Shalom Bayit, in Hebrew. This is God modeling for us a prototype of love that can only come through self-sacrifice.
And, this is the same love-sacrifice message exemplified in the story of the Binding of Isaac, the Akeida. Abraham shows his love for God by willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, to Him. (Genesis 22:1-19) This is the love of Rebecca for her son Jacob. She was willing to sacrifice her soul in order to protect her son from any curse that might result from deceiving his brother Esau for the family birthright. (Genesis 27:13) And this is the love shown by King David for his people when he offered-up himself up to God as a replacement sacrifice for their sins. (Samuel II 24:17)
These stories are far deeper and nuanced than at first glance. God doesn't need Abraham to carry out the killing of his son. He does not need Rachel to incur the wrath of His curses. And David does not need to actually die for the sins of the people.
The same with the Sotah. God does not want the woman to actually die from drinking the potion - the Talmud goes to great extent establishing legal hurdles making it all but impossible for this to happen.
Rather, what God wants from Abraham, Rachel David, the Sotah, and by extension, what He want from us all, is to show our willingness to transcend our own selves for someone or something else. That Divine love is revealed when we embrace our God-given capacity for loving each other, and to do so through personal sacrifice.
Rabbi Tom Samuels
I am in love with the Torah. We are a wonderful team. A great partnership. We foster each other’s best qualities. And our feasts of Talmudic discourse and theological exploration are so much fun. But I must be honest. There are times when I struggle with the words of the Torah. This Shabbat’s Torah portion, Nasso, is one of those occasions.
We read about the case of the Sotah, the “Unfaithful Wife.” According to the Torah, if a husband suspects his wife of adultery, even without a shred of evidence to back his claim - the Torah’s words are, “the spirit of jealousy passes onto him” - his legal remedy is to take his wife to the local priest where she is publicly shamed and forced to drink a magical potion called “The “Bitter Waters.”
The drink is a test: If she is innocent, then the potion will have no effect on her. If, however, she is guilty, then the potion will result in a long and painful illness, where her stomach swells her uterus ruptures, and eventually she dies.
A first glance, through a literal reading of the text, (what the rabbis called the “Peshat”), the Sotah is problematic to my sense of fairness, justice and equality. After all, according to the text, the woman is presumed guilty from the start. She has no voice, no agency. Her very life is at the whim of her husband and the priest.
And then I am reminded of the famous line from the Talmud, that there are “70 faces to the Torah.” That there is so much more than simply the sola scriptura, the text as an end unto itself. That implicit within the Torah there are infinite possibilities for re-contextualizing the text. An endless well of interpretations and potential meanings.
The rabbis named this rabbinic style of textual interpretation as Midrash. Professor Norman Cohen compares the Midrashic process to giving birth to a child: “Once the umbilical cord is severed, the text takes on a life of its own. It can grow, expand, and change as readers of every age interact with it.”
This pedagogy for textual reinterpretation can be applied to our Torah portion’s case of the Sotah, the “Unfaithful Wife.” For example, in the 5th century collection of rabbinical homiletics called Leviticus Rabba, the rabbis extrapolate on the Divine ingredients that went in making the "Bitter Waters" concoction:
“So great is peace, that God says that The Great Name, which was written in holiness, should be erased in the water (i.e. the Bitter Water for the Sotah) in order to bring peace between a man his wife.” (Leviticus Rabbah 9:9)
God, the Sages imagine, burns the segments of His sacred Torah’s parchment that deal with the Sotah, and then dissolves the resultant ashes into the "Bitter Waters" for her to drink. In other words, God inserts Himself in to this human drama, and sacrifices a part of the God-self for the sake of bringing about resolution between the husband and the wife, Shalom Bayit, in Hebrew. This is God modeling for us a prototype of love that can only come through self-sacrifice.
And, this is the same love-sacrifice message exemplified in the story of the Binding of Isaac, the Akeida. Abraham shows his love for God by willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, to Him. (Genesis 22:1-19) This is the love of Rebecca for her son Jacob. She was willing to sacrifice her soul in order to protect her son from any curse that might result from deceiving his brother Esau for the family birthright. (Genesis 27:13) And this is the love shown by King David for his people when he offered-up himself up to God as a replacement sacrifice for their sins. (Samuel II 24:17)
These stories are far deeper and nuanced than at first glance. God doesn't need Abraham to carry out the killing of his son. He does not need Rachel to incur the wrath of His curses. And David does not need to actually die for the sins of the people.
The same with the Sotah. God does not want the woman to actually die from drinking the potion - the Talmud goes to great extent establishing legal hurdles making it all but impossible for this to happen.
Rather, what God wants from Abraham, Rachel David, the Sotah, and by extension, what He want from us all, is to show our willingness to transcend our own selves for someone or something else. That Divine love is revealed when we embrace our God-given capacity for loving each other, and to do so through personal sacrifice.