Shabbat Shalom, Chag Shavuot Tov, and Welcome to Judeo Talk. The Torah portion for this week is Parsha Naso, Numbers 4:21-7:89.
Naso picks up where last week's parsha left off. God instructs Moses to continue assigning tasks to specific subsets of the Levite tribe. The Levite men between the ages of 30-50 are divided up by their home region of Egypt and given particular elements of the Tabernacle to guard and carry. Later the parsha names and enumerates the key individuals involved.
There are two very strange parts of this parsha that come in between the segments about the Levites. One is the center of an ongoing Talmudic debate, the other is often (in my opinion, incorrectly) dismissed as archaic superstition. Unfortunately, I only have space to address one of these things, so I'm going to go for the more flashy one. So, let's jump right in.
Believe it or not, The Five Books of Moses are rather light on superstition, especially for a text coming out of the ancient world. There is very little talk of magical things, and those stories that do contain some measure of magic usually fold out into a tidy metaphor with very little prodding. So, when mumbo-jumbo pops up out of nowhere, it's naturally meant to be suspect. As I've said before, coming to a place in the Torah that gives you pause for whatever reason is not an opportunity to dismiss the book outright, but a chance to delve deeper into what is more likely than not an intentional speed bump. In the case of the sotah, the bump is pretty big and the pause requires some mental gymnastics to get to a satisfactory answer.
The sotah can be defined as the wife who is suspected of infidelity without any actual evidence. The Torah's instructions for the sotah are for her to come before the priest and drink what basically amounts to a mixture of sand, water, and ink supposedly carrying a curse for any woman who has been unfaithful to her husband. The Torah says that an innocent woman will not only be unaffected by the curse, she will actually become healthier and more fruitful. A woman who is guilty, however, will suffer a horrible fate, with her belly filling with water, ending in her death.
Now, I know this seems rather strange and out-of-place for the Torah. That's because it is. There is a certain cleverness to this law, though. It's a morbidly funny, roundabout way of actually surmising whether or not an infidelity has occurred. The important part isn't whether or not the curse will work, which all reason says it won't, but that all parties involved believe that it will work. A woman who is guilty will have to fear for her life. It's no coincidence that the outward physical signs of guilt and innocence are the same. A belly slowly filling with water and a belly expanding with a child would look identical. A guilty woman might naturally assume that the curse has taken hold and in her despair confess her crime. A woman who is innocent will think herself blessed.
Of course, this leads us to question of what happens when the expanding belly ends up being a child, as it always would be. This is the real genius of the "curse". If a child was going to happen regardless of guilt, this "curse" provides a method of relieving the child of a broken home. Assuming a guilty wife doesn't confess, the suspicious husband, seeing a child result from the ritual, will believe his wife to have been faithful. The child is what's important here, not the quarreling couple. Being born into a harsh wilderness is hard enough without having to deal with parents who don't trust one another.
The curse of the sotah is an example of how superstition can have value in a very real, human way. It requires some digging and some non-traditional thinking, but the moral core is still there.