In Good Faith

Parshat Naso - Being Faithful

by Rabbi Avi Billet

I cherish the fact that the Torah does not hide from truths, and does not whitewash unpleasant situations. Biblical narratives in and beyond the Torah include examples of individuals who struggled with the most primal of human urges. More than monetary fraud and tax evasion, this sin remains, to this day, one that ends even the greatest of political careers (unless you were U.S. president for most of the ‘90s).

Yosef, Shimshon, and King David are three examples of great Jewish leaders who faced these challenges. Yosef triumphed, David failed, and Shimshon dealt with his desires through a faithful intermarriage in order to infiltrate the enemy’s inner circle.

With this background, however, one can still argue that nothing about the circumstances surrounding the Sotah, the suspected adulteress, is particularly pleasant. It is nice that our parsha instructs in how to deal with a real-life possibility of unfaithfulness, but the focus is on exposing the unfaithful married woman, and there is no particular focus on her partner-in-sin, nor whether he is likewise married.

Not to say that he is faultless, blameless, or unpunished in the Torah’s presentation of the case or in the Talmud’s subsequent analysis of the circumstances. [Aish.com takes a stab at explaining this conundrum]

But in the Torah’s depiction of the particulars, it seems translators have a debate as to what really happened.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan’s translation of the verses (5:12-13) reads thus:
“[This is the law] if any man's wife is suspected of committing adultery and being false to her husband. A man may have Iain with her carnally, keeping it hidden from her husband, and they may have acted secretly so that there could be no witness against [the woman]. [The woman] was not raped.”

ArtScroll translates the same words, “Any man whose wife may go astray and commit treachery against him; and a man could have lain with her carnally, but it was hidden from the eyes of her husband, and she became secluded and could have been defiled — but there was no witness against her — and she had not been forced.”

Rabbi J.H. Hertz translates the same words, “If any man’s wife go aside, and act unfaithfully against him, and a man lie with her carnally, and it be hid from the eyes of her husband, she being defiled secretly, and there be no witness against her, neither she be taken in the act.”

The husband’s jealousy follows, and the Torah then says she may have or may have not actually committed the act.

In all cases, she is brought to the temple, and the procedure with the kohen and the special waters follows.

Clearly there is talk of her husband being suspicious. The Hebrew text (5:13) says “V’shakhav ish otah shikhvat zera, v’ne’elam me’einei ishaH.”

Where Rabbi Kaplan and ArtScroll translate “a man may have” and “a man could have,” Rabbi Hertz writes “and a man lie with her.” The question therefore goes beyond, ‘does her husband have real grounds to suspect, beyond his warning to her?’ The question is, “Did she or didn’t she? And is it only because her husband warned her that she goes through this process?”

Hertz’s translation is the most literally accurate. The Torah does seem to suggest at the outset that the woman is guilty, before it retracts and says she may have or she may have not committed the sinful offense against her husband. Could it be, then, that she might maintain a complete secret from her husband, and though personally guilty of adultery, nonetheless get away with it on the human level?

It would seem so.

In our Jewish community, we value and focus on the nuclear family, and are meant to do our utmost to preserve its sanctity. Some of our communities have a standard of conduct that prevents married men from becoming too “familiar” with married women, and vice versa. The Mishnah in Avot 1:5 (see part I and part II) even suggests a healthy distance, to avoid problems.

In explaining the custom that women would not work in the evenings of Sefirat Haomer (Shulchan Arukh 493:4), Shibbolei Haleket (Pesach laws 235) compares the Omer offering to the Sotah offering — both are a tenth of an eiphah of barley — and says because the Omer offering might cause us to think of a Sotah and thus arouse suspicion that our righteous women are unfaithful, it is to their continued honor and glory that they refrain from work during these evenings, because they are above suspicion.

May all of us, men and women, continue to live up to the category of “above suspicion” of the Shibbolei Haleket, as we model ideal family life for ourselves and for our children.