Welcome to The Morning Scroll! I'm Rabbi Deena Cowans from Mishkan Chicago and you're listening to what will be a quick dive into this week's parsha. If you’ve been meaning to brush up on your Jewish literacy, or you’re looking for some inspiration, you’ve come to the right place. This week, we read Parashat Nasso, “lift up”, in which we learn about what the Levite families are lifted up to do. We’ll start with a brief recap:
Continuing from last week, God tells Moshe the jobs of the Gershon and Merari families, and repeats how many of them there are. There’s 2630 Gershoni men, who are responsible for carrying the Mishkan’s tapestries and coverings, and the Merari family, of whom there are 3200, carry the beams and boards and pillars and things. The total number of Levite men old enough to work is 8580. Now that the Mishkan is up and running and being taken care of, we learn who is considered impure and unable to enter, and are reminded that people with tzaraat must be temporarily banished from the camp. We also learn some case law like what happens to someone who steals and lies about it, when to verbally confess sins to a priest, and the right of each person to choose which priest to give gifts to. We also learn about the ritual of Sotah, a woman who is accused of adultery, who is subjected to a sort of gruesome Temple ritual, and the laws of the Nazir, a person who makes a voluntary vow to abstain from grape products and cutting their hair. Changing subjects yet again, on the day the Mishkan was inaugurated, the nasi of each tribe brought gifts, lots of gifts, which are all recorded and described, but I’ll spare you the details. We end with a description of how God would talk to Moshe, with God’s voice emanating from between the two cherubs on the Ark.
Let’s dive into this Sotah ritual a little more. According to this parsha, if a man suspects his wife of adultery, he can bring her to the Temple, where a priest administers a ritual that involves forcing her to drink a potion of water with a ground up oath in it. If she’s guilty, she has some sort of physical consequence- the text says her thigh sags and her abdomen distends, but it’s not clear what exactly this means- and if she is innocent, she will be unscathed and in fact will bear children soon. But despite the fact that there is an entire tractate of Talmud called “Sotah”, ostensibly after this ritual, it’s not really clear that this was ever done to a woman. In fact, the tractate of Sotah is now where we can find some of the most amazing, feminist midrashim, which credit women with the Israelite redemption from Egypt.
There are a few other examples of times when the rabbis of the Talmud have an extensive discussion about a procedure in the Torah, seemingly for the sake of writing it out of existence, but to go so far as to use that tractate to honor women and center their roles? Unexpected, maybe, but also kind of awesome. It reminds me that just because a law exists, doesn’t mean it is just or right. In fact, maybe what we should do in the face of unjust or inhumane laws is use them to tell empowering stories about the would-be victims of the law. This, I hardly need to say, is a lesson we can all take to heart in our modern world. Law and justice are not the same thing, and sometimes the law describes procedures and rules that we feel are unjust. We can try to change the law, yes, but even if that isn’t possible, we are not stuck. We can use the occasion of the law to have conversations that lift up the disenfranchised, to remind ourselves that laws impact real people and that we don’t want to become normalized to disrespect.
This week, I want to bless the Israelite women who heard these laws and felt fear that they could be dragged into a public humiliation if their husbands had a fit of jealousy. I hope they were blessed with partners who were invested in protecting their dignity and safety, and that they felt comforted by a community who turned away from the law to respect them. And to anyone whose body, or whose existence, feels threatened by our laws, I hope you will be blessed with loved ones and a community who respect and protect you as much as you deserve.