In God’s Name

Nasso 5776 / 18 June 2016

Anyone who attends a Yeshiva high school eventually figures out that there are some cultural quirks unique to a Jewish school. My senior year was largely defined by one of these: the “morning detention.” Just fifteen minutes long, morning detention took place immediately before the daily minyan, and it was assigned for just one infraction — if you were late or absent from the morning service too many times, you could count on a quarter hour in Ms. Davids’ office, enough to ensure you’d be the first person in the room when it was time for minyan.

In my defense, numerous research studies have shown that teenagers naturally fall asleep — and, ideally, wake up — later in the day, and a 7:30minyan was probably never a winning plan for a high school. Nevertheless, I ended up part of our own little Breakfast Club of students with regular morning detentions. While the theory was solid — get us to school well before minyan, so we would be on time to davening — in reality getting to school at 7:15 posed just as much, if not more, difficulty. Given that missing one morning detention earned two more… you can see where this is going.

Things got really interesting around March of my senior year, when I and a few friends had racked up more morning detentions than we had days remaining in school. At that point, the premise of morning detention — and with it, any hope of holding us accountable for attendance at minyan — became a farce. What was the school going to do? We knew they wouldn’t hold us back from graduating because of minyan attendance; they knew that as soon as summer came, we could safely walk away from any lingering consequences.

It’s a funny memory, a light-hearted story of benign adolescent rebellion. But it also reveals a frightening truth about human society: laws function only so long as their violation remains a relatively rare occurrence. Rampant, blatant transgression can render any rule functionally meaningless. The Sotah ritual,^[1] described in this week’s parshah, presents us with a test case. The Torah lays out an elaborate ritual designed, in a case where a man suspects his wife of adultery but lacks sufficient proof, to conclusively demonstrate her guilt or innocence. We’ll set aside, for now, the question of fairness, noting only that there is good evidence to say that the procedures may be rigged in order to vindicate the wife;^[2] for today, it’s important that we ask, where did this ritual go?

The Mishnah, at the very end of Tractate Sotah, lists a variety of practices that were cancelled outright by the Rabbis during the Second Temple period, among them the Sotah ordeal. The Mishnah helpfully explains the reason for discontinuing the Sotah ritual:

Just like morning detention, at a certain point these rituals — the Sotah, and the broken-necked heifer, to which we will turn our attention in a moment — became useless because the behavior they were meant to police grew on an unmanageable scale.

I’ll call your attention to two important features of this text that might otherwise escape our notice. First, although the Torah focuses on the woman who is suspected of violating her marriage vows, the Mishnah attributes the breakdown of Sotah to the dramatic increase in מְנָאֲפִים,male adulterers. As Rav Hirsch points out, the Sotah rituals indicate the wife’s guilt or innocence only when the husband has committed no improprieties; when the men habitually violated the sanctity of marriage, recourse to the Sotah ordeal became pointless.^[5] A ritual designed to determine a woman’s faithfulness serves no purpose when the men have demonstrated their general disregard for the sanctity of marriage.

The other key feature to notice is the juxtaposition with the broken-necked heifer.^[6] The Mishnah refers to a ritual invoked when a body is found murdered and the culprit can not be identified; the elders of the city must symbolically take responsibility for the death that happened in their area — on their watch, so to speak — as atonement for their failure to bring the murderer to justice. The ritual, however, pertains only where the murderer’s identity remains unknown; if he can be identified, even if there is insufficient evidence for a trial, the heifer ritual is not performed. Here too, when killers eventually became so bold as to murder in plain sight, making no effort to hide or cover their tracks, our Sages cancelled the ritual altogether.

Both of these examples reinforce the idea that the rituals, procedures, and ideals of the Torah have currency only when society maintains some measure of collective responsibility. Faithfulness and betrayal in any one marriage might remain a private matter, but for our Rabbis, the moral tone of a society must be a matter of public concern. When the crossing of moral boundaries no longer evokes a sense of shame or contrition, a nation’s accountability systems cease to function. The examples in the Mishnah — coming one after another at the close of the Second Temple Period — reinforce the inherent danger: when a society loses its ability to hold itself, collectively, accountable for the actions of its citizens, the end will not be far behind.

Reading our parshah this week — in the shadow of the cold-blooded murder of fifty of God’s children, specifically targeted in an LGBT nightclub — leaves me chilled to the bone. Throughout this election season, candidates have often asked where our country is headed. If we had the fortitude to really engage that question — not just as campaign rhetoric — I’m not at all sure we’ll like the answers. As many in the LGBT community have pointed out, the terrorist attack in Orlando can not be separated from a deep history of homophobia and transphobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and discrimination against people of color. We can not help but notice that exactly one year ago, another terrorist executed nine African-Americans in a Charleston church; while statistics are difficult to pin down, reasonable estimates suggest that in the three years since the Sandy Hook massacre a hundred thousand people have been shot to death in this country. However justified we might be in feeling saddened and angry by the events in Orlando, we have no right to be surprised; when a country literally does nothing in response to the murder of children — middle-class white children — what should we expect when the victims are latinx homosexuals? In a year when presidential candidates brazenly evoke racism, homophobia, and nativism, feed off seething hatred, flirt with political violence — this country is playing with fire.

I see no coincidence in our parshah joining, in a single aliyah, the Sotah ordeal — which raises such uncomfortable questions about societal accountability — with the Priestly Blessing, ברכת כהנים.^[7] Revered for millennia — archaeologists have found these verses written on silver amulets dating to the seventh century B.C.E.^[8] — these three blessings remain a centerpiece of Jewish life to this day, bestowed upon our children each Friday night. The aliyah concludes with one final verse, a postscript tacked onto the blessing itself: וְשָׂמוּ אֶת־שְׁמִי עַל־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וַֽאֲנִי אֲבָֽרֲכֵֽם, “You shall place My name upon the people of Israel, and I will bless them.”^[9] God, of course, has many names — among them שָׁלֽוֹם, “peace,” the concluding word of the Priestly Blessing.^[10] God expects us to place God’s own name upon ourselves — but a name is not like a robe that we can lay across our shoulders; in order to fulfill thismitzvah, we must take on this particular name of God, שָׁלֽוֹם, peace, as the primary focus of our lives.^[11] We can even suggest that שָׁלֽוֹם may be the most holy of God’s many names: we generally revere the four-letter name of God — which we dare not even pronounce aloud — above all others, but in the Sotah ritual God demands that we erase that name in order to restore peace — שָׁלֽוֹם — between husband and wife.^[12]

The word שָׁלֽוֹם derives from the Hebrew root שלם, meaning “whole” or “complete;” discrimination, repression, and marginalization shatter that wholeness. Our Rabbis emphasize the sanctity of human dignity when they teach that every person must insist, בִּשְׁבִילִי נִבְרָא הָעוֹלָם, “The whole world was created for my sake;”^[13] and yet in the aftermath of the Orlando attack, my friend Andrew Belinfante wrote of how hollow those words sound to him:

As a rabbi, as a Jew, as a human being, I will never know שָׁלֽוֹם, peace, wholeness, until all people around me feel that the world was created for their sake as well.

Rabbi Shai Held, in an open letter to the LGBTQ community, points out how often religious people — of all faiths — “reduce God to their own size… imagin[ing] that God loves the same people they love, and that God hates the people they hate.” The Priestly Blessing, on the other hand, asks us to expand our hearts to God’s size: when we pray, וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלֽוֹם, “place peace upon you,”^[14] we ask for the capacity to become more like God, loving others for the simple fact of their being created, just as we are, in the image and likeness of God.

Toward the end of the Torah, Moses will present the Israelites with a choice between blessing and curse.^[15] For us, the choice has come early. Every action, every word we speak, represents an opportunity to reach for the blessing of שָׁלֽוֹם, peace. We live in a time of great danger, but also great opportunity: it falls upon us to show that love is indeed stronger than death,^[16] that compassion can push aside hate the way light banishes darkness, that we live in a world created for the sake of each and every one of us.  וְשָׂמוּ אֶת־שְׁמִי עַל־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל, “Place My name,” שָׁלֽוֹם, “upon the people of Israel.”^[17] Our parshah calls us to take on God’s name שָׁלֽוֹם, peace, to walk in the world robed in this holiest of divine names, to become the instruments of blessing, the channel through which God’s love will manifest in the world.

כן יהי רצוננו, may it be our will.

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Tags: America, Gun Violence, Nasso