There are parts of the Torah that uplift the soul—moments of revelation, liberation, and transcendent wisdom. But there are also parts that unsettle us. Passages that feel foreign, archaic, or even ethically troubling. Parshat Nasso contains one of the most jarring of them all: the ritual of the Sotah—the trial of the woman suspected of adultery.
To modern eyes, the Sotah ritual reads like a dystopian spectacle: a man suspects his wife of infidelity but lacks evidence. He brings her to the priest. She is publicly shamed—her hair uncovered, her offering placed in her hands—and she is made to drink a mixture of sacred water and dust from the floor of the Tabernacle, accompanied by an oath invoking a divine curse. If she is guilty, the Torah warns, “her belly shall swell and her thigh shall sag.” If she is innocent, she is cleared and blessed with fertility.
It is a difficult passage—not only in content, but in implication. It touches on themes of gender, power, suspicion, and spectacle. It is easy to dismiss it as a relic of ancient patriarchy. And perhaps that would be the easier choice. But I would suggest that this is exactly the moment when Torah demands something deeper.
Because one of the most sacred responsibilities of Jewish learning is not to ignore difficult texts—but to face them. To bring our discomfort into conversation with our tradition, and to ask: what does this text want from us? What does it reveal about our values, our society, and ourselves?
Torah Is Meant to Be Wrestled With
The first human to receive a divine name in Torah is Jacob. He becomes Yisrael—“the one who wrestles with God.” That is not incidental. It is existential.
The Torah doesn’t ask for blind reverence. It demands courageous engagement. Rav Kook, the great mystic and halakhist of early 20th-century Palestine, wrote: “The ancient light of Torah appears clothed in garments that are not always suited to all generations. But beneath those garments is eternal truth.” The work of Torah study is to uncover that light—especially when it is hidden behind difficult or disturbing texts.
And the Sotah is certainly one of those.
Between Justice and Spectacle
Let us look more closely at what the ritual entails—and what it may have been trying to prevent.
A man, overcome by jealousy, suspects his wife of infidelity. In the ancient world, such suspicion could be fatal. A husband could kill his wife, exile her, or shame her with impunity. The Torah does not grant him that power. Instead, it intervenes.
The Sotah ritual redirects the husband’s suspicion away from impulsive punishment and into a structured, sacred process. The public nature of the ritual, while humiliating, also places limits on his private authority. The priest mediates. The community watches. God is invoked. Human vengeance is restrained.
This is not to excuse the ritual’s disturbing elements—but to notice what it displaces. The Torah does not validate male jealousy. It constrains it. It replaces unilateral action with a ritualized form, a divine test, a pause before judgment.
Still, the unease remains. And it should.
Rabbinic Discomfort Is Part of the Tradition
The rabbis of the Talmud didn’t read this passage and breathe easy. They, too, were disturbed.
The Mishnah in Sotah (9:9) teaches that the ritual was abolished entirely in the Second Temple period because society had become too morally corrupt. “When adulterers increased, the Sotah ritual ceased,” they said. In other words, when faithfulness could no longer be presumed—when men themselves were morally compromised—the ritual lost its moral standing. Justice requires a just society.
Rav Soloveitchik adds another layer: the ritual of Sotah, he says, dramatizes not only a legal procedure, but a theological dilemma. “The Torah confronts jealousy,” he writes, “not with ethics alone, but with holiness. When suspicion corrodes love, only the sacred can redeem or dissolve the bond.”
Still, even he acknowledges that the ritual exists in tension with our moral instincts. The point is not to resolve the discomfort—but to make it productive. To use it as a lens into the human condition: our fear, our need for control, our hunger for clarity, and our tendency to condemn.
Why We Still Need Difficult Texts
There is a temptation in contemporary Judaism to sanitize Torah—either by editing out the difficult parts or reinterpreting them beyond recognition. But the danger in doing so is not merely intellectual dishonesty. It’s the loss of Torah’s moral friction—the sacred tension that refines us.
Because Torah was never meant to be a comfort blanket. It is a mirror and a crucible. It shows us who we are, not just who we aspire to be. It reveals the messiness of human life—jealousy, betrayal, fear—and then asks: How will you respond?
The Sotah ritual is not a prescription for modern justice. But it forces us to confront the enduring human impulse to shame, to suspect, to humiliate. And it demands that such impulses be contained, sanctified, and ultimately, abolished.
Modern Echoes of Ancient Spectacle
We no longer have the Sotah ritual. But we have our own versions.
We shame people publicly on social media based on suspicion. We draw conclusions without process. We participate in online stonings masked as “accountability.” The spectacle remains—only now, there is no priest, no divine water, no sacred limits. Just viral suspicion and public humiliation.
In that sense, the Torah’s uncomfortable ritual might be more ethical than our own. At least it tried to slow things down, to introduce caution, to defer judgment to God. That is not an endorsement of the ritual—but a critique of what we’ve replaced it with.
Sacred Discomfort
The Sotah teaches that not every suspicion should lead to condemnation. That not every accusation requires public display. That holiness demands restraint.
But more importantly, the Sotah teaches us how to live with difficult Torah. How to remain faithful even when challenged. How to struggle with love. The Sotah invites us into a mature relationship with Torah—one where we do not flinch from the hard parts, nor abandon the tradition because of them.
As Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai said: “There is no verse in the Torah that is not filled with meaning like a pomegranate with seeds” (Shir HaShirim Rabbah 6:11). But the seeds are sometimes hidden under tough skin. Our job is to keep peeling, with reverence and resistance in equal measure.
To be a Jew is to stand before the Torah not as a consumer, demanding comfort—but as a covenantal partner, willing to wrestle.
And sometimes, that wrestling—especially with the most uncomfortable texts—is what love of Torah truly means.
Leave a Reply