Jealousy, Heartbreak, and a Terrifying Law
A woman drinks ink and dust to prove her innocence.
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My husband said something the other day that gave me pause: “I think you’re becoming too religious.”
I laughed—but in truth, I’ve been wondering the same thing. We both grew up ultra-Orthodox. I stepped away long ago, for reasons I’ve written about elsewhere. But lately, with my text study so deeply rooted in traditional sources, I feel myself being pulled back into the fold—and it unsettles me.
Some of the old struggles haven’t gone away. I still wrestle with the way our tradition has treated women, with the persistent patriarchy embedded in halacha, and with the creeping fear that if this is so visible to me, what other moral blind spots are still hiding in plain sight?
Jealousy on Trial
This week, Parshat Nasso brought all of it back to the surface.
It’s a packed portion, finishing the Levite census, descriptions of the Nazirite vow of abstinence, and the oldest piece of the Hebrew Bible with archival evidence, the Priestly Blessing, but tucked in the middle is something incredibly difficult to read: the ritual of the Sotah.
Compared to other ancient legal systems, the Torah’s version is less physically brutal. In the Code of Hammurabi (law 132), a man who suspects his wife of infidelity—with no proof and no witnesses—can have her thrown into a river. If she drowns, she’s guilty. If she swims to safety, she’s innocent.
The Torah takes that ritual but makes it slightly different. If a husband is “overcome with jealous feelings,” regarding his wife, without any witnesses or evidence of her betrayal, he may bring her to the Temple for a trial by ordeal. She is not drowned—but she is humiliated. Her hair is unbraided. She brings a sacrifice of plain barley - animal feed. She drinks a bitter mixture of water, dust from the Temple floor, and ink scraped from God's name. If she is guilty, her body is said to collapse inward to destroy her reproductive organs. If she is innocent, she is told to go home (Numbers 5:12-31).
If you stick to a close reading of the biblical text, there’s no trial or defense. All that needs to happen for a woman to be forced into this ritual, is her husband’s decision. It feels terrifyingly unjust.
The Law That Undid Itself
Unlike some other disturbing Torah passages, Sotah is not ignored. In fact, it is elaborated upon extensively. There is an entire book of Talmud, Masechet Sotah that walks us through the ritual, sometimes in grotesque detail (Talmud Sotah 7a-b).
But this, paradoxically, is what begins to redeem the story.
Because if we stopped at the written Torah alone, we might be left with injustice. But Judaism, I was taught, has always included more than the written Torah. The Oral Torah—the Mishnah and Talmud—is not a footnote. It is the living, breathing body of Jewish interpretation. And in the case of Sotah, the rabbinic documents describe the process of a divine decree being quite literally dismantled. (For a detailed analysis, see: ReReading the Rabbis, Chapter 1)
Interpreting Our Way Out
How did the rabbis go from a plain-sense Torah command to a very different one described in Talmud Sotah?
Rabbinic interpretation operates within a deeply traditional framework, they leverage oral teachings passed down through generations alongside inherited tools for close textual reading, finding structural patterns, and repeated language, through interpretive methods the Torah authorizes: middot shehaTorah nidreshet bahem—the 13 principles by which Torah is interpreted.
The language in Parshat Nasso around Sotah is strange—repetitive, emotional, and at times ambiguous. The word kinah (jealousy) appears multiple times, as does nitma’ah (defiled). The rabbis believe these repetitions were clues. Every extra word asked readers to dig deeper.
That digging became the law, or halacha. The Talmud’s elaboration on Sotah creates requirements that the Torah does not specify explicitly: the husband must give his wife a formal warning before two witnesses regarding secluding herself with a specific man; later he or at least one of those witnesses must have seen her secluded with the man in question. Only then can the ritual proceed. If one of the steps is missing, the ritual cannot be performed (Talmud Sotah 2a-2b).
The result is the version of Sotah we inherit is not the one we read directly in the biblical text.
The Day the Ritual Died
And then, even with all those safeguards in place, the rabbis took it one step further: they ended it.
The Mishnah tells us that Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai abolished the Sotah ritual during the Second Temple period. He didn’t do it in an act of rebellion. He did it within the halachic framework itself—codified in the texts that define Orthodoxy today. (Mishnah Sotah 9:9)
Why was it abolished? The reasons vary. One tradition says adultery had become too common, and the lines to perform the ritual were overwhelming the temple. Another says that a man cannot accuse his wife of betrayal when he is guilty of the same sin, and because most men were likely guilty too, the ritual was cancelled.
Regardless of the reason we reach the same halachic outcome: the ritual commanded in the Torah was no longer practiced.
The rabbis didn’t break the law—they read it closely enough that the law could no longer bear its own weight.
What makes it remarkable is not that it happened, but that it happened within the four walls of halacha. Sotah is a terrific example of the phrase coined by Blu Greenberg, “Where there is Rabbinic will, there is a Halachic way.”
She Said, He Said
Beit Toratah is a project that rewrites the entire Hebrew Bible with swapped genders, allowing women and men to engage with the text in new ways. When I read the Beit Toratah version of the Sotah ritual, it said:
“If a man slides out from under a woman and betrays her…” (Bamidbar: 5:20)
The language was jarring. Graphic. Uncomfortable. And oddly cathartic. Because it revealed just how much of my discomfort with biblical rituals has to do with who is in power. Who had the right to stand in the courtroom—and who was not allowed there.
The Torah profoundly empowers men. But Toratah—Torah written with female protagonists—opens a new possibility: shifting our perspective of who is in power and who must obey.
And maybe the Torah already hoped we would gender swap, and gave us the idea to do so by putting the ritual of Nazir immediately following the ritual of Sotah.
The Nazir is a person who chooses separation. Someone who vows to abstain from wine, avoid contact with the dead, and grow their hair out of spiritual devotion. The Torah is clear: ish o ishah—a man or a woman can become a Nazir. The category of holiness is open to both, not men or women, but to both - whoever chooses to dedicate themselves to God.
Sotah is imposed. Nazir is chosen. Sotah begins with suspicion; Nazir begins with aspiration. But both are about the body. About loyalty. About who we belong to. And about who gets to decide.
And when you place them side by side, the text seems to ask: What if loyalty was not just something demanded, but something all of us vowed to uphold? What if promise was not gendered, but mutual?
What If Loyalty Was Mutual?
There is something deeply emotional about the Sotah ritual—something almost beautiful, if it weren’t so lopsided.
At its core, Sotah is about betrayal. A couple makes a covenant to become one. Then one of them, in secret, steps outside that bond. The Torah imagines this as such a violation of oneness that it must be addressed not just privately, but publicly. The woman brings a barley offering—animal feed. The message is brutal: if you treat the bond like nothing, you forfeit your dignity. You become less than what you were.
It’s harsh. But there is a kind of sacred gravity to it—a reverence for love as a moral obligation. If this were a ritual that applied to both partners, equally and without hierarchy, it might read not as humiliation, but as heartbreak with holiness.
But it isn’t equal. It applies to the woman, and only the woman. Her husband owns the suspicion, the process, and the right to test her loyalty. He is never brought before the court. Never forced to explain where he has been, or with whom.
And maybe that’s what Nazir is really doing there, right alongside Sotah—showing us a different kind of loyalty. A loyalty that sanctifies instead of shames. One that’s chosen, mutual, and bound not by suspicion, but by intention.
And it’s open to both genders.
I’m not saying we should bring the Sotah ritual back—but maybe its placement beside Nazir is a hint. A whisper toward a better way. A holier way. A ritual that still holds us accountable to each other, but does so with dignity, agency, and a vision of covenant that binds both partners equally, under God.
🧠 Reader Challenge: Build Trust
Some rabbis say the Sotah ritual wasn’t about punishment, but about closure. It offered a path forward when a husband couldn’t prove his wife had been unfaithful, but couldn’t live with the doubt either.
Imagine something like that today: You think your partner might have betrayed you. You ask them. They deny it. You don’t believe them. What do you do?
Would you bring them in front of everyone you know and ask them to confess? What might help you trust again? What would give you peace?
Final Reflections
The Sotah ritual no longer exists.
But jealousy does. So does power. So does shame.
And so does the potential for Torah to be used—as it always has been—as a tool of either oppression or liberation.
The question, then, is no longer just what the Torah says.
It’s how we read it and who reads it.
And who gets to say: this isn’t finished yet.
The rabbis once ended a ritual that harmed women.
They challenged it, engaged it, rebuilt it from within.
What began with discomfort became halachic innovation.
So where is that innovation needed now?
What makes you uncomfortable?
Let’s talk about it. Let’s dig.
Shabbat Shalom,
Miriam
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