What price adultery?
Torah study
RABBI ISMAR SCHORSCH
Naso/Numbers 4:21 - 7:84
As the Pentagon struggles with the issue of adultery in the military, and Americans continue to feast on the melodrama of last year's hit film "The English Patient" (a straightforward story on the subject), this week's Torah portion outlines an arbitrary, primitive and repugnant ordeal to which women suspected of adultery were subjected.
According to the Torah, God commanded that the woman be brought to the tabernacle and forced to drink a potion, administered by the priest, that would render her deformed and infertile if guilty (Numbers 5:11-31).
The Academy Award-winning film "The English Patient," set in North Africa in World War II, ends up making a case for the U.S. Pentagon's view that adultery can endanger the security of the military, with Count Amalfi desperately bartering his maps of desert paths for a German plane to rescue his injured lover, Katherine Clifton.
Jewish law treats adultery with utmost severity, but defines it more narrowly than military law. Adultery occurs under Jewish law only when the woman involved is married (as she is in "The English Patient"), which means that First Lieut. Kelly Flinn would not be guilty of adultery. Under Jewish law, if the male alone is married, the extramarital affair is not classified as adultery.
The Ten Commandments include a prohibition against adultery (Exodus 20:15), defined later in the book of Leviticus (20:10), along with the stipulation that both "the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death."
In all ancient societies where polygamy prevailed, adultery was limited to the case of a married woman. In Israel, it becomes a public rather than merely a private offense because it is classified as one of the forbidden sexual unions that pollute the land. From the Torah's perspective, adultery is a sin against the social order dictated by God.
The ordeal of the suspected adulteress, in the absence of hard evidence, is not intended to restore matrimonial harmony, but to offset the defilement of the camp and community, which is cumulative. Under rabbinic law, with its pronounced aversion to capital punishment, a woman condemned for an adulterous liaison simply was forbidden to return to her husband or to marry her consort.
The holiness of matrimony is found in the Torah from the time of creation itself. After Adam recognizes Eve as "flesh of my flesh," the Torah declares: "Hence a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, so that they become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24). However, marriage has never evolved in Judaism into an indissoluble bond.
And Judaism is not static. The rabbis of the Mishna and Talmud reworked those sections of the Torah that time had rendered inoperable or repulsive. They found the ordeal of the suspected adulteress as problematic as we do and softened it through reinterpretation.
In the Mishna, before the husband can compel his wife to be tested, he must have warned her in the presence of two witnesses not to meet secretly with a specific paramour. Rabbi Yehoshua, whose view became the law, demanded another set of two witnesses to testify that they actually saw the wife rendezvous with the man in question. Only then would the unpalatable potion be administered.
Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who consolidated Pharisaic Judaism after the year 70 C.E., halted the ordeal procedure because adulterers increased beyond number. As promiscuity spread and the social order unraveled, Rabbi Yohanan saw the injustice of singling out women as solely responsible.
A judicial inequity may have been eliminated, but a society that pays mere lip service to the sanctity of marriage cannot long endure. Other social institutions more basic to the well-being of society will also sink into oblivion. Adultery as a way of life is surely more than a matter of private concern.
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch is chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
|
