The Passionate Torah

Sex and Judaism

Danya Ruttenberg

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814776346
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

In this unique collection of essays, some of today's smartest Jewish thinkers explore a broad range of fundamental questions in an effort to balance ancient tradition and modern sexuality.

In the last few decades a number of factors—post-modernism, feminism, queer liberation, and more—have brought discussion of sexuality to the fore, and with it a whole new set of questions that challenge time-honored traditions and ways of thinking. For Jews of all backgrounds, this has often led to an unhappy standoff between tradition and sexual empowerment.

Yet as The Passionate Torah illustrates, it is of critical importance to see beyond this apparent conflict if Jews are to embrace both their religious beliefs and their sexuality. With incisive essays from contemporary rabbis, scholars, thinkers, and writers, this collection not only surveys the challenges that sexuality poses to Jewish belief, but also offers fresh new perspectives and insights on the changing place of sexuality within Jewish theology—and Jewish lives. Covering topics such as monogamy, inter-faith relationships, reproductive technology, homosexuality, and a host of other hot-button issues, these writings consider how contemporary Jews can engage themselves, their loved ones, and their tradition in a way that's both sexy and sanctified.

Seeking to deepen the Jewish conversation about sexuality, The Passionate Torah brings together brilliant thinkers in an attempt to bridge the gap between the sacred and the sexual.

Contributors: Rebecca Alpert, Wendy Love Anderson, Judith R. Baskin, Aryeh Cohen, Elliot Dorff, Esther Fuchs, Bonna Haberman, Elliot Kukla, Gail Labovitz, Malka Landau, Sarra Lev, Laura Levitt, Sara Meirowitz, Jay Michaelson, Haviva Ner-David, Danya Ruttenberg, Naomi Seidman, and Arthur Waskow.

I-It: Challenges

1

Sotah
Rabbinic Pornography?

Sarra Lev

What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.

—Roland Barthes, Mythologies

Pornography is often more sexually compelling than the realities it presents, more sexually real than reality … For the consumer, the mediation provides the element of remove requisite for deniability.

—Catharine MacKinnon, “Only Words”

THE TEXT OF Mishnah Sotah is a form of literature that does not fit neatly in any one genre. It is not history, as it does not tell of an actual historical case, nor is it fictional narrative, since it functions as instruction rather than description or story. But although it is instructive, it is not an instruction manual or a law book per se, since it confesses to instruct on how to conduct a ritual that is no longer performed. When teaching this text, which focuses on the ritual to be performed when a husband suspects his wife of infidelity, I treat it as a director’s manual. I ask my students to “direct” the scene considered in the literature. I ask them, who is on the set or the stage? Who is the camera pointing at? Who is holding the camera? Who is active, and who is passive? Who is narrating? What actions are being performed, and by whom? And, finally, how is the film rated, and why? In this analysis, I also subject the text of Mishnah Sotah to the scrutiny of film theory, primarily the theory of the gaze. Many of the questions I pose here merely reapply theories articulated by scholars such as Mieke Bal regarding fiction, John Berger on the topic of art, and Laura Mulvey concerning film. My claim is that the question of who is looking at whom in the Mishnah of Sotah is of key importance. The reader of the text “views” the crowd viewing the priest viewing the woman, the ultimate voiceless object. The text is often voyeuristic and at times can even be classified as pornographic.¹

Again, keep in mind, I am not analyzing the ritual as a ritual that actually happened but instead as a novel or script meant to tantalize its readers with scenes of a public or group rape.² Whether this ritual ever happened is irrelevant here; of importance is the pornographic portrayal of the rape of a woman for a group of male readers—not in the “actual” ritual but in the depiction of such a ritual. The very fact of its having been written, whether or not it was ever carried out, is enough cause for deconstructing its problematic depiction of women, and the implicit and explicit sexual violence against them.

This chapter thus proceeds as if the ritual itself is fiction. At the same time it is treated as religious fiction, that is, a fiction that is given religious sanction and is imbued with religious sanctity. Whether in fact the violence ever occurred, the two millennia of male readers who have engaged in its study have done so with the understanding that this is an unproblematic text, and have engaged in imagining a scenario in which a woman is publicly raped for the preservation of religious “order.”

So, who is the Sotah? According to the Torah, the Sotah is a woman suspected by her husband of having sex with another man. The Torah explains that if a man should suspect his wife of infidelity, he should bring her to the Temple where she ingests a combination of water, dirt, ink, and parchment. Presumably, if she is guilty of said adultery, her stomach will swell and her thighs distend. Of course, according to biblical (and rabbinic) norms, no equivalent ordeal exists for an “unfaithful” husband, since a husband is not required to remain monogamous. The sexuality of the wife belongs to the husband and may not become the property of another. The sexuality of the husband, on the other hand, belongs solely to him. He may use it as he wishes, as long as he does not break one of the prohibitions of Leviticus 18 and 20.

But while the Torah seems to intend the ritual to vindicate the accused woman, the Rabbis who later interpret the ritual ultimately turn it into a humiliation and a punishment for the (only possibly guilty) woman.

The Biblical Ritual

The biblical Sotah ritual takes up twenty verses of Numbers chapter 5, just two-thirds of a single chapter. The text begins:

Any man whose wife goes astray and commits a trespass [ma’al] against him, and a man lies with her carnally, and it is hidden from the eyes of her husband, and is hidden, and she is defiled, and there is no witness against her, and/for she was not caught; and the spirit of jealousy comes upon him, and he is jealous of his wife, and she was defiled; or if the spirit of jealousy comes upon him, and he is jealous of his wife, and she was not defiled, the man should bring his wife to the priest, and shall bring her offering for her (on account of her?).… It is an offering of jealousy, an offering of memorial, a reminder of iniquity.

The biblical text opens with the possibility that a woman is suspected of the crime of allowing her body to be used sexually by someone other than her husband. The text uses the term ma’al, a term usually reserved for the (mis)use of objects reserved strictly for use by God (signified by the Temple). The obvious correlate in the equation positions the husband as equivalent to God and the woman’s sexuality as sacred object, to be used only by her husband. That she allows her body to be used by anyone other than her husband constitutes me’ila.

Throughout Numbers chapter 5, the description balances between potential guilt and potential innocence, allowing for the possibility that “the spirit of jealousy comes upon him, and he is jealous of his wife, and she was defiled; or if the spirit of jealousy comes upon him, and he is jealous of his wife, and she was not defiled.” The equally weighted possibility that she may be innocent is repeated each time the text mentions her possible guilt—in verses 19-21, and again in verses 27-28 and 29-30.³

The text also leaves open the question of whose transgression is being discussed, referring constantly to the jealousy of the husband (using the word “jealous” ten times in twenty verses) and calling the offering that he must bring “an offering of jealousy, an offering of memorial, a reminder of iniquity” (Num. 5:15). Just whose iniquity is being referenced is unclear. Is it the iniquity of the (possibly innocent) woman? If so, if she is innocent, what is her iniquity? Or is it, perhaps, the iniquity of the jealous man? The man of the Sotah ritual, after all, is always jealous, as the entire ritual is triggered by his jealousy. In fact, the very last verse states: “then shall the man be guiltless from iniquity, and this woman shall bear her iniquity,” assuming the original iniquity of both man and woman.⁴

The biblical text is consistently ambiguous about the guilt or innocence of the woman, and, moreover, about the possible transgression of the husband. The biblical ritual seems to be directed at ending the husband’s jealousy and returning the system to its proper balance, wherein “sacred property” is used for its proper purpose.

The Rabbinic Ritual

In contrast with the twenty-verse biblical ritual, the Mishnah of Sotah constitutes an entire book, much of it focused on the performance of the ritual. The book does not, as one might expect, expand on the intent of the biblical ritual but utterly transforms the original ordeal into a demonstration of sexual humiliation and punishment for a sin not yet proven to have occurred.⁵ Unlike the biblical ordeal (in which a man’s own jealousy is enough to bring the woman to the priest), the rabbinic ritual is put into action only when a man warns his wife, before two witnesses, not to talk to a certain man. If the wife is then seen going into a “secret place” with this man, and staying there for enough time to have intercourse, the games begin. The ritual is only activated by the presence of observers—in the first case, witnesses who are seen by the wife. In the second instance, however, the observers may be anyone at all—in one opinion, a single witness, or even the husband himself, and they may be entirely invisible to the wife.

The theme of watching and being watched throws us into several discussions prevalent for the past two and a half decades: the discourse of the “gaze” (in film theory); scopophilia,⁶ and voyeurism in particular (in psychology); pornography (in feminist theory); and the analysis of the panopticon and its role in discipline in Foucault’s book, Discipline and Punish.⁷ All these discourses form themselves around the question, “What does it mean to watch and to be watched?”

This essay, which engages to a certain extent with all these intersecting theories, focuses primarily on the voyeuristic/pornographic nature of the Mishnah’s reworking of the Sotah ritual. In focusing on this element of the ritual, I am not claiming that this is the only lens through which this text may be understood; I merely choose this particular focus for the purpose of delving deeper into this specific aspect of a complex and multilayered text.

Finally, I engage briefly in a discussion of Foucault’s panopticism, for while these voyeuristic elements of the ritual are startlingly explicit, they are not the only locus of the subjugation of “woman” as a class in Mishnah Sotah. The other, more insidious, locus of subjugation is visible only through the work of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, where he offers an analysis of various “mechanisms” of discipline. But first, let us return to the first order of business: the Sotah ritual as a piece of early pornography.

We left the text above as our Sotah was observed entering a secret place (literally, “house of hiddenness”) with the “other man.” At this point, the husband takes her to the local court and is assigned two Sages to accompany him to the Jerusalem Temple, in order to watch over them, lest they have sex on the way to Jerusalem.⁸ The accused woman sets off for Jerusalem accompanied by the watchful eyes of two scholars, watching not only her but her use of her own sexuality with her own husband. Before the ritual even begins, the Mishnah has introduced yet another stage in which careful observation must take place. In each of these cases, the reader’s gaze (and that of the characters watching) is a male gaze. The gaze is also sexualized, as the (male)⁹ reader reads first of the husband’s insinuation that her talking to another man is “dangerous,” then of the townspeople watching her entering a private place (letting his imagination wander), and, finally, as he imagines the two watchers watching her (and her husband) for signs of sexuality on the way to Jerusalem. Here, in the Sotah ritual, the reader is not only innocently watching a woman but is also watching her sexuality. Not only is the gaze a sexualized gaze, but it is also a creative one. The reader does not actually know anything about the true sexuality of the woman; rather, the reader imposes his own idea about her sexuality upon the body that he imagines. The reader watches, and at the same time imposes an imagined sexuality upon her body as he watches.

The watching of the Sotah has only just begun when this odd group of four arrives in Jerusalem. It is here that the watching becomes ever more expanded, as what is watched becomes ever more sexualized and enticing. Upon arriving in Jerusalem the text of Mishnah Sotah 1:3 describes the beginning of the ordeal in which the power relationship and the woman’s position in that relationship are established:

They would take her up to the high court in Jerusalem and intimidate her as they intimidate witnesses in capital cases. And they say to her: My daughter, wine does much [to lead one astray], joking does much, childishness does much, bad neighbors do much;¹⁰ do it (confess) for the sake of the great name which is written in holiness, so that it is not erased in the water. And they say before her things which she should not have to hear, she and all her family.

In this Mishnah the accused woman is “persuaded” by the high court of Jerusalem. They begin by calling her “my daughter,” setting up the power dynamic of kindly father-figure and straying daughter. They attempt to cajole her into confessing her crime (though they do not know yet whether she committed it) by assuring her that her mistake could have been the result of hanging out with the wrong crowd (bad neighbors) or of an excess of wine or frivolity. But we must make no mistake about it: this “kindly” interaction is not benign. It is, in fact, only a calculated piece of a violent process of which this “good-cop/bad-cop” scenario marks the beginning. This power dynamic is hinted at even in the text itself through the use of the word “intimidate” (otherwise translated as “threaten”) at the beginning of the description. And again, at the end of the Mishnah, the reader is left to imagine what words “which she should not have to hear” are whispered into the ears of the suspected adulteress. In describing the necessary components of pornography, Susan Cole writes:

It is important for feminists to identify a patriarchal sexual ideology that is held together by three strands.… The second ideological strand perpetuates the women-as-submissive/men-as-dominant configuration within the heterosexual paradigm.… Pornography is just one of the cultural institutions committed to this second strain. There is a great deal else done to make our own demise sexually arousing to men.… [M]any men and women really “feel” aroused by domination and surrender.¹¹

In the buildup to the explicit pornographic climax, the ritual begins by conveying the woman’s powerlessness in contrast with the power of the presiding “fatherly” priest or the “administrators” of the ritual. Clearly, if this tactic does not succeed, the next stage will not be as gentle...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I-It: Challenges
• I-Th ou: Relationships
• We-Th ou: Visions
• Golssary
• Contributors
• Index of Sources
• Subject Index