In the Torah portion of Naso there is a description of the ritual of Sotah. A married woman is accused by her husband of adultery. Since there are no witnesses to the adultery, it can’t be brought to court. The wife has to drink a potion that will reveal her guilt or innocence. This trial by ordeal is problematic to the modern reader. First it should be noted that the wife can not accuse her husband of adultery and cause her husband to drink the potion. Sotah clearly comes from a society where men had status and power unequal to women. It also was a society that believed that God would cause the truth or falseness of the accusation to be revealed. The rabbis in the Talmud said that when adulterers became common this rite was abolished. We might say when people were no longer confident of God acting in these cases, the ritual was abolished. 

      Some commentators suggest that the Sotah ritual existed to prevent the husband killing his wife based only on suspicions. More broadly, it raises the question of how trust is restored after it is broken, especially when what occurred is not clearly known. The magic of the Sotah “revealed” the truth, which either allowed the relationship to heal or not. The notion that the Sotah ritual served as a curb on the potential violence of the husband is supported by the choice of this week’s haftarah/prophetic reading, which tells the story of Samson. 

      Samson reads like a tale of a Marvel superhero. He has abnormal strength—carrying off a city gate or killing a lion. He is also a stereotypical guy with lots of brawn and little brain. He loves women—lots of them. After a number of tries, he is fooled by his wife Delilah into revealing the secret of his strength. Shorn of his hair, he is blinded by the Philistines.  Perhaps at last unable to be bewitched by beauty, he knocks down a building, killing his enemies and himself. Like King Kong, it is a story of beauty killing the beast. In both the Sotah ritual and in the Samson story, men are beastlike and dangerously powerful. They act without thinking. The Torah says about Sotah: “but a fit of jealousy comes over him” (Num. 5:14).

      Ultimately, the Sotah is a fantasy of how to resolve uncertainty. In reality, we are often unsure of what happened or why it happened. In our society, we fantasize that some superhero will make everything ok. Or, we suspect our problems are the fault of someone or a group of people based on little or no evidence. We want to believe that there are simple solutions to the complex issues our society faces. These are useless fantasies. Instead, we need to engage in the hard work of fixing what is broken in our lives and in the world. We can’t remain stuck in our uncertainty believing that if we only knew the truth, the road ahead would be obvious. The only certainty is if we stay where we are, we will never move forward.