Naso: Passion
Embedded between burdens of the
Levites and the twelve individual and identical offerings of the tribal princes
are laws relating, implicitly, to passions. The wayward wife acts on her
infatuation. The jealous husband's imagination kindles his fury. They
feel that these emotions spring from the unique parts of their being. The
establishment of a ritual to deal with these seemingly private matters attests
to their banality. These suspicions and
desires come from the river of species preservation that brought us into life
and flows toward the preservation of our families, tribes and nations past
individual mortality.
The evolutionary forces that made
passion the driver toward procreation, like all Darwinian explanations, are
post-hoc justifications. There are elements of intragroup re-selection. An
element of competition is intrinsic to ardor. The most passionate, and those
with the skills and strength to act on their desires, prevail. Thus, passion
has an element of self-selection. QED
The sotah ritual deals with
passions gone awry. The system of monandry assumed in the Torah is imagined violated.
Should I apologize for this demeaning rite? It is a little more benign that
expected. The male imagination is not
sufficient cause to condemn the wife. In the hands of the Talmud (we recently
completed the tractate Sota) the accusations and fantasies are subject to rules of evidence, including the
standard two (valid) witnesses required to establish the facts. The penalty,
the trial by ordeal, the drinking of the embittering waters is very unlikely to
have true, physical, ill effects ( unless adulterated). The Mishna (written
when the second temple stood) says that the ritual was abandoned when adultery
became too commonplace. There was also a realization that the potion was
ineffective. It was the end of an era.
I recently read D.H.
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(not a recommendation). The book, on its surface, is a celebration of adultery
and the passion that drives it. It comes at the beginning of an era that glorifies
passion as a supreme value. That ethos is strong, I find it difficult to speak
against it; that ethos is a stick in the eye of Gd.
The Talmud relates that the
community of sages wanted to release the populace from the temptation of lust.
This resulted in unacceptable consequences.
Hens would no longer lay eggs. The sages compromised and blinded the
demiurge Lust in one eye; they reduced the passion, they did not kill her.
There
is a sotah story embedded in the haftorah: the annunciation of the birth of
(lusty) Samson. The (nameless) wife of Manoah is frustrated by her
childlessness (like Lady Chatterley). She is approached by a man who is later
(conveniently) revealed to be an angel. The text says that he appeared to her. But
when she relates the event to her husband , the woman says בָּ֣א אֵלַ֔י
Ba. The word
could also mean that they did something that might result in a child! When she
reports this episode of seclusion to her husband, he celebrates the news of a
child. He wants to know more about the
conditions that have been dictated: strict sobriety for mother and son and
Nazerite status for the son. Manoah does not invoke the sotah ritual… and he
could have. Is this his merit? Does his desire for a child cancel his
possessiveness and jealousy? Is Manoah a modern?
The nazir is the outsider, the
alienated one, zar. The restrictions: wine and grape products, contact with the
dead, cutting (or combing) the hair – do not remove the nazir from life, they
remove the nazir from the loss of reason. The prohibited matters are those that
release a person from careful thought. Intoxication releases desire from the
constraints of (imagined) consequences. Death, and the finitude it implies,
asks the question “why not”. Our vestigial hair is in the service of passion.
The nazir is distanced from the river of passion, at least partially. The rules
allow life on another plane.
The parade of identical gifts is
a redirection of passion. The gifts could have been demonstrative of the grandiosity
of the tribes and their princes. The huge tribe of Judah could have brought far
more than the small tribe of Benjamin. The rich tribes of Reuben and Gad (too
wealthy to cross the Jordan) could have brought more ostentations gifts. Perhaps
that would have been more just: from each according to the ability to give. No
showing off here. Every gift identical – and not. At the level of description,
they are all the same, but the worker who made the bowel and the herder who
bred the sheep and cattle could tell them apart. But that escapes the
description.
Gd gives history a direction. We
can glorify our victories, enjoy the fleeting moments of our pleasures, agonize
in the consequences of indulgence. All predictable small eddies in the giant
river of time. I prefer to believe that
it is going somewhere, at least to the sea.
