NASO
Naso (4:21-7:89) “Add up” is a smorgasboard parsha. The part of Chapter 4 in Naso is a continuation of Chapter 4 in Parshat Bamidbar, a description of numbers of the Levite clans and their tasks in moving the mishkan. Chapter 5 is mostly about the confusing ritual of Sotah, a magical ritual to determine if a potentially pregnant woman is actually carrying the child of her husband, triggered by the husband’s suspicions. Chapter 6 gives us the laws around Nazirites. It closes with the familiar priestly blessing. Chapter 7 is an extraordinarily lengthy recital of the twelve tribes’ contributions to the dedication of the altar and the equipment necessary for moving it that was allocated to the different Levite clans depending upon their task.
I’m going to focus on four themes.
When is one an adult male? (sorry for the sexism)
The Sotah ritual
Being a Nazirite
The priestly blessing
When is one an adult male? This parsha and the previous one provide an answer for what our ancestors thought. The census in these two parshiot counts adult males in two ways. One is for army service (see Numbers Chapters 1 and 2) and counts males twenty years and older. The second approach is limited to the Levites serving the mishkan and counts males from ages 30-50 (Numbers 4:3, 21 etc). So a 22 year old male is good enough for the army, but not presumably mature enough for the sacred service to the mishkan. And, of course, women are completely excluded.
These approaches are both strictly based on age. There’s no test of any kind of developmental maturity. There’s no qualification based on being married or having children. We have the same thing in the United States. Age 18, you can vote or go to the military (women too). Age 21 you can buy alcohol. Certain ages, varies by state, you can get married.
The chronological approach is both completely understandable and utterly bypasses the question of psycho/spiritual maturity. All of us know far too many people who look like adults and behave like adolescents (or younger). Traditional societies, at least for boys, tended to demand clear signs that the boys were mature enough to take their place as young adults before they received the privileges of adulthood such as marriage and a place in the community council. They did this by putting them through some kind of strenuous tests that always take place in the context of the more than human world.
If our ancestors had some kind of way of having a boy prove that he was ready to be an adult, it has not been preserved. There is nothing obvious that we can reclaim. What do I mean by a psychospiritual adult? Here’s a definition, drawn from Bill Plotkin’s work. An adult is A person who knows their unique purpose on this planet and has developed a delivery system to share that unique purpose with a targeted community of folks.
I want to note that I think, contrary to Plotkin, that there is both a human centric developmental wheel and an ecocentric one. That is, I think it is possible to have a unique purpose on earth that is targeted only at the human community and a human only delivery system. Plotkin believes, on the contrary, there is only ecocentric development and that human development is necessarily stunted if a person does not find their unique place amongst the human and more than human world.
Let me offer my take on my own psychospiritual development as an example. I’m actually moving towards or am an elder in the human oriented developmental wheel. I believe that my unique gift for my human oriented focus was my ability to run an organization and my delivery system was running CITE, my teacher training business. This delivery system only manifested after my business partner’s death in 2012 when I was 54. Before that, I probably had the ability to run an organization, but I never had, so I had no delivery system.
My ecocentric development is a bit less striaghtforward. At one point I thought my unique purpose was to steward a piece of land with a delivery system of rotationally grazed grass fed beef. I do have a true ability to listen to pasture land and to cows and connect with the nexus of grass and cows. But I really don’t care about selling the beef so the delivery system wasn’t quite there. Further, I left the farm where I raised grass fed beef. So somehow that wasn’t quite it. Now I think that my ecocentric purpose is this reclamation of Animist Judaism and my delivery system is my teaching and writing. So these days I feel like an ecocentric adult—but that is a very recent development based on the parsha class I teach and the people my website reaches.
I’ve been highly concerned with understanding what it means to be an adult because of the lack of adults and consequently elders in our society—you can’t be an elder if you aren’t first an adult. I think we suffer greatly from the pervasive psychospiritual immaturity of our society.
Answer these questions from either a human centric perspective or a broader one that centers the more than human world. What is your unique purpose on this planet? Who is your target community for your expression of this unique purpose? How will you share this purpose with this community?
The sotah ritual is confusing at best—not just for us but for our ancestors as well. I am going to walk us through the ritual itself first.
The sotah is a married woman suspected of committing adultery by her husband but where there are no witnesses and thus proof is impossible. The husband brings his wife to the priest with an offering of barley flour, the only case in the five books where coarser and cheaper barley flour is the offering rather than wheat flour. The priest takes holy water in a clay container and some of the dust from the floor of the mishkan. By the way, this explains why the ritual can no longer be performed, following Friedman. No mishkan, no ritual. The sotah then unbinds her hair, part of what is done in a trial. The priest has her swear that she will be cleared by drinking the water if she hasn’t had sex (or maybe isn’t pregnant? It’s not clear) with some other man. But if she had had sex with some other man, then “this cursing water will come in your insides to swell your womb and make your thigh sag.” (5:22).
The priest writes the curses on a scroll, rubs them in the water in the clay container and she drinks it. (5:24). The text sure seems to suggest that her womb will swell immediately upon drinking the mixture, (5:27), but only if she has lied and had sex or maybe is pregnant. The idea that this is a pregnancy test is supported by the image of a swelling womb. Women can be convinced they are pregnant and have their wombs swell (I had a case when I was a social worker), but instantaneously? This supports the idea that something in this mix is an herbal abortificant, because a non pregnant woman who had committed adultery wouldn’t have her womb swell. Or maybe not. Why the dust from the floor of the mishkan if there were a straightforward herbal explanation? The dust from the floor and the curses on the scroll suggest a more psychological approach, except I can’t imagine that a woman’s womb will swell almost instantly for psychological reasons. The woman is cleared if her womb doesn’t swell, but is guilty if it does and she shall “bear her crime” (5:31), whatever that means.
This is not a standard judicial process. We are told the husband starts this process because her action “has been hidden from her husband’s eyes and she has kept concealed, and she has been made impure, and there is no witness against her and she has not been caught.” (5:13). As Artscroll, a traditional Orthodox commentary says “The ordeal of bitter waters is the only halachic [legal] procedure in the Torah that depends on supernatural intervention.”
Why is this ritual even included in our text? I am reminded of the ritual of the bitter waters of life in the book Dune which draws from the mythology from this part of the world. This ritual is one where an aspiring reverend mother drinks a poisonous concoction as a test. If she has the ability to convert the poison within her system, she both passes the test and gains access to the memories of all the other Reverend mothers who came before her. If she cannot convert the poison, she dies. It’s also akin to drinking Ayahuasca infused concoctions that make you sick. If you are, in some sense prepared or worthy, you get visions you can use. If you are just in for an exotic experience, you get to puke all night.
Is there a way that we can see the Sotah ritual as a certain kind of metaphor? What kind of metaphoric poison could I swallow that would let me see who I really am? How would that metaphoric poison be infused with holiness?
To become a Nazirite, you must take vows to separate yourself (the term nazir means to separate) from anything that came from grapes, from beer, from cutting your hair and from corpses. Nazirite vows can be time limited, or they can be, as with the most famous Nazirite, Sampson, be a lifetime vow. If your first question about Nazirite vows is why someone would undertake them, you’ve come to the wrong place to get an answer. Chapter 6 simply states “When a man or woman will expressly make a Nazirite vow to make a separation for YHVH” (6:2) and nowhere does our text address why one might choose to become a Nazirite.
Our text also does not address the ritual around taking these vows. Do you just say, hey, I’m going to be a Nazirite for a year? Our text is silent, but apparently Maimonides thought that all you had to do was say “me too” if you saw a Nazirite pass by (Mishneh Torah Nazir 1:6). What you do to mark the fulfillment of your Nazirite vows and be released from them also does not seem like a big deal, though it is a bit pricy involving 3 sheep and grain products that are offered up by the priest and shaving your head and offering the hair to the fire underneath the peace offering (6:13-20)
The list of proscribed things doesn’t seem like that big a deal. It is a little bit hard, at least for me, to understand why these few things would make someone more holy for YHVH than say vowing to pray for at least 2 hours a day or fasting for 24 hours once a week or being a vegan or eating only unspiced food or sexual abstinence, or any other of a hundred things that have been religious practices throughout the ages.
I’m intrigued by two aspects of being a Nazirite and wonder if we could reclaim it in some way. One is that there is a physical representation of our commitment to the divine—uncut hair. Is there a kind of visual representation of a commitment to earth based Judaism we could introduce? The second aspect that intrigues me is the idea of some kind of time bound commitment to a sacred practice that could be shared communally. So not just a personal commitment to being a vegan or eating only grass fed animal products, but a communal one?
Now we get to use our imaginations. What kind of practice and for how long a time period would feel like you had separated yourself from your everyday life and bring you closer to the divine? How would you physically make this known, if at all? What could be done communally?
“Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying, this is how you shall bless the children of Israel.” ((6:23) The priestly blessing consists of three simple lines. (6:24-6)
May YHVH bless you and watch over you.
May YHVH make his face shine to you and be gracious to you.
May YHVH raise his face to you and give you peace.
If this sounds familiar from Fiddler on the Roof, that’s because it is.
Our family engaged in the traditional practice of reciting this as part of blessing your children on Sabbath eve. I find it remarkable that I recited the exact same words that were written at least 2,500 years ago. I sometimes think I take being the inheritor of a thousands year old heritage for granted, like it is no big deal because it is so common and because eating chicken on Shabbat feels just as ingrained a thing once I stopped being a vegan as does reciting the priestly blessing. And yet we live in a world where rootlessness is a huge problem and our Jewish roots go remarkably deep.
How are you rooted? How are you rootless? How well is it working for you? Here’s a practice suggestion. Spend at least ten minutes, shoeless, outside imagining your roots sinking into the earth. What did you learn?
QUESTIONS
What is your unique purpose on this planet? Who is your target community for your expression of this unique purpose? How will you share this purpose with this community?
Is there a way that we can see the Sotah ritual as a certain kind of metaphor? What kind of metaphoric poison could I swallow that would let me see who I really am? How would that metaphoric poison be infused with holiness?
What kind of practice and for how long a time period would feel like you had separated yourself from your everyday life and bring you closer to the divine? How would you physically make this known, if at all? What could be done communally?
How are you rooted? How are you rootless? How well is it working for you? Here’s a practice suggestion. Spend at least ten minutes, shoeless, outside imagining your roots sinking into the earth. What did you learn?
Hand gesture for priestly blessing