Community Rabbi Corner, May 21, 2021

Sometimes the Torah speaks – or shouts - explicitly but we are perversely unable to hear its voice. 

In Parshat Naso, we read – in rapidfire succession – laws about the Sotah (a man suspects his wife of cheating on him), the Nazir (a person takes a vow to abstain from intoxicants and more), and the Birkat Kohanim (the three-sentence blessing delivered by the Priests to the Israelite nation, still practiced to this day in the synagogue ceremony known as duchanen). There are certainly people who would like to skip the Biblical sections of the Sotah and the Nazir, since their rituals are no longer practiced. Why expend mental energy learning the details of fossilized footprints from a long extinct world? 

The voice of God whispers through our Torah like the murmurings of a flowing brook as it tumbles and weaves its way downstream in a Kol Gadol ve-lo Yasaf, a great sound that never ceases. Even though we no longer have a Temple with officiating Kohanim giving offerings on an altar, it would be the pinnacle of willful blindness to think that the very real situations those rituals address (a free-floating suspicion or mistrust of one who lives closest to you for Sotah, some life experience that shakes you up so much that you swear off alcohol as in the Nazir) no longer impact our lives! What is more indicative of our current historical moment than suspicion of one’s congressional bedfellows or of one’s next-door, ethnically-other neighbor? How cruel, then, that we read that there used to be a ceremony to rid families of divisive suspicion that we can no longer access. 

But the rabbis read the Torah and heard echoes of hope. When husband and wife were fighting, God so desired to see the situation resolved that God permitted God’s name to be erased (from a scroll) just to get beyond the problem. Of all the many reasons someone might take a vow to become a Nazirite for a month, the Talmud records the horror that someone feels when seeing a Sotah publicly humiliated, prodding the observer to swear off alcohol! What seem to be intractable situations lead, somehow, to next steps, to forward motion. So despite the fact that synagogues are being torched in Lod, Arabs are being lynched in Bat Yam, Jews are being knifed in Los Angeles by mobs of black clad Palestine supporters and a generalized “Ruach Kena’ot (spirit of suspicion)” is running rampant, maybe we can take heart from the fact that God wants – desperately wants – the people to be blessed with safety and (ultimately) shalom. 

Torah continues to murmur to us today.  We should listen intently to hear the blessings that are just upstream, right around the corner, an undeniable and inevitable point of balance and sanity in the midst of so much human craziness.