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.