Parshah Commentary

“Under the pavement, the beach!” So goes a famous slogan of the French student protesters of 1968. When they ripped the stones from the Paris streets to build their barricades, they found sand beneath—and a potent symbol for the idea that capitalist modernity was but a thin veneer atop an anarchic and idyllic natural world, which promised both political and sexual liberty. Oddly, the rabbis imagined a parallel process occurring in the ancient Temple, though for opposite purposes. For the sanctuary floor, which was made entirely of marble, contained a ring attached to a single square-cubit block, which a priest could remove to access the earth below. He did so to perform the weird and distasteful “sotah” ritual, described in this week’s parshah, Naso. In this procedure, a husband who suspects his wife of adultery drags her to the sanctuary and forces her to imbibe a bitter cocktail of water, earth, and crumbled parchment bearing a conditional curse, which the priest recites and she affirms; by the terms of the curse, either the ordeal would magically inflict a physical punishment, or her immunity would prove her innocence. Our parshah assumes that the priest reaches down and grabs some of “the earth that is on the floor of the Tabernacle,” a simple directive given that the travelling sanctuary is, after all, a glorified tent. But in the permanent Temple, floor dust is harder to procure, a sourcing conundrum that prompted the rabbinic invention of this escape hatch.

Beneath the superficial similarity, there is a deep opposition between the Parisian students dismantling the city to uncover a libertine utopia and the Israelite priest lifting the polished marble to reveal the Temple’s darker side: a punitive, misogynist ritual of sexual discipline. And unlike the gleefully rebellious students, the priest, I imagine, must have been grimacing as he lifted the stone; as the rabbis’ little trapdoor highlights, the sotah ritual seems always already to have been an embarrassing anachronism. For us, of course, it is the shameful holdover of a patriarchal past, but the biblical author may have had his own reasons to be abashed. The sotah ritual is cultically anomalous, unlike anything else found in the priestly instructions: a magic trick involving a dissolved curse-scroll, requiring the (otherwise forbidden) erasure of the divine name. The Bible scholar Tikvah Frymer Kensky argued that Bamidbar stresses the efficacy of the curse-oath over the thaumaturgic potion, which suggests to me that the biblical writer is revising an inherited ritual he regarded as uncomfortably superstitious, rationalizing it by emphasizing the woman’s oath and the judging Deity instead of the bitter waters’ intrinsic potency and the priest as sorcerer. In this sense, even in the wilderness, performing the sotah ritual involved exposing the archaic, primeval unconscious of orderly, priestly religion.

That square cubit of removable marble is thus also the cork stopping up a menacing, ancient past. In a remarkable Talmudic legend, when King David dug the drain pipes for the Temple, he unwittingly released the watery depths known as the Tehom, which threatened to drown the world. He only prevented this deluge by throwing a pottery shard inscribed with God’s name into the water—a violation of the prohibition on erasing the divine name that King David’s advisor justified using the precedent of the sotah ritual. The detachable floor-block installs in the Temple a permanent reminder of that mythic encounter with the uncanny Deep, the chaos that precedes creation itself and which, as Rabbi Lexie Botzum suggests, strives to unmake static, fixed orders of domination. Like many rulers, King David finds that his program of modernization, centered on a fancy construction project, unleashes unintended revolutionary forces, which he then scrambles to suppress.

Much as I envy (and respect) the joyous, optimistic students of ‘68, I think the sotah ritual ultimately provides a more mature account of what lies beneath the modern surfaces of our world. Awaiting us there is not a hippy paradise, but a genizah of past traumas, social worlds forcibly remade by new elites, revolutions accidentally unleashed and violently put down. “Under the Temple floor, the watery Deep” is hardly as alluring as the offer of a sottovia beach community just waiting to be accessed. Nonetheless, it challenges us to march—not under the flag of naive utopianism, but with the awareness, eternally bitter and finally hopeful, that history is bristling with struggle and transformation.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents.