Once they're married, Hasidic couples (as well as some other ultra-Orthodox Jews) don't touch, hand each other objects, or use terms of endearment while the wife is menstruating, and then for another protective week after that... The Talmud's more than twelve thousand pages of arguments, stories, and teachings on Jewish law contain rich discussions of sex. An entire book is devoted to the sotah, a woman whose husband suspects her of adultery because she's been seen entering an "enclosed space" with a man other than her husband. (Confirmed adulterers are handled in another section.) Talmudic rabbis debate, for instance, how long the woman and man must have been sequestered in order to presume they had sex. Their arguments suggest that in ancient times the preferred encounter may have been the "quickie." One rabbi says it's the amount of time it takes to circle a date tree, while another says it's the time it takes a woman to remove a wood chip from her teeth (there's an additional debate about how deeply said wood chip was wedged). The scholars at least have the good sense to dismiss the position of Ben Azzai, a second-century commentator who says that coitus lasts the time it takes to roast an egg. They point out that Ben Azzai himself never married and therefore wouldn't (or shouldn't) be acquainted with such matters.That first thing is called niddah; it's explained in this excellent book, which is called I don't care if you have to finish it for class tomorrow, Helen, this isn't a good book to read while trying to look flirtatious in a coffee shop.
Sotah is exactly what Druckerman says it is (a trial-by-ordeal for suspected adulteresses based on Numbers 5), but she leaves out the thrilling details: the woman is called before the community, ritually humiliated (clothes ripped, hair mussed, etc.), and made to drink a sickening potion; if she explodes, she was an adulteress, and, if she doesn't, it may be that she's innocent or it may be that she's guilty but her "merit" has delayed her punishment one to three years (depending on how much merit she has). The description of the ordeal is unusually graphic, but the historical record suggests that the sotah ordeal was never performed in the rabbinic period.
For contrast with Druckerman, this was my take on tractate Sotah (because if Nicki can quote from her final papers on Iqra'i, surely I can get away with it here) (also because Noah asked):
The obsolescence of the sotah ritual, as well as the strict limits placed on the circumstances in which a husband might demand it, place the ordeal in the realm of imagination rather than reality. While it may not have been practical for husbands to enact the spectacle that Sotah describes, they could certainly picture it in detail. The ceremony of bitter water described in Numbers is not explicitly public; the public humiliation emphasized in the Talmudic account is entirely the contribution of the rabbis. Given the rabbis’ interest in preventing jealousy from showing itself in action—either in forcing isolation on one’s wife, divorcing her with little cause, in asking her to spit in a rabbi’s eye, or in any other way—it makes sense for them to have made the established psychological outlets for jealousy as satisfying as possible...It's not about punishing adultery, or even discouraging it; it's about managing it when it happens through some cocktail of schadenfreude plus cultural scripts! Sotah is to the Bavli as the cheatin' song is to country music! Or is not everything about my preoccupations?
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