Sotah 036

1:
In Mishnah 4, Tanna Kamma tried to deal with the phenomenon that sometimes women who were obviously guilty did not die as a result of drinking the bitter waters. He stated that sometimes a guilty woman will not die immediately because in some cases good deeds that the woman may have performed during her lifetime will serve to postpone the dreadful consequences. (It was this statement of Tanna Kamma that provoked the disagreement between ben-Azzai and Rabbi Eli'ezer.) In our present mishnah Rabbi Shim'on seeks to overturn the original statement of Tanna Kamma.

2:
Rabbi Shim'on is Rabbi Shim'on ben-Yoĥai, who reached the full flowering of his halakhic reputation in the generation after ben-Azzai and Rabbi Eli'ezer. (By his time the ceremony of the Bitter Waters had been abolished for more than 100 years.) He has two worthy objections to the suggestion that the bitter waters do not always produce the dreadful results outlined in the Torah. Firstly, if women know that some good deed that they have performed in the past may save them from the immediate effects of the bitter waters, they – the bitter waters – will lose all their power as a deterrent. Secondly, virtuous women who passed the test could now be brought into disrepute: gossips could claim that she was "really" guilty but she did not die because of some good deed she had done in her lifetime.

3:
Rabbi – Rabbi Yehudah, the President of the Sanhedrin and compiler of the Mishnah – tries to bridge the divide between Tanna Kamma and Rabbi Shim'on. (Rabbi, as he is called, belongs to the generation after Rabbi Shim'on.) Rabbi agrees with Tanna Kamma that virtue can postpone the dire effects of the test, but he reminds us that postponement does not mean abrogation: in the due course of time the guilty woman will suffer the same fate as she would have done immediately had she not had some saving virtue. She will never become pregnant and her health will gradually degenerate until "die the same death" as she would have done.

Linda Faurot, quoting her rabbi, presented an interpretation of the varying state of men and women within marriage. I invited people to respond. Ze'ev Orzech takes up the challenge:

Linda Faurot, in the name of Rabbi Nodel, builds a whole superstructure on the basis of the story of creation from chapter 2 of Bereshit, i.e., that men and women were created equal but separate and were created sequentially. Why not use chapter 1 which says (1:27), God created ha'adam in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Only the first part of the sentence is in the singular, after that all references are in the plural. Rashi explains that God created ha'adam with two faces and then separated them. The 'him' in the sentence does not refer to a male creature, for ha'adam here is obviously not the name of a person (since it has the definite article), but must be understood to refer to a more general creation like Humankind (or Earthling). Hebrew does not have a neuter gender to indicate this, and therefore must use 'him'. The command 'be fruitful and multiply' was not given to man alone, but to both. The Hebrew uses the plural, masculine imperative form of the verbs.

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Mishnah 4 mentioned deprecatingly 'the lashes of the Pharisees'. Michael Lewyn asks: Why does the Mishnah go out of its way to condemn Pharisees (as opposed to self-flagellators generally)? I had always thought that the rabbis of the Mishnah and Gemara considered themselves either Pharisees or the spiritual heirs of the Pharisees.

I respond:

It is true that the sages were the spiritual and ideological heirs of the Pharisees. I think that the term is being used in this context with great irony: it is meant to refer to people who outwardly behave with great piety as if they were devout Pharisees but whose motivation reveals that they are not true disciples of the sages. The term 'pharisee' also appears in Christian scriptures as a negative term of disapprobation. It could be that it was the sages themselves who first used the term with a disapproving connotation.

During the month of November I am on vacation. I shall do my best to post shiurim whenever I can, but at best it will be sporadic.