Naso: Learning From Our Mistakes
Original author - Evonne Marzouk, edited by the GrowTorah Summer Inchworms 2021-2022
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In Parshat Naso, we read about the ishah sotah, a wife who is suspected of adultery. Since her husband suspects her and cannot forgive her without proof of her innocence, but her guilt cannot be proven by witnesses, a miraculous test determines her innocence or guilt. The woman is forced to drink “bitter waters that cause curse,” formed of water, the dirt from the ground of the Beit HaMikdash, and the ink of an erased curse.[1] If the woman is guilty, she will die; if she is innocent, she will be cleared of all suspicion.
Immediately following the ordeal of the sotah, the Torah addresses the vow of the nazir. “A man or woman who sets themself apart by making a nazirite vow to abstain for the sake of Hashem, from new or aged wine shall he abstain…”[2] This is a voluntary vow that any individual can take upon themself, to avoid wine or any grape products, cutting their hair, and abstaining from becoming tamei lameit for a fixed period of time.
The pairing and order of sotah and nazir does not make intuitive sense, but it can illuminate the Torah’s approach to mistakes. Rashi comments that “whoever sees an adulteress in her disgrace should vow to abstain from wine, for it leads to adultery.”[3] The idea here is that one should learn from the experience of seeing another person (the suspected adulteress) stumbling, and then commit oneself not to make the same mistakes through the vows of the Nazirite, even beyond the boundaries of our usual commandments.[4] Note that we do not need to make mistakes of our own in order to learn from them just the same. Let us take advantage of our place in time and inherit a higher starting point.
In contrast to the Torah’s ordering, the Talmud discusses the nazir before the sotah. The commentator Mei Shiloach, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef of Ishbitz, explains the reversed order with an interesting exploration of mistakes.[5] Normally, one would expect that, “one can only uphold the teachings of the Torah when he has stumbled in them,” i.e. a person makes mistakes and then learns from them. As mentioned above, this is why the Torah orders it in this way - first the sotah (mistake), and then nazir (correction). However, continues the Mei Shiloach, the sages of the Talmud embraced “torat imecha” – the instruction of our mothers, an allusion to Proverbs 1:8: “Hearken, my son, to the discipline of your father, and do not forsake the instruction of your mother [torat imecha].” According to Rashi, “the discipline of your father” refers to the written and oral Torah, whereas “the instructions of your mother” are the safeguards for the Torah.[6] The safeguards referred to are the additional edicts of the Rabbis, which go beyond the “letter of the law” and are meant to keep us from stumbling. They therefore arranged nazir before sotah, so that the Jews would learn to restrain themselves from temptation and thus would not need to suffer the pain of their mistakes.[7]
Although the sages understood that one can, and should learn from one’s mistakes, the rabbis intended that the fences around the Torah would prevent us from making mistakes that could cause us unnecessary pain, suffering, or distance from Hashem.
Both approaches to making mistakes are at play in our responsibility towards the environment. On the one hand, many environmental mistakes have already been made by people both like and unlike us. We could point to the genocide in Darfur, where an estimated 300,000 people have been killed and 3 million have been left homeless by a conflict that began in part as an agricultural skirmish over water supplies.[8] We could point to our society’s eager use of fossil fuels, leading to irreversible climate change.[9] These mistakes can no longer be avoided, but we can learn from them. We can be overzealous in the fences that we construct to protect ourselves and our children from environmental “mistakes” and the damage that they may cause.
It might be difficult to imagine that our way of life could ever change, or that environmental impacts could ever truly affect our way of life. By all standards, we live in an extraordinarily complex society relative to human history. The global dynamics of our world present great opportunities. However, this also means that our mistakes are not limited to our local impact—the actions of individuals in America can be refracted and impact the food supply in Indonesia.[10] But as Jews and as participants in this globalized society, we must ensure that our actions and the systems we help create and perpetuate are made bearing in mind the mistakes of the past. They should guard against the mistakes of the future, protecting our land and our precious world, so that our children will be able to enjoy the good land and all the resources that Hashem has granted us.
Though it will be difficult, and in some cases impossible, to undo the damage that our generation and those before us have wrought, making these radical changes now, just as the Rabbis did for us, can help future generations be careful so as to not stumble and continue with the same mistakes.
Suggested Action:
First, make sure that you follow the full extent of the law – in content and spirit – when it comes to the environment. For example: recycle properly. Beyond that, learn environmental history and advocate for environmental protections that take that history and science into account, creating a “fence around the law.”
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Notes:
[1] Bamidbar 5:18
[2] Bamidbar 6:2-3
[3] Rashi on Bamidbar 5:18, based on Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 2a and Nazir 2a, and Midrash Bamidbar Raba 10:2-4
[4] Gitin 43a, which states that one can only be strong in Torah observance once one has fallen
[5] Commentary on Bamidbar 6:2
[6] Rashi describes the word “imecha” (your mother) as related to “amitecha” (your nation, i.e, the nation of Israel), as in (Ezekiel 19:2) “What a lioness was your mother [meaning your nation]!” Invoking the concept of a “lioness,” he explains that the additional edicts of the rabbis serve as a guardian for the laws of the Torah.
[7] Rabbi Herzl Hefter has explained this verse by elaborating the metaphor: that in a family, a father tends to be more comfortable with his child getting hurt and learning from mistakes in order to become independent, whereas a mother tends to want to protect the child from any pain and therefore tries to prevent mistakes from happening.
[8] For an explanation of the environmental origins of the conflict in Darfur, see this article.
[9] To understand the climate science and its attribution to fossil fuel use, see the most recent IPCC Report. For statistics on historical fossil fuel use, see Our World in Data on Fossil Fuels.
[10] See, for example, this article on the global dynamics of malnutrition.
