There are portions in Torah that comfort. Others disturb. Parashat Naso offers us both.
Nestled among instructions about the camp and Nazirite vows, we find an ancient, bewildering ritual: the ordeal of the sotah, the trial for a woman suspected of adultery. It’s hard to read. A woman stands accused, not by witnesses or evidence, but by the jealous suspicion of her husband. She is brought before a priest, her hair unbound, a grain offering in hand. She is made to drink “bitter waters” mixed with dust from the sanctuary floor and ink from a scroll bearing God’s name.
We flinch. Rightly so. Because even if the ritual ends without punishment, the entire episode is a theatre of humiliation. And if her body swells and she suffers illness, the verdict is cast. Guilty or not, it is she who pays the cost of suspicion.
So, how do we read this text today, especially at the gates of Pride Month, a season when we affirm dignity, resist shame, and honour those who have too long been told that their love or gender makes them “other”? Let me offer not an answer, but a path.
The bitter water of the sotah is mixed with dust from the sanctuary. The holiest place. Earth and holiness stirred into a potion meant to judge a woman’s worth.
And here is the contradiction: how can something born of sacred ground become the tool of shame?
But perhaps this is the Torah’s quiet subversion. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch once taught that dust is a symbol of common origin. From the dust, we are all made. From the dust, we return. (Hirsch Commentary on Numbers 5:17)
The dust of the sanctuary says: You belong here too.
Yes, the ritual is problematic. Yes, it emerges from a patriarchal world where a woman’s value was entangled with a man’s honour. But perhaps within the ritual’s dust lies a seed of truth we can reclaim , that every body brought before God carries something holy. That God dwells not only in perfection, but in pain, in process, in protest.
Imagine now, not a woman before a priest, but a young person, perhaps trans, perhaps queer, standing before a religious community. Not to be shamed, but to be seen. Not with suspicion, but with celebration.
That is the reversal Pride calls us toward.
The Torah may speak in the language of its time, but we, its readers, are called to speak in the language of our own. We name the pain of exclusion, and we respond with the rituals of affirmation. We mix our dust with hope.
This is the gift of Progressive Judaism. We do not read Torah to freeze time. We read it to transform time. And that includes calling out what wounds and blessing what heals.
Midrash Tanchuma teaches that the sotah ritual exists not because God wishes to punish, but because God wishes to heal a broken relationship. The point, say some sages, was to stop a man from taking violence into his own hands. To introduce delay, to make space for something softer than rage. (based on Midrash Tanchuma, Naso 5)
Now, imagine what it would mean if our communities applied that logic more widely. When suspicion arises about someone’s identity, or discomfort about the unfamiliar, what if we slowed down? What if we resisted judgement, made space for honest encounter? Could we turn bitterness into belonging?
The sotah text gives us a script, one that, in its time, perhaps offered protection. But Pride gives us a counter-liturgy. Where the sotah drank words erased, we speak words affirmed. Where her body became a canvas for divine punishment, we honour the body as a vessel of the divine image.
And we remember, too, those who have been made invisible: people expelled from camps, families, and sanctuaries, not because they broke a law, but because they broke a mould.
In this light, Pride Month isn’t just a celebration. It’s a sacred protest. A reweaving of the text.
So maybe the most radical message in this week’s portion is that dust can speak.
Dust, from which we were formed. Dust, mixed with holy ink. Dust that remembers every footstep, those who came in fear, and those who returned in pride.
Let us be the generation that reclaims the dust, not for bitterness, but for blessing. Let our sanctuaries be places where no one is tested for worthiness, but everyone is told: You are already whole. You are already holy.
Shabbat Shalom.
