Sotah

Beautiful, fragile Dina Reich, a young woman in Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox haredi enclave, stands accused of the community's most unforgivable sin: adultery. Raised with her sisters to be an obedient daughter and a dutiful wife, Dina secretly yearned for the knowledge, romance, and excitement that she knew her circumscribed life would never satisfy. When her first romance is tragically thwarted, she willingly enters into an arranged marriage with a loving but painfully quiet man. Dina's deeply repressed passions become impossible to ignore, finding a dangerous outlet in a sudden and intense obsession with a married man, with terrible consequences. Exiled to New York City, Dina meets Joan, a modern secular woman who challenges all she knows of the world and herself. Set against the exotic backdrop of Jerusalem's glistening white stones and ancient rituals, Sotah is a contemporary story of the struggle to reconcile tradition with freedom, and faith with love.

Combining philological, anthropological and cultural tools, this study sheds new light on issues of rabbinic gender economy and sexual morality, and contributes to the nascent scholarship on the formation of the temple in the Mishnah.

"Writing the Wayward Wife" is a study of rabbinic interpretations of sotah, the law concerning the woman suspected of adultery (Numbers 5: 11-31). The book identifies the emergence of two major interpretive themes: the emphasis on legal procedures, and the condemnation of adultery.

This study analyzes the specific textual formation of Mishna Sotah. Diverging significantly from its origins in the book of Numbers, the Mishnaic ritual was traditionally read by scholars as an "ancient Mishna", narrating an actual ritual practiced in the second temple. In contrast to this generally accepted view, this book claims that while Sotah does contain some traditions, its overall composition has a clear ideological and academic form. Furthermore, comparisons with parallel Tannaitic sources reveal the ideological redaction, which carefully selected only those opinions which support its rewriting of the ritual as a public punitive ritual, while rejecting all reservations and opposition to its specific punitive character – even ignoring the possibility of innocence of the suspected adulteress. The author’s groundbreaking conclusion is that, regardless of the form the real ritual did or did not take at the temple, the specific Mishnaic ritual was (re)invented by the rabbis in the second century C.E. From its very inception, it was purely textual, reflecting rabbinic imagination rather than memory.