Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 23 May 2026¹

• The sotah ritual – in which women whose husbands suspected them of adultery would have them force-fed a poisonous liquid in a humiliating public ordeal – is a horrendous example of gender-based violence. As Dr Ruth Calderon has said, it was “a ceremony that developed in response to men’s primal fear of women”.² A jealous husband would disgrace, and possibly kill, his wife as a way of “overcom[ing] his lack of control and the doubts that haunt him”.³
• The Mishnah documents a debate as to whether or not converts were subject to the sotah ritual, or only women who were born Jewish.⁴ It tells the story of a convert to Judaism named Kark’mit who was doubted by her husband. The leading rabbis of the time, Shamaya and Avtalyon, apparently forced her to drink the sotah waters. But, a couple of generations later, a Mishnaic rabbi said: דּוּגְמָא הִשְׁקוּהָ. That is a very difficult phrase to translate. The second word, הִשְׁקוּהָ, is simple enough: it means “they caused her to drink”. But the first word, דּוּגְמָא, literally means ‘example’, and it has been interpreted in different ways.
• The commentator Ra’avad⁵ understands it to mean that Shamaya and Avtalyon were trying to set a דּוּגְמָא, an example. They weren’t really supposed to carry out the sotah ritual on a convert, and they knew that, but they were descended from converts themselves and didn’t approve of such people being excluded from Jewish practice. If Jews-by-birth were forced to drink this poisonous liquid, Jews-by-choice should be allowed to as well, otherwise it would be discrimination! Shamaya and Avtalyon therefore carried out an off-book sotah ritual on Kark’mit, in much the same way that modern Liberal rabbis were known to officiate off-book weddings for mixed-faith couples before that sort of thing was allowed.⁶ Of course, mixed-faith couples typically wanted weddings, whereas Kark’mit surely wouldn’t have minded being ‘excluded’ from this particular act of cruelty.
• The other interpretation is very different. Hai Ga’on⁷ says that דּוּגְמָא הִשְׁקוּהָ means that they caused her to drink ‘example’ water – dyed water, imitation sotah liquid – to try and frighten her into confessing her adultery without going through the real sotah ritual to which she, as a convert, was not really subject.
• Neither of those interpretations is especially edifying. Ra’avad says they gave Kark’mit poison as a sort of twisted treat, and Hai Ga’on says they were trying to trick her into thinking she was on the verge of death.
• But I think we can come up with a synthesis between the two of them that is not only edifying, but which completely changes the end of the story.
• Shamaya and Avtalyon went into work one morning in the 2nd century, and were quietly going about their rabbinic business – writing their sermons, meeting prospective new members, updating the shul website – when suddenly Kark’mit’s irrationally jealous⁸ husband barged in, dragging his wife behind him.⁹ He demands that the rabbis immediately begin the sotah ritual: go to the kitchen, brew up a batch of poisonous liquid, hold her down and pour it into her.
• Now, if that happened to me here at BHPS, I’d be calling the police. Of course, things were different 2,000 years ago, but it’s easy to imagine that Shamaya and Avtalyon might not have been entirely comfortable with the situation either. Yet it wasn’t obvious what they could do with their discomfort. They could call the authorities, but then again, what Kark’mit’s husband was demanding was the law. They could simply say ‘no’, but then again, Kark’mit’s husband would just haul her along to another rabbi and have him poison her instead.
• But there’s one other factor at play here: Shamaya and Avtalyon were, Ra’avad said, descended from converts. And Kark’mit herself was a convert. They felt a special bond with her, a special responsibility towards her. She had done something incredibly brave, leaving her family and relaunching herself as a Jew. Surely, if anyone deserved to be protected from this most barbarous and misogynistic of Judaism’s antiquated practices, it was her. She came to our religion having identified it as something beautiful, something inspiring, something worthy – killing her would be the ultimate betrayal.
• So what did Shamaya and Avtalyon do? Well, as Hai Ga’on said, they gave her fake sotah water. But not to frighten her. To frighten her husband. To impress upon him that all had been done properly. To make it look as if they’d gone through the proper ritual, during which Kark’mit had ‘died’.
• And then, once this horrible man had gone home with his jealousy sated and the self-satisfied smile of someone who’s done a good thing, the two rabbis helped Kark’mit escape, and set her up in a different part of the country where she could live a happy life free from her abusive husband.
• This is all a complete flight of fancy on my part, but no greater a flight of fancy than that of Ra’avad or Hai Ga’on. The Mishnah left us this tantalisingly meaningless phrase דּוּגְמָא הִשְׁקוּהָ; why shouldn’t I play with it? More specifically, why shouldn’t I play with it with the intention of liberating our beautiful and inspiring religion from some of its past failings?
• The passage of Torah we read this morning was ghastly. I chose it specifically because it’s ghastly. Rabbis Ariana Katz and Jessica Rosenberg have described it as “a harmful text that needs to be named as such in our continued work to heal from and create a world without misogyny”.¹⁰ Here I am, then, denouncing this passage of Torah. But, crucially, Judaism isn’t just the Torah. Judaism is also the stories and the interpretations and the humanity. In fact, Judaism is the tightrope we walk between halachah and aggadah, between law and lore. Judaism is the outcome of internal processes in which we adjust Divinely-inspired legal texts in the light of our Divinely-created moral compasses. The ambiguous mishnaic story of Kark’mit is just as authentically Jewish as the unambiguous sotah ritual in the Book of Numbers – and creative interpretations of the two are the most authentically Jewish of all.
• Chayyim Bialik, the father of modern Israeli poetry, wrote that our laws are “pedantic, severe, unbending – all justice”, while our stories are “accommodating, lenient, pliable – all mercy”.¹¹
• And both are necessary. If our lives were solely dictated by tall tales and the caprice of individual conscience, we would not be Jewish, because there would be nothing to unite us: each person’s existence would depend on “vague feeling and beautiful phrases alone”.¹² On the other hand, if our lives were solely dictated by the blackletter commandments of the Torah, we would not be Jewish, because we would be unchangingly and unchangeably stranded in a harsh and unkind period of human history.
• The sotah ritual represents our people at its worst. The Mishnah’s enigmatic story of Shamaya, Avtalyon and Kark’mit represents our people in a moment of transition. Our modern reading of their tale as one of salvation and inspiration, represents our people where we are.

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Shavua tov!

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Notes

1. Numbers 5:23-31 ↩︎
2. Ruth Calderon, A Bride for One Night: Talmud tales (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2014): 12. ↩︎
3. Ibid: 13. ↩︎
4. m.Eduyot 5:6 ↩︎
5. Ad loc ↩︎
6. See eg Anna Maxted, “Liberal rabbi barred for too liberal view on weddings”, The Jewish Chronicle (26 February 1993). ↩︎
7. Quoted in the Aruch sv ‘Degem’ ↩︎
8. Numbers 5:14-15 ↩︎
9. Numbers 5:15 ↩︎
10. Rabbi Ariana Katz and Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg, For Times Such as These: a radical’s guide to the Jewish year (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2024), ebook edition. ↩︎
11. Hayim Nahman Bialik, “Halachah and aggadah” (trans Sir Leon Simon) in Israel Cohen and B Y Michali (eds), An Anthology of Hebrew Essays (Tel Aviv: Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, 1966), vol 2 pp 368-388: 368. ↩︎
12. Ibid: 385; see also 386, 388. ↩︎