Rabbi’s Message, May 26, 2026
As the weather temporarily warmed this past long weekend, my fun-time “beach reading” was consumed by the Dungeon Crawler Carl series by Matt Dinniman. While the books contain plenty of adventure, humor, and absurdity (and a warning about their colorful language), they also spend a surprising amount of time wrestling with a question that feels deeply relevant to our own lives: How does a person maintain their integrity when circumstances become less than ideal? What happens when life becomes messy, even very messy? What principles remain non-negotiable, and where does flexibility become necessary? How do we hold onto our values when circumstances constantly pressure us to compromise them? These are the questions I carried with me when I began reading this week's Torah portion, Parashat Nasso.
The longest portion in the Torah, Nasso opens with a census of the Levite clans and an accounting of their responsibilities in caring for the Israelites' sacred space. It then turns toward a series of situations in which things have gone wrong. The Torah discusses theft, wrongdoing, restitution, and the process of repair when someone recognizes their mistakes and takes responsibility for them. These passages offer a vision of accountability rooted not merely in punishment, but in restoration.
Yet the section that often receives the most attention appears a bit later: the ritual of the Sotah. The Sotah ritual addresses a painful situation in which a husband accuses his wife of infidelity, while the wife maintains her innocence. The Torah describes a circumstance in which jealousy has overtaken the husband: "a fit of jealousy has come over him and he is wrought up about the wife who has defiled herself; or if a fit of jealousy has come over him and he is wrought up about his wife although she has not defiled herself" (Numbers 5:14). For many modern readers, this passage feels deeply uncomfortable. The ritual reflects assumptions about gender, power, and marriage that stand far from our contemporary values. It would take five pages for me to list all of the reasons that I find this text challenging (at best) and repulsive (at worst).
Yet Jewish tradition rarely asks us to ignore difficult texts. Instead, it invites us to wrestle with them.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the rabbinic tradition is that our sages themselves struggled with the Sotah ritual. Rather than treating jealousy as proof of guilt, they increasingly shifted attention toward the destructive power of jealousy itself and how society could help moderate behavior driven by this feeling. (Mishnah Sotah 1:4-5) The Talmud ultimately teaches that the practice ceased altogether. (Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai, Mishnah Sotah 9:9) According to the rabbis, when adultery became widespread in society, the ritual no longer functioned as intended and was abolished. (Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 28a) In effect, the tradition chose to retire a troubling institution rather than preserve it unchanged.
This move reflects something profound about Jewish ethics in the context of less than ideal circumstances. The goal of Torah is not blind obedience to our worst instincts. The husband in this story arrives consumed by suspicion and fear. The Torah acknowledges those emotions, but the larger arc of Jewish tradition refuses to let jealousy have the final word.
Perhaps that is one reason this passage appears alongside laws of restitution and repair. Human beings make mistakes. We become angry. We become fearful. We become convinced that our perspective alone tells the whole truth. The challenge lies not in avoiding every difficult emotion, but in deciding what we do once those emotions arrive.
In Dungeon Crawler Carl, the characters rarely face a clean choice between good and evil. More often, they must choose between competing goods, competing loyalties, or competing harms. The same often proves true in real life. Most of us do not wake up wondering whether to become villains. Instead, we face decisions clouded by grief, uncertainty, fear, exhaustion, conflicting responsibilities, and yes, even jealousy.
The Jewish response does not expect perfection in these messy circumstances. It seeks integrity. Integrity means returning, again and again, to the values that define us: justice, compassion, truthfulness, accountability, dignity, and peace. It means asking not simply, "What do I want?" but also, "What kind of person do I want to become?" It means recognizing when jealousy, anger, or fear have begun to drive the conversation and even the decision-making that we want to do. And it means remaining willing to engage in repair when we inevitably fall short.
Nasso reminds us that living in ideal circumstances is not always possible, not even in the Bible. Like the characters in Dungeon Crawler Carl, we often find ourselves navigating situations in which every available option carries risk, cost, or uncertainty. The Jewish tradition does not promise us perfect choices. Instead, it offers us a compass: compassion, accountability, repair, and dignity. When circumstances become messy, those values may not tell us exactly what to do. But they can help us remember who we want to become.
