Shabbat Mishpatim
Written by Rabbi Neil Amswych Monday, 23 February 2009
“She Turned me Into a Newt…!”
I would like to look at a verse in the sedrah that receives little attention in progressive synagogues. Exodus 22:17 contains just three words, Mekhashefah lo techayeh: “You will not suffer a witch to live.” I’m guessing this doesn’t receive much attention because we don’t believe in sorceresses, and even if we did, we wouldn’t put them to death. In fact, when we think of witches, most of us here think of that wonderful scene in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, where one of the villagers claims “She is a witch – she turned me into a newt…… Well, she turned me back again…!”
However, this verse is actually very interesting. Why is it a ‘sorceress’, and not a ‘sorcerer’? Traditional grammatical assumptions hold that the male normally encompasses the female – we would expect it to talk about a sorcerer, by which a sorceress would also be implied. But this text only refers to the female – the sorceress, or witch.
Tractate Sanhedrin 67a provides us with the kind of viewpoint we might expect in answer to such the question: “Why is the feminine used? Because mostly women engage in sorcery,” an answer which Rashi repeats many years later. Does that mean that when it comes to sorcery, the feminine includes the masculine?
When Leviticus discusses necromancy, it specifically mentions both men and women: “A man or a woman who has a ghost or a familiar spirit shall be put to death" (Lev. 20:27). So why not here?
The answer of the Talmud – that this is normally a female activity – seems to contradict another text, just one page later, which tells us that “Jannai went to an inn and asked for water, which they brought him. He noticed the women muttering, so he threw some away and it turned into snakes.” So far, so good. The women were muttering, they cast a spell on his water, and he had the saychel not to be caught out by the spell. But it continues, “He said to them, ‘I have drunk of your water and you will drink of mine.’ He made one of the women drink and she turned into an ass. He mounted her and rode into the market-place. Her companion came and released her from the spell, so that he was seen riding on a woman” (Sanhedrin 67b). The whole page, in fact, is filled with stories of men performing weird and wonderful tricks, including every Middle Easterner’s favourite: sawing the camel in half (I kid you not!).
Dr. Isaac Gottlieb of Bar-Ilan University says that “R. Jonah ibn Janah, the medieval Spanish grammarian, noted that mekhashefa is not the feminine of mekhashef [sorcerer] but a collective noun, just as daggah is not the feminine of dag [fish], but a collective noun denoting fish in general.” So, in fact, while traditional translations read mekhashefa as feminine, it is also a generic term for all sorcerers, but devoid of gender, like “fish” in English.
If ibn Janah is correct, then the question posed by the sedrah is exceptionally important: what do we as readers bring as assumptions to the text? Clearly the Talmudic writers, Rashi, and others read their own misogynism into the text, and interpreted it accordingly. Progressive rabbis also read our own agendas into the text. What I hope is that as we read our texts we understand what our bias is, and therefore what teaching we impart to others. The law of the sorceress is of essential importance, because there is no such law, and I think that speaks volumes about not just the law, but us as well.
