Adapted from: The Power of a Vort by Rabbi Yissocher Frand

דַּבֵּר אֶל בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְאָמַרְתָּ אֲלֵהֶם אִישׁ אוֹ אִשָּׁה כִּי יַפְלִא לִנְדֹּר נֶדֶר נָזִיר לְהַזִּיר לַה’

Speak to the Children of Israel and say to them: A man or woman who shall dissociate himself by taking a Nazirite vow of abstinence (Bamidar 6:2).

Rashi, citing Chazal (Sotah 2a), explains that the parashah of nazir follows immediately after the parashah of sotah because when a person witnesses the downfall of a sotah, he should take on a nazir vow and abstain from drinking wine so that he doesn’t suffer the same ignominious fate.

Rav Yaakov Weinberg zt”l, the Rosh Yeshivah of Ner Israel, pointed out that we might have expected the opposite to be true. When someone witnesses a horrendous car accident in which a passenger died because he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, that generally gives him pause the next time he gets into a car. Even someone who hates seatbelts will think twice about flouting the law upon seeing a body carried off a highway after not buckling up.

Shouldn’t the same be true for someone who witnesses the disgrace of a sotah? Shouldn’t the image of the sotah being degraded be seared upon his memory, providing him with spiritual immunity from further sin? Why should such a person need to become a nazir as a barrier to sin?

Rav Weinberg answers that the healthiest way to avoid sin is to be so far removed from it that it never enters the realm of possibility in our minds. Seeing someone else sin — or even paying the price for their sins — moves the possibility a little bit closer to us. The sin just seems more doable now that we know that someone else has done it.

One of the dangers of living in such an open society is that when we witness others transgressing or even hear about it, our own levels of kedushah are diminished. We may begin to entertain the thought of engaging in acts that lack kedushah. A person who witnesses a sotah’s downfall must proactively counteract the spiritual weakness it introduces into his psyche by vowing not to drink wine, which can cause a person to act frivolously and eventually lead to sin.

Even the greatest tzaddikim are well aware of the damage of being exposed to sin, and take active measures to fight it.

Radin, where the Chofetz Chaim lived, was a tiny hamlet that had no chillul Shabbos whatsoever. Until World War I, when the Chofetz Chaim was already in his mid-70s, he never witnessed someone desecrating Shabbos.

When the battlefront encroached on Radin during World War I, the entire population of the village picked up and moved into the interior of Russia for the duration of the war. The first Shabbos the Chofetz Chaim was in exile from Radin was the first Shabbos he saw desecrated — and the sight made him break down into copious tears.

The next week, when the Chofetz Chaim experienced chillul Shabbos again, he cried for even longer than he had the previous Shabbos.

“We understand why you cried so much last week,” the people who were with him said. “Witnessing chillul Shabbos for the first time was a traumatic experience, and you were so shocked by it that you cried. But by this week you should have expected it already. Why did you cry at all, and moreover, why did you cry with more intensity this week than you did last week?”

“The first time I saw another Jew violate the holy Shabbos,” replied the Chofetz Chaim, “I was crying for the problem itself. This week, it didn’t hurt me nearly as much — and that’s why I cried even more. I am concerned that I have become callous toward Shabbos because I have fallen from my own spiritual level and I no longer feel Hashem’s pain when his children desecrate Shabbos.

“Last week, I was crying for Shabbos,” summarized the Chofetz Chaim. “This week, I am crying for myself.”

If the Chofetz Chaim considered himself spiritually vulnerable after witnessing chillul Shabbos when he was over 75 years old, how much more are we susceptible to becoming spiritually weak if we witness a sin being committed?

This is the message the Torah is imparting to us. If a nazir does not take on a vow of abstinence from wine, not only won’t experiencing the sotah’s downfall prevent him from sinning, it might actually lead him to sin.

A person who sees another sinning — and in today’s world, we are exposed to such transgressions with frightening frequency — must realize that they have become vulnerable. Those sins no longer seem as distant and undoable as they were before. Although we may not have the nezirus vows today, when our spiritual firewalls are breached by witnessing others sinning or even being disgraced for their sins, we must repair that breach immediately to prevent ourselves from becoming corrupt.