"Spit in my Eye": The Wife, the Husband and the Sermon Marriage Counseling

Rabbi Meir was sitting and teaching Torah on Friday night.

A certain woman was sitting there listening.

His talk lasted too late.

She waited until he was finished speaking.

Then she went to her home, and found that the lamp was already extinguished

Her husband asked her: “Where have you been?”

She told him: “I have been sitting and listening to the rabbi.”

The husband said to her: “I swear by such-and-such that you are not to enter here until you go and spit in the rabbi's face!”

They sat [separated] for one week (Shabbat),

a second,

and a third.

Her neighbors told her: “You are having a quarrel. Let us go with you to the Rabbi.”

When Rabbi Meir saw them, he envisioned [the reason for their coming] by means of the holy spirit [of prophecy].

[Pretending to have something wrong with his eye] He said to them: “Is there among you a woman skilled in reciting a charm for the eye?”

Her neighbors said to her, “Now, go spit in his face and you will be permitted to live with your husband again.”

[So she came forward] but when she sat down before his face, she cringed before his presence.

She confessed: “My master [literally, my rabbi], I do not know how to recite a charm for [healing] the eye.”

But he said to her: “Just spit seven times and I will be healed.”

She spat in his face seven times.

Then he said to her: “Go and tell your husband: ‘You asked me to do it only once but I spat seven times!’”

His disciples said to him: "Master! Is the Torah to be treated with such contempt? If you had only told one of us to recite the incantation for you.”

R. Meir replied: “Isn't it enough for Meir to be equal to his Maker?

For Rabbi Yishmael taught: Great is peace, so that God’s holy Name written in sacred fashion is as commanded by the Holy One to be obliterated in the water [in the case of the suspected adulteress (Numbers 5: 23-24)], in order to bring about peace between a man and his wife.”