I envision answering the girls' difficulty on two levels: First, one can
simply say that the woman is not blameless - she met in private with a man
of whom she knew her husband to be jealous. The "ordeal", then, is partly
a punishment, and punishments are meant to be unpleasant. (Disclaimer:
I haven't researched the topic, so if it turns out that what I just wrote
about Sotah is narreshkeit I beg your pardon and hope someone will
enlighten me.)
Somehow I expect that answer will leave the girls unsatisfied, since the
"crime" of such a meeting will not resonate with them. In fact, the whole
episode takes a view of the husband/wife relationship that they may well
find offensive.
To answer them on this level you should first make sure they've learned a
unit on ecosystems. Then you can explain to them that fiddling with a
society's attitudes towards men and women is about as likely to work out
as introducing mongooses. I've always found it funny (read: inexcusably
stupid) that the people most likely to fear unspecified ecological
catastrophe if we kill off the spotted owl or unintended consequences of
projecting military power in geopolitics are the least likely to hesitate
about tampering with society.
The idea here is not that the society described by the Torah is the ideal
society (although it might be -how would I know?). It's that one needs to
approach it with humility, realizing that changing an aspect that strikes
one as needing improvement might end up with all of us knee-deep in kudzu.
In parallel, it can be pointed out that, people being what they are, no
organization of society is likely to keep everybody happy all the time.
The husband in our story, for instance, is already unhappy, so if the wife
has to suffer embarrassment for them to come out the other end with a
repaired marriage, who's to say that isn't the least of the evils?
Michael
