Timeout

אִישׁ אִישׁ כִּי תִשְׂטֶה אִשְׁתּוֹ וּמָעֲלָה בוֹ מָעַל (במדבר ה, יב)

Should any man’s wife stray and be unfaithful to him… (Bamidbar 5:12)

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A person does not sin unless a spirit of folly enters into him. -Talmud, Sotah 3a

The word the used for the sotah’s “straying” shares the root with the word shtus, which means “folly” and “insanity.” The Talmud tells us that for a Jew to transgress any sin, even if not as obvious as adultery, is possible only when under a spell of foolishness.

It is not by chance that the Torah teaches this concept with its wording of the laws of a sotah. A woman is deemed a sotah upon placing herself (after being cautioned) in a circumstance that raises suspicion, even though her guilt of infidelity or innocence has yet to be established. Behavior that allows for suspicion is considered immodest for a Jewish girl, temporarily barring her from her normal married life. On the other hand, once her innocence has been established after drinking the miraculous “sotah waters”, she returns to live happily ever after in a blessed marriage with her husband.

The same is true of all the mitzvos, which can only be possibly transgressed in a bout of irrationality. Like the temporary sotah status for behaving immodestly, after which the woman happily returns to her married life with her husband, a Jew‘s detachment from G-d – the Husband of the Jewish people – upon being blinded by his animalistic impulses and transgressing a sin, is only temporary. Ultimately, he will be cleared from his sin, as he will certainly do teshuva – meaning return, returning to an enriched relationship with G-d.

Likutei Sichos vol. 2, pp. 313-314