Encounter and Havdalah

In the same way though, that the yetzer isn’t good or bad, juridico-discursive or productive, neither is the Experience/Encounter model. All human beings function in both frames of mind- the ideal is to embody intention in interactions with other people, and in Buber’s formulation to reach God. Realistically though, Experience and Encounter are more about the capacity in each person. Experience is just as much a part of life as Encounter, but it simply contains less capacity for good, without being inherently bad or wrong.

In the post, My Sweet Boy, My Goy Toy, author Hugo Schwyzer relates the story of Chana, the beautiful redhead he fell for in his doctoral program. She was Jewish, he was not, and he was shocked to learn that she would never allow their sexual relationship to become anything more. “It was 1992! What serious academic…made decisions based on religion?” But that was fine at first, for the “sex was transcendently good. [He] was in awe of her hunger, her intensity, her raw wanting.”

This beautiful, brilliant woman who had grown up in a Modern Orthodox community was his sexual fantasy come alive. Their experience of sex was overwhelming and world-expanding, but the boundaries of her religion blurred the lines between Encounter and Experience – was it for pleasure alone or for the dynamic that existed between their bodies? When Hugo started to fall too hard for Chana, she reminds him “Sweet boy, please don’t make this more than what it is…if you fall in love with me, we’ll have to stop this.” She called him Sweet Boy and Goy Toy interchangeably, the latter to remind him in an “unkind way…that what we had was not only temporary but insignificant.” The powerful sex and the honesty that it can make relationships far more than anyone ever bargained for is central to this text. So is the insistence that there are some taboos that are too strong to cross. Chana ends it with Hugo after a visit from her parents, eventually marrying a rabbi and having three children. (90)

In Plato’s Symposium, the ancient treatise on love, one of the more famous speeches is given by Aristophanes and explains that long ago people were androgynous and literally were two bodies in one. Male and female (or male/male and female/female) were back to back, with two heads and eight appendages, and they rolled from place to place, always connected to their other half. But then the gods chose to split them in half in order to prevent them from rising up against them (such is the capacity of these fully joined bodies). They ran around desperate to find their other halves, and out of pity, the gods moved the human’s genital around to the front so that they could cleave as close to one another as possible. (91) Love then, “is the name for the desire and pursuit of wholeness.” (92) A fascinating parallel is found in the root of the word “sexuality”, which comes from the Latin sexus, which may be akin to the Latin secare, “cut” or “divide.” “This suggests incompleteness seeking wholeness and connection that reaches beyond our differences and divisions….sexuality can be summed up as the physical and emotional grounding of an individual’s capacity to love.” (93) An Encounter of sex with another person might look a little like this coming together of separated parts, of separated souls.

According to Ian Hacking in Our Neo-Cartesian Bodies in Parts, it is the sum total of a person’s life experiences that build up a soul, and it does not exist wholly formed prior to those experiences. He describes eyes as the path to the soul, implying that the soul lives deep inside the body, and uses the same portals to relate to the world that our brain and heart use as well, making the soul something almost tangible. (94) These two conceptions of the soul – that it is an amalgamation of days of our lives, and that it reaches out from the depths of our bodies to interact with the world around us – create an idea of healthy harmony when soul and body are united. When one takes into account such an active soul, it requires a different understanding of what it means to have intentions, how we conceive of consciousness, and how we embody our intentions and conscious thought in an act of self as we create the notions of health and healthy living that define our daily activity. It is our intentions that allow our souls to be complete, to be fully built, and it is our intentions that allow us to connect in a mode of Encounter with another human being. In Aristophanes’ speech, he proclaims that,

The ideal way to complete one’s soul, to find Encounter in sex, is to find your perfect match. And yet the ideal is rarely possible. Instead, what is possible is to find a love, and Encounter of sex in a person with whom you are compatible. It doesn’t have to be one person forever, simply one person of value in that time in an accumulation of soul-building moments.

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