Encounter and Havdalah

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A164 Thesis4

This ethic is not prescriptive for anyone. By all means, have all the sex you want with whomever you want, or don’t. I hope you enjoy it. This is simply an ideal to strive for, a better framework and a better experience of sex with our partners in whatever context we find them. This is a Jewish ethic and must be based in text. But it is based in new kinds of Torah, and as such it must recognize the dissonance between God and man and religion, and recognize the awesome potential to expand the framework. It must be wrestled with and argued over. This is not an ethic for everyone, nor is it an ethic for every Jew. It is an idea of how observant Jews- might face the challenges of post-modernism and boldly move forward while still retaining the identity of Torah-Judaism. Jewrotica is this new Torah, providing space for experience, confession, advice, knowledge and paradigm shifts, and means of production.

Jewrotica comes to celebrate all fantasies, experiences, challenges, and desires. It is media as a platform for the transmission of a continued multiplicity of revelations, building a community of We-Thou, and the space to move forward together. There is an idea in Judaism that every idea, every word, every letter of the Torah has 70 “faces,” or interpretations, and all are correct; all are the word of God. We must remember the 70 faces, many of which we have yet to see, as we find space for all to be citizens in the slow walk from real to ideal.

83 – Cisneros, Sandra, This Is How You Lose Her, By Junot Díaz, (New York: Riverhead, 2012).

84 – Janson, H. W., and H. W. Janson. Janson’s History of Art: The Western Tradition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011) 687.

85 – Horstman, Judith, The Scientific American Book of Love, Sex, and the Brain: The Neuroscience of How, When, Why, and Who We Love (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012) 187.

86 – Buber (I and Thou) 62.

87 – Buber (I and Thou) 62.

88 – Buber (I and Thou) 156-157.

89 – Westheimer, Ruth K., and Jonathan Mark, Heavenly Sex: Sexuality in the Jewish Tradition (New York: Continuum, 1996) 15.

90 – Schwyzer, Hugo, “My Sweet Boy, My Goy Toy,” Jewrotica. (N.p., 13 Nov 2012: Web Nov 2012) .

91 – Plato, The Symposium (New York: Penguin, 2006) 27-29.

92 – Plato (The Symposium) 31.

93 – Clack, Beverley, “Virgins and Vessels: Feminist Reflections on Dominant Models of Spirituality,” Religion and Sexuality, Ed. Michael A. Hayes, Wendy Porter, and David Tombs (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998) 244-245.

94 – Hacking, Ian, “Our Neo‐Cartesian Bodies in Parts,” (Critical Inquiry 34.1, 2007) 78-105.

95 – Plato (Symposium) 32.

96 – Marcus, Bat Sheva, “Sex and Holiness,” Jewrotica (N.p., 15 Aug 2012: Web Dec 2012) .

97 – Genesis 24:67

98 – 2 Samuel 11

99 – 2 Samuel 1:26

100 – Ruth 3:7

101 – Westheimer (Heavenly Sex) 71.

102 – Biale, David, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California, 1997) 20.

103 – Westheimer (Heavenly Sex) 70-71.

104 – Westheimer (Heavenly Sex) 59.

105 – Buber (I and Thou) 135.

106 – Ruttenberg, Danya, The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism (New York: New York UP, 2009) 4.

107 – Buber (I and Thou) 84.

108 – Winkler (Sacred Secrets) 96.

109 – Winkler (Sacred Secrets) 97.

110 – Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berakhot 25b.

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C.G. is a graduate of NYU in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication. C.G. wrote “Online Erotica & The Space to Move Forward: A Modern Jewish Sexual Ethic” for her senior honors thesis in May 2013.