Encounter and Havdalah

Havdalah & the Slow Walk

In the Jewrotica post, Sex and Holiness, well-known Modern Orthodox sex therapist Bat Sheva Marcus speaks about her trouble with the concept of “holy sex.” She repeats the phrase “I struggle” five times throughout her six paragraph essay. She uses the repetition in part as a rhetorical tool, and yet her word choice echoes that primal struggle of observant Jews; that eternal structure that harkens back to Jacob and his struggle with the angel.

Marcus explains that sex can be meaningful and transcendent, but trying to make every experience of sex holy is unrealistic and can be and often is very damaging to a relationship. She acknowledges that perhaps sex can be holy when it is a mutual and not a selfish act. Perhaps it can be holy by virtue of the fact that it (theoretically) takes place within the confines of a sanctified relationship, so the act becomes holy even without a specific holy intent, though “for many people that may take the romance out of the concept of holiness.”

But instead of looking for the romance, or “think[ing] about transcendence,” perhaps we should be looking instead for the dynamics that would lead to such an Encounter, and the markers that we have been changed by it. (96) And just as Winkler explains the discrepancy between God and religion, we have to realize that this Holy Sex doesn’t happen all the time. The Bible is full of husbands and wives who simply “knew” one another, which one might categorize as Experience. Only one Patriarch- Isaac, is actually described as loving his wife. (97) Sex rarely happens as it’s supposed to in the Torah, and the sexual norms that are spelled out in the Bible are suspended over and over, chronologically after the giving of those same laws by God.

David took Bathsheva from her husband (98); there is an implied romantic relationship between David and Jonathan (99); and Ruth climbs into the bed of Boaz in order to guarantee that he will marry her (100). The Book of Ruth is an example of David Biale’s “politics of sexual subversion” that he describes in his book Eros and the Jews. “Indeed, a relationship that fully subscribes to the norm is hard to find in the thousand-plus pages of the Holy Book.” (101) Biale claims that, “erotic transgressions are covertly positive…God, it would seem, straddles both sides of the legal fence to advance the fortunes of his chosen people.” (102)

What God wants and what prophets and men will for human beings is often contradictory. We have changed laws as times changed, and sexual ethics in the Torah depict that quite clearly. “The Book of Ruth is a magnificent example of example of the Bible being a strategic handbook for the sexes, encouraging the woman to initiate sex, even outside marriage, providing that the relationship contains the possibility of fruition, of life, of spirituality.” (103) The road from the Bible until today is a winding one filled with paradoxical ideas about sex, but what is again apparent is that it is the possibility of meaning that sanctifies a sexual Encounter.

According to Dr. Ruth Westheimer, “The Jewish concept of what is sacred and sanctified is expressed through separation and designation. Sex was to flourish within boundaries, and within those boundaries the greatest eroticism was to be not only allowed but given God’s blessing.” (104) This sanctified sex is made holy and erotic by virtue of its separation and designation into pre-approved partners and circumstances. When Shabbat ends each week after the sun has fully set on Saturday night, Jews perform a ceremony called havdalah, or separation, involving wine, a candle, and fragrant spices. The liturgy ends with the blessing, “Blessed is the God who separates between the sacred and the ordinary.” The sacred time of the Sabbath is leaving, and the ordinary weekday is taking its place. We are able to make this blessing because we have experienced both and can thereby distinguish between the two and appreciate the holiness of Shabbat by virtue of its difference from the weekday. With this visible paradigm of distinction, how are we supposed to recognize the sacred in sexuality if we never experience the ordinary?

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