This is Torah, and I Must Learn

The community of sex-positive Torah Judaism that Jewrotica seeks to build upon has been deeply misconstrued throughout the ages, in particular through the pervasive myth of a Judaeo-Christian sexual ethic. “Sexual taboo is a disease invented by humans and blamed on God,” Gershon Winkler begins in Sacred Secrets. Winklers guiding premise is to enlighten Jews as to the true nature of the Torah and rabbinic literature regarding attitudes toward sexuality. Winkler posits that because of the surrounding sexual ethics of Christian societies in the Middle Ages, Judaism adopted many Christian attitudes toward sex in order to avoid additional cultural conflict. (51) In Augustine’s Tractatus adversus Judaeos, he quotes Corinthians to prove that Jews are indisputably carnal. (52)

In Against Faustus, he explains that it is the plight of the “impious, carnal Jews” to be scattered and persecuted wherever they go, in order to serve as a reminder to the world of their guilt in the murder of Christ. This came later to be known as the Doctrine of Jewish Witness. (53) Jewish laws codes embraced parallel sexual ethics of their host societies, often marginalizing women and keeping them from traditional knowledge in emulation of Church rule in order to downplay the charge of carnality as well as avoid persecution as much as possible (though there were other factors as well). (54)

As such, the concept of a Judeo-Christian sexual ethic is a misleading one. When one returns to the primary texts, a sex-positive When one returns to the primary texts, a sex-positive discourse (albeit in some instances “sex-positive” must be evaluated within a historical context) is apparent. Judaism sanctions sex for pleasure alone, although within parameters, and within those parameters, there is no sin in sex; on the contrary, sex is celebrated and mandated. Though Winkler draws up a variety of sources, many of them at this point hold no standing in Jewish law or were minority opinions in their own time. This book is not meant to drastically change Jewish law, but instead to shake up the conversation, to present a history and a truth that Judaism should not ignore, and should work to better incorporate into mainstream ideology and praxis.

Jewrotica seeks to reclaim this history that is steeped in conversations of sexuality and express it anew. And yet with this reclamation of Jewish sexual ethics, a residual aspect of Christian sexuality still remains embedded within the literal and sub-textual fabric of the website: the Confession. Users are invited to confess dirty stories and scandalous incidents, rarely sharing anything more than a hometown as an identifier. This notion of confession is actually a Christian one, and frames the central crux of Foucault’s argument against the repressive hypothesis. What once had previously been a venue simply to confess sexual transgression became in the 17th century a space to confess every sexual thought, dream, and fantasy to an authorized power.

We’ve been taught to see confession as something liberating, done for our own good. Foucault argues that it is in fact a coercive construct of our culture that objectifies our sexual understanding. (55) Is confession, now so textually embedded in our culture, something that continues to coerce us? If the confessions were not anonymous, it could be argued that they were more than confessions, they were declaration of subject-hood. Whether or not the cloak of anonymity that the website allows for propagates social constructions or allows for a freedom to speak without fear of censure is still to be seen.

Jewrotica employs the mode of confession most often as a vehicle for the articulation of sexual fantasy, within the frameworks of the Fantasies category, which are fully anonymous, and Confessions, which always indicate location, and only occasionally a name. In one fantasy story called Lilith, a very graphic sexual encounter is described between a man and a woman on the Upper West Side. Lilith says that she’s “allowed him – no, commanded him – to invade my body in all possible ways just like the first and leading matriarch I was named after, who insisted on dominating shivery Adam back there in Eden.”

Lilith is a homiletic tale; she was the original mate for Adam described in Genesis 1, but her overwhelming sexual desires threatened to destroy the world and so she was replaced with Eve instead. This reclamation of the female erotic as something powerful and meaningful is significant, even if it is only visible upon closer reading. Oppenheimer jumps into the comments section and asks whether or not a fantasy can be categorized as “Jewish” if it comes from a Jewish person but is almost completely devoid of Jewish references (those two occur in the first paragraph of a four page story). (56)

In Confession #16: My Rabbi, a young man talks about the crush he has on his rabbi and watching him on a Friday night. He repeats the word bimah to describe the elevated platform in a synagogue from where services are led, intimating the elevation of the rabbi in his esteem. The rabbi is his “beloved,” doubly emphasized by the mention of the prayer “lecha dodi,” which speaks of the Shabbat as a beloved bride, in the same sentence. He is drawn not toward a nice smile or an attractive body, but to the Rabbi’s eyes, and the act of looking, of gazing is repeated. This is a search for sexual transcendence, for love that would replicate their hug in which “we pulled each other close temporarily, seemingly becoming one.” In a few short paragraphs he describes the universal feelings of butterflies in the stomach, of the heart skipping a beat when one’s object of affection walks in a room. (57)

These two stories, which address the universality of sexual feelings, may be less liberating to their owners because of the anonymity of the post, and yet they actually work to subvert the Foucauldian model in that they are not confessed to one clergyman, one therapist. They are confessed, though anonymously, to an entire community (not to the mention the entire Internet), not in order to receive censure or seek forgiveness, but to share an experience and move forward, learning from one another. Rav & Kahana today are as unknown to us as these confessors, and yet their experiences only serve to teach us. Yes, Foucault is right in that we are doing a lot of talking about sex, and talking about how we talk about sex (I’m doing that right now!) and yet all of this talking seeks to create to build a foundation of understanding and ecstasy, one in which we can learn to feel good about the body parts that we can name, and the sensations that fill them with the unspeakable.

The Talmud explains that “when a man and a woman unite with mutual love and desire, the Divine Presence abides with them. (58) And Maimonides writes that Jewish law permits kissing “each and every organ on the body.” (59) The Torah (specifically the Old Testament, in this instance) is filled with stories of unabashed sexuality. What is most important though is that Judaism proscribes sex within moderation- not in frequency or creativity, but in the parameters of with whom and when.

Within sanctioned relationships, sex is requirement. Moreover, fun, pleasurable sex is a requirement (it is in fact grounds for divorce if a man does not provide his wife with appropriate sexual satisfaction). A couple must have sex regularly, but they have to both be in the mood; sex can never be forced, and the couple cannot have just argued or be secretly plotting to end the marriage. (60) All of this ensures that the context is one that bonds and nourishes both parties. Whether contemporarily that applies to married or single, heterosexual or queer sex, these requirements are truly the embodiment of sex positivity (though it is important to note that not all requirements for marital sex are sex-positive, the majority are). Because these are guidelines for living Jewishly, sex and experiences of bodily sexuality are acts performed as part of a Torah-lifestyle, drawing in all who similarly participate in Torah-proscribed activities under the same communal banner.

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