Exchange with Yisrael Kashkin about "A Hedge of Roses" and the Purpose of Mitzvot (2005)

1. Yisrael Kashkin to R. Lamm (Nov. 6, 2005)

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A Hedge of Roses: Jewish Insights Into Sex and Marriage, Part 2 (1969)

In order to appreciate the implications of Family Purity, it is important to understand, as well, what it is not.For one thing, it is not the kind of superstition that, in other cultures, has stigmatized the menstruant as repulsive, placed upon her mysterious and stringent taboos, and banished her from the community for the duration of her menses. Maimonides, the eminent twelfth-century Talmudist, philosopher, and physician, forcefully rejected the superstitious beliefs and practices of the Sabeans, Magi, and other Eastern peoples concerning menstruation, and emphasized the spiritual content of Judaism’s teachings.״ The Torah’s legislation is simply not of one piece with, for instance, the primitive customs recorded in Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Unfortunately, such identification of the Torah’s laws with primitive pagan and mythological cultures often does take place in the mind of the contemporary Jew or Jewess who is uninitiated into the world of Torah and the Jewish Tradition and who cannot, therefore, view Jewish Family Purity from a broader perspective and greater knowledgeability. A terminological confusion is largely responsible for this unhappy distortion of the Torah’s larger purposes and the intrinsic meaning of its commandments. Tuharah and tum’ah (and the corresponding adjectives tahor and tamei) are usually translated as “pure” and “impure.” It is this deceptive semantic delinquency that leads to the interpretation of these categories as denoting some kind of intrinsic mysterious abhorrence that possesses the person of the menstruant and that must be purged by some magical incantation.But this is clearly not so. According to Jewish teaching, nothing whatever happens to or changes in the person or character or value of the individual, man or woman, designated as “impure.” No special quality makes such an individual inferior in any way to any other person re-fen־ed to as “pure.” The terms ta-harah and tum’ah signify halakhic or legal categories…

Marriage & Sexuality

Exchange with R. Rackman about "A Hedge of Roses" and the Jewish Concept of Time (1966)

Dear Norman, Thanks very much for sending me a copy of your A Hedge of Roses. It is beautifully done. However, I was really intrigued by your chapter on the sanctity of time. Beginning with page 75 you make a point which I had made in my first essay in Tradition. I thought it was original and I had offered it with tongue in cheek. Are there Gedolim who have advanced this thought? If so, I would be gratified to know. I, too, came upon the same conclusion almost twenty years ago. Best wishes from house to house for a Chag Kasher ve-Someach, Yours as ever, Rabbi Emanuel Rackman

Marriage & Sexuality

Hedges, Roses, and Thorns: Sex and Sexuality in the Mesorah (Yom Iyun: Sexuality

Rabbi Lamm explores topics of sex and sexuality in the Jewish tradition.

Marriage & Sexuality