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November 2, 1998

Shalom Bayit (1988)

Marriage & Sexuality

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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

Article

New Book Spotlights Jewish Laws of Married Sex Life

New York – Most marriages are failures, says a young New York rabbi in a recently published book, A Hedge of Roses by Norman Lamm (Feldheim Publishers, N.Y. $1.75). Whether or not they end in divorce, he adds, too many marriages become “exercises in sustained tension, only occasionally relieved by periods of happiness and joy.” With this grim note, the author, a visiting assistant professor of Jewish philosophy at Yeshiva University and associate rabbi at The Jewish Center of New York, guides the reader on a short tour of one of Judaism’s most fascinating clusters of laws – taharat ha-mishpaḥah (Family Purity). According to Rabbi Lamm, the chances of success in a Jewish marriage are directly proportional to the couple’s observance of the biblical and Talmudic laws concerning conjugal relations. “It is easy enough to get married. It is quite another thing to stay married.” He recommends the ancient Jewish code for modern couples as a way of preserving marriage. The author eschews various “scientific” interpretations that have been offered to explain this religious institution. He proposes, instead, psychological, philosophical, and symbolic insights into the sexual code of Judaism. “Family Purity,” he concludes, “is that life-long education in the love of life which commences even before life begins.”
Marriage & Sexuality

Outline

Taharat Mishpacha (1989)

Imp'ce theme: gem': שבת – כשרות – טה"מ. Source? don't know! spsf'd: correspond to hum. psychol reality – 3 most powerful drives: sex – food – power.... Thus 25 yrs ago, lect'd THM-TJC. earlins – sptld – got several families pbl'pa THM even tho' no שבת... so: Hedgo. Teva – ins Heb (2): Portuguese... left out: cancer; flowers wilting...
Marriage & Sexuality