Kosher Sex

In this adaptation from his new book, "Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy," Rabbi Shmuley Boteach draws on Jewish wisdom and teachings to discuss the holiest of topics. Designed to strengthen marriages, the book is predictably conservative (no masturbation, no premarital sex, no pornography) but is also refreshing in its recognition of the importance and power of sex. The 32-year-old Boteach, who grew up in Miami and Los Angeles, moved to England a decade ago to establish an Orthodox student society at Oxford University. "Kosher Sex" was an instant best-seller last year in the UK, prompting plans for a Hebrew edition to be sold in Israel and a Stateside edition that arrives in March. Despite the book's popularity overseas, some Orthodox Jews in the U.S. insist it won't be welll received. They call Boteach a publicity hound (he prefers "popularizer") who has usurped traditional Jewish modesty. "The Talmud states that matters of marital intimacy should not be discussed before an audience of three or more," one critic complains. This isn't the first time the young Hasidic rabbi, who is married with six children, has caused tsuris. His first book on sex and relationships was "The Jewish Guide to Adultery: How to Turn Your Marriage Into an Illicit Affair"; his next will be "Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments."

The Wise Man and the Clever Man

An ancient Jewish aphorism declares that the difference between a wise man and a clever man is that the clever man can extricate himself from a situation in which the wise man would never have gotten himself involved in the first place. Ours is a clever generation, not a wise one. Your sex life has become boring? No problem. Pull out a bullwhip or tie your partner to a lampshade. Better yet, rent blue videos with such searing titles as Honey, I Accommodated the Entire Neighborhood. Your husband ignores you? Toss the bum out and get yourself a temporary lover to restore your confidence.

Most of us are crisis workers, not lovers. Nowhere is this more evident than in our attitudes toward sex. Is it something we should do, watch on TV, discuss, ignore, indulge or suppress? Sex at once excites us, compels us, rules us. It also bores us, provoking yawns and serving as the butt of jokes. We take it for granted. Yet sex is the most important means of keeping a man and woman happily under the same roof for a lifetime. Within marriage, sex is not a luxury but a most basic necessity. It is the only human undertaking that, when done right, rids us of inhibition and manifests our essence. It is the ultimate form of knowledge, the greatest joy of life. During sex, we glorify in the art of being and existing rather than becoming and doing. This does not mean it cannot be debased. Indeed, the ancient Jewish mystics were adamant that the loftier the concept, the more it was subject to abuse.

The Wives' Pleasure

Long ago, well before Christianity enacted legislation forbidding its clerics from marrying or having sex, ancient rabbis were giving explicit advice to married men and women as to how they could enjoy pleasurable yet intimate relations. The rabbis made female orgasm an obligation incumbent on every Jewish husband. No man was allowed to use a woman merely for his own gratification.

Rather than offering prescriptive rules about sex, Judaism offers guidelines, or what might be called erotic channels of communication. Judaism does not indulge in guilt, harping on one's sexual past or sins. The essence of Jewish thought is gei veiter--always move forward. It is not out to condemn man for his sexual nature, but to uplift him from the realm of the animal. Sex is a motion designed to engender deep and lasting emotions.

I write about sex because it is holy. It is as religious a subject as a discussion of belief in God. It is only through sexual congress that a soul is brought into this world, and that a man and a woman merge as one as they were before creation. It is one of the few mystic experiences of life in which we all share. Rather than fighting our nature, we must harness it. Rather than reversing it, we must focus it. Rather than being ashamed of it, we must understand it and develop it to our advantage. In the bedroom we find and experience God through the warmth and closeness of another human being.

Some feminists portray religion as encouraging women to subdue sexual longing. But the Bible conceives of sex within marriage as the woman's right. The Torah obligates a man to pleasure his wife so that she reaches sexual climax before him, and the Bible records the fundamental rights of the married woman as food, clothing, shelter and conjugal relations. The sex must be pleasurable to the woman, the rabbis explain, for without pleasure there is no bonding.

It is for this reason that Iggeret Hakodesh, a 14th century letter written by a sage on the occasion of his son's marriage, encourages a man to exert every effort to pleasure his wife:

We can still learn from this, for one of the things that has most undermined sex in the modern age is the complete focus on the body. In areas of the flesh, men and women are different and cannot achieve harmony. But in areas of the personality and soul, they can become one. This is why pleasure is so central. The body peels away, masks begin to fade and what is left is a vulnerable and feeling human being.

A Crisis of Intimacy

I was once approached by a 24-year-old man who had been married for two years. He and his wife had just had their first child, and his wife now had lost interest in sex. She had even lost her ability to climax, and this made it impossible for him to climax. He spoke of how he had tried this position and that position. He bought her sex manuals and left them on her bed, but she threw them out, calling them smut. Then, to my surprise, he opened a plastic bag and pulled out about ten books on sexual technique, everything from the Kama Sutra to Driving Your Woman Wild in Bed.

"What are you doing with all this stuff?" I asked.

"What do you mean?" he said. "I'm doing whatever it takes to make our sex life more exciting and to save our marriage."

It soon emerged that the reason his wife seemed so tired was that her husband, the sex guru, had not lifted a finger to help her with the baby. He wanted to be a husband only in the bedroom. Theirs was a crisis of intimacy, not of sex.

Since the publication of The Joy of Sex in 1972, we have been flooded with amazing guides promising to provide enough sensual pleasure to send readers careening through the rafters, or your money back. It seems odd that none should offer sex techniques designed to maximize emotional intimacy. To me, it's a startling fact that even if you were to watch a couple in the throes of passion during the most erotic sexual encounter, you would have no way of knowing if they love each other.

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Back to Basics

Judaism insists that there should be one principal sexual position: the much-maligned missionary position. In no other position do we see a meeting of the mouths accompanied by a full integration of all the limbs. The ancient rabbis draw our attention to the belief that humans are the only creatures who make love facing each other. Biologists have suggested that the size of the human penis--which, proportionally, is far larger than that of most mammals--enables humans to have intercourse face-to-face (who says size doesn't matter?). Women have stated in study after study that what they enjoy most in sex is this physical embrace. Other positions, while physically pleasurable, close off some or all of the other outlets: verbal, mental, emotional. They are flawed in that they bring together only genital and other erogenous zones. The lovers are connected, but on only one plane. Breathing, words, the digging of nails and the clawing of flesh can all serve as gauges of our partner's arousal, but these are no substitute for looking into his or her eyes. There is nothing more alluring than watching your spouse come alive as a sexual being in response to your touch.

Is Oral Sex Wrong?

I once received a visit from a very religious Jew who asked if he could discuss a personal problem. He was 23 years old and had married a girl his age who also was very religious. He arrived without his wife, and we met in my living room. He immediately closed all the doors and windows. "I need your help," he said. "When I asked my wife for oral sex, she started to cry and accused me of degrading her. I may be religious, but I'm also a man."

God wishes for husbands and wives to be happy together. This happiness cannot be achieved by throwing in prohibitions that limit a couple's sexual repertoire, especially within the already difficult constraints of monogamy. To add an unnecessary prudishness is to sometimes invite disaster and inhibit a couple's bonding process.

Many students of Jewish thought cite the Code of Jewish Law, which advises husbands and wives to minimize direct oral contact with the genitals, and to never stare at them. (Staring leads to erotic parts of the body becoming as exciting as an elbow.) Students of Jewish thought also may point to the rulings in the code which say that for a man to kiss his wife in the genital region is lewd (thereby prohibiting cunnilingus) and that wasted seed is a severe prohibition (thereby prohibiting fellatio).

To see these pronouncements as laws is a travesty. In Judaism the more conservative sexual rulings are given only as advice. The great medieval Jewish codifier Maimonides advised husbands and wives to abstain from overindulgence in nonmissionary positions. At the same time, he confirmed that the actual law was: "A man's wife is permitted to him and therefore, whatever he and his wife wish to pursue sexually, they may do. They may have intercourse whenever it pleases them and he may kiss any organ he wishes, and he may have intercourse in a natural or unnatural manner."

The definition of holiness in sex is anything that serves to bring a husband and wife closer together, barring intentional destruction of sperm and sex during menstruation and a week thereafter. A religious wife has every right to refrain from oral sex if she feels uncomfortable, and a husband should never push her to do anything that repels her. That doesn't mean he can't try, lovingly, to persuade her--just that neither spouse should base their objections on piety. The purpose of oral sex is not to destroy the seed. It is to try something new and pleasurable, something that will cause husband and wife to increase their dependency on each other and lessen their dependency on strangers.

The Married Man and Masturbation

During a debate at Oxford against a psychosexual counselor, my opponent launched a diatribe against me for offering that masturbation lessens our dependency on our partners. She was adamant that, on the contrary, the more we masturbate, the better our sex lives become. "People who don't masturbate are the most sexually repressed people around, and they are also the worst lovers," she said. David, a businessman I came to know, favored masturbation because he traveled constantly. Although he was trying to become more religious, he scoffed at any prohibition.

"Tell me what you think is better, Shmuley," he said. "I have to go on long business trips. We have two small children at home, so my wife cannot always accompany me. Is it better that I sleep with strange women or that I masturbate to those movies they have in hotels? I would never cheat on my wife, but I'm not made of wood."

His argument gave me an opening: "Who says you are meant to be away from your wife for weeks at a time? You are telling me you need sexual release. Masturbation allows you to be away from your wife. But if you refrained and had no other sexual outlet, you would have to come home. Your marriage is more important than your business, and your sexual dependency on your wife reminds you of that always."

Masturbation is certainly not kosher. The most common modern argument in favor of it (and one that is advanced almost exclusively by female experts) is that it is unfair that a woman should have to serve as her husband's exclusive outlet for sex. A woman, they say, should not have to wait for her husband to pleasure her, which most of the time he fails to, do anyway. Since most surveys contend that women have stronger orgasms masturbating than during intercourse, why should this pleasure be denied them?

Often the problem with experts is that they focus on details and miss the bigger picture. What David is doing is not neutral and harmless. It has grave consequences for his marriage. One of the most beautiful moments of marriage is when a husband and wife who have been forcibly separated reunite after longing to be in the same bed again. There are few moments as passionate or, as powerful as that night when all the pent-up sexual tension erupts. By masturbating, David is allowing his sexual steam to escape. Imagine how his wife feels. If he were not sitting in front of those blue movies, he would return voraciously hungry for her. As it stands, their life remains unmarked by the long separation. In a sense, he has cheated on his wife because he is meant to make her feel loved and attractive.

A Brief Word on Modesty

It is sometimes argued that modesty prohibits certain sexual practices. Pious people who dress modestly because they think that lusting after the body is ungodly have it all wrong. The reason God commands us to dress modestly is so that the natural power of the body to attract remains intact. Sex must always be a journey of discovery fueled by curiosity. When watching a BBC documentary on the western Amazon rain forest becomes more interesting than watching your wife undress, you know your marriage has had it. Menachem Meiri, one of medieval Jewry's greatest rabbis, declared: "Although a wife must be modest in public, her loss of all modesty in private is not a contradiction to this in any way, because the idea of modesty in public is that she preserve her feminine charm for her husband." Notice that the Ten Commandments prohibit you from lusting after your neighbor's wife, but offer no prohibition against lusting after your own wife.

Kosher Sex Toys

One of the most precious and important laws within the Jewish guidelines for lovemaking is that no one may fantasize about anyone other than his or her spouse during sexual intercourse. What kind of intimacy is it when you are thinking of your spouse's body as a mere form of friction? At the same time, isn't it better that a couple rejuvenate deadened sexual interest with marital aids than watch some boring television, turn off the lights and go to sleep? The answer is yes. But there is a clear distinction between marital aids and pornography. Any erotic device which causes us to be more focused on our spouse, however outlandish, may be used. An example is a wife buying sexy lingerie to stimulate her husband. I even know of one very old and respected Rabbi from Russia who, when a husband told him that he was losing sexual interest in his wife, gave the man very explicit ideas about what he might buy (naturally, this Rabbi is popular among his congregants).

The same can be said of sexual toys and devices which allow a couple to expand their sexual play. This may not be everyone's cup of tea, but that doesn't make it unkosher. If a store that sells pornography can truly become a marital-aid shop, then the existence of such places should be applauded. Every form of lingerie, mirror on the ceiling or plastic object that helps break a pattern of monotony is kosher. At the same time, any form of explicit sexual material that leads a husband and wife to focus on someone or something other than each other is harmful.

The truth is, we really don't even need pornography to get sexually stimulated when we become bored with our spouses, and here is the proof. In the past few years, there has been an explosion of amateur pornographic material. The biggest sellers are not the professionally made videos of beautiful and shapely men and women yelling at the top of their lungs. Rather, they are ordinary housewives filmed by their husbands. In other words, what the guy down the street wants most to see is your wife taking off her clothes. So, then, why are you bored with her? Of course it's because you've seen her a thousand times and want something new. Seeing your neighbor's wife take off her bra--now that would be damned exciting!

But you, and not your neighbor, should be having those dirty thoughts about your wife. And acting upon them. Rather than buying a video or magazine that is an insult to your wife, go out together and get erotic things and acquire ideas that bring newness to your marriage. Far better to take photographs and make videos of yourselves together, if you feel you truly need external aids to jump-start your passion, than to sit together and watch strangers.

I once made this argument about pornography versus marital aids during a seminar in London for Jewish married couples. Little did I know there was a reporter in the audience. The next morning, a newspaper appeared with the headline: Rabbi advocates opening of more sex shops around Britain. I was not the most popular man in my religious community that day. I wrote a letter to the newspaper correcting the report, and emphasizing that I had supported the idea of marital-aid shops, not sex shops.

A week later I received a letter from the owner of a string of sex shops asking if I would give my official rabbinical seal of approval if he changed his advertising to say their purpose was to help married couples. I was prepared to go ahead with the outlandish idea, on three conditions. First, he had to rid his shops of all pornography. Second, he had to restrict access to married people. Third, he had to make me a 50 percent partner. He turned me down on all conditions. The point is that sexuality pulls us outside ourselves. It is not at all private or solitary, or something we can fully enjoy on our own.

Sexual Loss

A few years ago I saw the movie Total Recall with a friend. While I marveled at Arnold Schwarzenegger's proficiency with a ray gun, my friend claimed he was more impressed by the plot. "It's about memory being the essence of human personality," he said. "You can alter a person radically just by changing his memory."

"I've often thought," he continued, "that when I meet the woman of my dreams we should both have partial lobotomies. Then we could wipe out the memory of our old lovers and love each other exclusively."

He was speaking to the age. By the time people get married these days, there is the latent, lurking entanglement of premarital sex. It would be unnatural not to feel exceedingly close to someone after you have sex. But with premarital sex, that is not meant to be. People stifle the powerful emotions that should flow in the wake of intimacy.

It is simply not natural to sustain the loss of a close relative and to be back at work a couple days later, smiling at colleagues. Similarly, it cannot be healthy for adults to consciously suppress the emotions that are born of sexual congress. The repeated disappointment of breaking up with boyfriends or girlfriends snuffs out an essential part of us. We become hardened from the pain, unable to trust anyone all that much. And it shows. People marrying today surrender only parts of themselves, incrementally, to ensure that they never get hurt again. When a problem crops up that in times gone by could not have severed a married couple, the modern husband and wife find themselves torn apart.

God's Gift to Women

Men have a terrible fear of committing to marriage, one of the foremost causes of which is a falsely inflated opinion of themselves. They have this uncanny knack of believing that every woman in every situation is interested in them. Furthermore, many young (and not so young) men feel that by taking themselves off the market they would be depriving hundreds of women. It is therefore almost an act of cruelty for them to pledge allegiance to one woman.

At Oxford I hear this refrain all the time. "Did you see the way that clerk handed me my change? I could tell she wanted me." "You know Melody, who lives across the hall from me? Although she has never even said hello and often crosses herself and throws salt over her back when she passes by, I can tell from the way she dropped her key as she walked by my room last week that she can't wait to have me." "Did you hear how that waitress asked me if I want milk and sugar? I have that effect on all women."

If a man felt he would be lucky to have the affections of even one woman--who would love him despite his faults--he would feel privileged should anyone agree to marry him. It is humility that allows us to share a healthy relationship with another human being, and it is arrogance that makes it impossible to commit.

Sometimes I wonder whether women understand what their agreement in the Sixties to commitment-free sex did for them. It ensured that men could get sex readily and without strings attached, which gives men no good reason to commit. As one attractive 29-year-old who had broken up with a longstanding boyfriend said to me, "If we women all agreed not to give men any sex, they'd be lining up at the altar."

Another friend flew in from Miami to discuss how unhappy she was. She had been living with her boyfriend for four years, though he had promised that they would marry after two. Women today have forgotten what a real compliment is. A guy will tell a girl he loves her and that he wants to share his life with her, that she is beautiful and that he cannot live without her. She is impressed and flattered. So she saddles up her stuff and brings it around to his place. But there is only one compliment a man can give a woman: "Will you be my wife?" It comes with a price he is prepared to pay. All other compliments are just words.

The Torah obligates a man to pleasure his wife so that she reaches sexual climax before him.

There is nothing more alluring than watching your spouse come alive as a sexual being.