Published: 21 March 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Dubbed “America’s rabbi”, (largely by Boteach himself), the one-time Republican candidate for Congress, frantic A-lister, reality TV star, father of nine and author who popularised the term, “Kosher sex,” rocked the ABC’s Q&A two weeks ago with his plea to revive a flagging institution and warn that “sex is broken.” Even feminists such as Fairfax columnist Wendy Squires applauded him, for “encapsulating my view on modern mating, dating and relating”.
Well, who doesn’t fret about the corrupting influence of porn on young men, and the challenge of sustaining passion over the long haul?
But, impolite as this may sound, few things are as pacifying as a rabbi cheering me on in the bedroom. There’s a “spiritual” dimension to lust between a husband and wife, Rabbi Shmuley told The Washington Post in 2014, and it sounds perfectly edifying— except, practically speaking, the moment I hear a rabbi rabbiting on about the spiritual dimension of shagging, an involuntary response takes hold whereby I find my fingers urgently pressing on… the remote, for one almighty Netflix binge, so that I can lose myself in narrative arcs redolent with sublimated sexual tension, rising toward climax, deferring gratification till the next hour-long episode, and so-on, to the series end and until the scratchy dawn.
And thus cleanse my restless imagination from the icky intrusion of a RABBI TALKING ABOUT SEX.
Even if Boteach has an enlightened approach to same-sex relationships, acknowledging the biblical prohibition but advocating inclusion to the extent his Orthodoxy allows.
Even if a rabbi talking about sex is way more palatable than a cleric from either of the two other monotheistic faiths talking about sex, given Judaism’s relatively healthy attitude to carnality; Halachic texts acknowledging female sexual pleasure, the erotic exuberance of Song of Solomon and the Kabballah, all that. For me, the choice is still analogous to being asked in the dental chair which instrument I’d like probing my mouth.
None, thanks!
I’m not squeamish about Jewish flavoured sex tips. I welcome the buba-esque Dr Ruth egging me on. And while I bat for the conventional team, the mere thought of Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel and her blockbuster TED talks on adultery, gets me going. The point being: both women have great qualifications.
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Jewish sex, however, differs from kosher sex, which is almost an oxymoron. Sex at its most compelling flirts with danger, transgression, abandon, anarchy. How can such a force be koshered, with all the obedience to ancient authority and libido-killing heimishness that implies? Orthodox couples may be inclined to seek relationship advice from rabbis; but what’s in it for the rest of us?
Ah well, America’s rabbi, a former spiritual advisor to Michael Jackson no less, is an unabashed Judaiser. Sort of. His book, Lust for Love, is co-written with former Playboy model and Baywatch star Pamela Anderson. And his own disdain for Playboy— its slogan “entertainment for men” is “degrading to women”—clearly wasn’t an obstacle to the magazine publishing extracts from Kosher Sex.
“When I wrote Kosher Sex,” Boteach wrote in Jewish Journal in January, “I advocated for even non-Jewish couples to observe the biblical period of 12 days of sexual separation each month in marriage — the laws of Niddah.”
He spins it well, as clerics do. The primitive misogyny informing Jewish laws about menstruation becomes, in Boteach’s hands, an ingenious “erotic obstacle,” fuelling desire between couples. (And making conception more likely, or is that mere coincidence?) Same goes for covering up flesh: “far from its purpose being to suppress women’s bodies, modesty enhances eroticism.
“In the end, the sexual revolution allowed feminine sexual wisdom to be eclipsed by masculine sexual exploitation,” he writes in Journal. “It also went against the grain of Judaism’s noble attempt to domesticate the male and inspire him to channel his erotic focus onto one woman, his wife.”
In Boteach’s world view, Miley Cyrus’ near-naked writhing sends a message: “whatever talents a woman may have, her greatest asset is her vagina.” Why must Cyrus be seen as sending any message other than a message about her own desire for assets in a market that places value on most things, including vaginas?
Wives, Shmuley, writes, long to be ravished, to feel like they’ve been “chosen”. This implies they’re not really the ones doing the choosing. In much of Boteach’s writing, men’s “erotic focus” smothers women’s sexual agency.
What he’s offering is sex with strings attached. Not simply the strings of marital monogamy, but political strings, concealed in avuncular hipness, made to look as natural as Eden.
For all the unintended consequences of the sexual revolution, rarely a day goes by without me giving thanks for the pill, for abortion rights, for nude beaches, for uncensured pre-marital sex, for freedom, especially for women, from bodily shame and sexual control. For sex that’s blissfully treif.
