Profile Rabbi Dovid E. Eidensohn

Showing posts with label challenge for the husband in intimacy wth wife. Show all posts
Showing posts with label challenge for the husband in intimacy wth wife. Show all posts

Sunday, July 8, 2018

The Wife and Marital Relations


Marital Relations

By Rabbi Dovid E. Eidensohn

The gemora in Nedarim 20A brings four kinds of damaged children born from parents whose marital relations lacked modesty. The gemora on the next page 20b reverses this by saying that “a person may do with his wife whatever he chooses.”

The problem is that the previous gemora that blamed immodest marital behavior for producing four kinds of very sick children claimed that the rabbis who said this were “administering angels” the highest form of angels, who were much greater than human beings. If so, the rabbis who argued with these holy rabbis were less than they were, and the law is surely not like those rabbis, but rather, we would accept the thoughts of the rabbis whose holiness made them to be as the administering angels. Furthermore, rabbis so holy as to be as wise as administering angels surely knew more about the formation of children than the rabbis who were less knowledgeable, who had no title to know angelic matters.

Furthermore, the idea that a rabbi who prized marital modesty would make such a bold statement as “a person may do with his wife whatever he chooses” is amazing. And to believe that a person who speaks this way is greater than rabbis who are so holy that they resemble administering angels, is incredible. Yes, the rabbis who disagree with the rabbis who were as administering angels were the greatest rabbis of the Talmud, Rebbe and Rav, but still, their bold statement of turning people loose to do in marital intimacy whatever they want to do is incredible, especially as the gemora quoting them strongly blocks this idea by advising people to abstain from a lot of marital relations. Something is missing here, something very important. This is reinforced by the fact that ladies complained to these great rabbis about the way they were mistreated by their husbands, and the rabbis replied, “What is the difference between you and a fish?” meaning that just as a person may eat a fish with any style of cooking it, the same applies to one’s wife. That is astonishing in the extreme.

Let us return to the statement of the rabbis who disagreed with the rabbis who were as the administering angels. “Anything that a man wants to do with his wife, let him do it. This is similar to a piece of meat that comes from the butcher store. If he wants, he eats it with salt, or fried, or cooked, and the same applies to buying a fish.” But are the greatest rabbis of the Talmud saying that treating a wife is like cooking a fish or a piece of meat? Is it not incredible to insult women like this? We can infer that rabbis even great ones have absolutely no respect for women, or else, we can be honest and say that such a statement requires some serious study, because the Talmud clearly honors women greatly. Let us first establish this, and then, only then, can we attempt to answer our problem with this gemora.

How do we know that the Talmud greatly honors women? First of all, there is a gemora in Berochose, the first volume of the Talmud, that says as follows:[1] “Greater is the trust that HaShem has trusted women more than his trust for men, as it is said, ‘Hear my Voice women of trust, hearken to My words.’”

One of the great classics of the Talmud in Medrash, or studies of the biblical text, is the Tanchuma. We find there in the Torah portion of Pinchas where five women petitioned Moses, the assembled Jewish leaders and senior rabbis, in front of the entire assemblage of Israel, to give them the land owned by their father, because he died and left no sons. G‑d responded to this and ordered that they be given the father’s possessions. This is stated clearly in the Torah[2].

The Medrash Tanchuma then states, “In that generation (of Moses) the women were strong in believing in G‑d, but the men were sinners. We find that Aharon, when pressed by the Egyptian sorcerers among the Israelites at Sinai, who, together with the Jewish Israelite men, were sure that Moses had gone to heaven after the Giving of the Torah by G‑d and died there. Therefore, the sorcerers pressured Aharon to take gold from their hands, because they knew that if he did, it could turn into a Golden Calf that could talk, and inform the Jews that it was the new god for the Jews. When a prominent Jew opposed this, they killed him. And no Jewish men stood up to this idolatry. The men, as a matter of fact, gave huge sums of golden material for the idol, but the women refused to give anything. They had trust in G‑d and did not believe the sorcerers that Moses was dead and it was time to seek a new god. THE WOMEN DID NOTHING TO MAKE THE GOLDEN CALF.”

The Medrash continues, “We find the same difference between men and women regarding the disaster of the senior Jewish princes of the twelve tribes of Israel, who went to Israel to spy it out and returned saying that HaShem cannot bring the Jews to Israel because of the strength of the gentile nations that lived there. But the women trusted in G‑d that He was stronger than those nations, as they had seen, that Moses had personally killed the great giants who protected several of these nations, and had destroyed their armies and divided their conquered territories among the Jews coming into Israel. The women believed what they saw and defied the men by not joining the masses of men who called for the Jews to defy G‑d by returning to Egypt and forgetting about ever going to live in Israel. Rather the women demanded a portion in Israel after the Jews would succeed in conquering it, something they were sure would happen, unlike the men who rebelled against G‑d.”

The Medrash continues, “Therefore, this portion [about the piety of the five ladies] is written in the Torah right after the death of the prophetess Miriam. She saved Moses when he was cast into the river by the Egyptians. From that we see that the men rebelled against G‑d and the women trusted in Him.” The Medrash is not clear in how Miriam was involved in this, but it is indicated in the story of the Jews leaving Egypt and crossing the sea miraculously, where the men stood and sang a song of praise to G‑d, but Miriam gathered all of the women who took musical instruments they had brought with them from Egypt, formed a huge circle, and danced to celebrate the miracle of salvation from the destroyed Egyptian army. The key to that victory was the Jewish women’s faith in G‑d. The men did not bring musical instruments from Egypt, but rather swords. They did not believe that G‑d would save the Jews, but only that the Jews would save themselves with their swords. And when G‑d wiped out the Egyptian army, the Jewish men without any musical instruments, and with no dancing or song, only recited some praise for the divine miracle, but nothing compared to what Miriam did with the women, who danced and sang in a great circle playing the musical instruments they had brought from Egypt, because they trusted in G‑d to save them from the Egyptians. From this we see that the women were superior to the men in their trust in G‑d, as taught in the gemora above and the Medrash we quoted.

All of this is very nice and completely correct, but actually, it makes our problem with the above gemoras even more problematic. How, after all of this, did the men have the right to do what they wanted with their wives, when the wives protested this as insulting or painful? Does not the Torah and the gemora command men “let him make his wife rejoice” meaning, a man must sacrifice his own happiness to make his wife happy[3]. If so, how could men insult women who did not want them to do certain things that could be quite painful? This is a major problem.

We could explain this by quoting the entire passage there about one who must make his wife happy. It says, “When a man takes a new wife, he should not go out with the army, no duty should befall him for any reason. For one year he should be completely bound up with his house, and he should make the wife that he took rejoice.” Note that the entire passage tells us a behavior for the first year of marriage, not anything afterwards. If so, we could say that just as the passage tells us to bring joy to the wife, and as Rashi and the Zohar explain, it means he must make his wife rejoice, not together with him, but separately, even if he is not happy by making he happy. The key is to make the wife, not himself, happy, for the first year. If so, we can say that the passage in Rambam and Shulchan Aruch that a man can do whatever he wants in marital relations with his wife, does not apply to the first year, because then his whole concern is to make her rejoice, and causing her unhappiness with certain marital experiences is surely not to be done the first year. But subsequently, after the first year, if the husband has already shown the wife his great love for her that cancels his own needs, even if he has to spend money on her that he needed for himself, as Rashis Chochmo explains, then the husband may have whatever marital pleasures he really needs with his wife, less he be tempted to sleep with a strange woman. And the wife, realizing this, suffers somewhat and she may go to great rabbis to protest, but the husband must protect himself from going to strange women, even if he has to, after the first year, do things to her that she doesn’t like.

To explain this, we have to go to the source of the statement of that gemora, and quote the entire piece. We find it in the Shulchan Aruch Aruch Chaim 25:2 and the Rambam in Isurei Biah 21:9 who say essentially the same things, so we quote Rambam here: “A man’s wife is permitted to him. Therefore, whatever a man wants to do with his wife, let him do it. He may have relations with her whenever he wants to, and he may kiss her in any part of her body that he so desires, he may sleep with her normally [in the front] or the other way [in the back] as long as he does not emit seed that goes to waste. Nonetheless, it is a sign of piety when a person does not do these things whenever he wants to, but rather sanctifies himself during intimacy…”

This is incredible. It says that the Torah completely permits all of this anytime and anywhere in the woman, and then he says that piety request us, but does not demand from us, that we not do these things, but display a more modest approach to intimacy, unlike the “what difference between women and a fish” taught in the gemora above.

Something is very much out of place, and we must find it.

The answer is as follows. Let us look carefully at the words in the Rambam, which are the words of the Shulchan Aruch, and the true meaning of the very strange gemora about women being fish and meat.

The missing idea is this: A Jewish man has usually only one wife, although in past and long gone generations a man could have more than one wife. But this was rare, even in ancient times. Now, a man with one wife, sometimes is as the “administering angels” meaning, now, something different than what we said before. We said before it means he was as angels who knew about babies and what makes them to be born with blemishes. But now we explain it as something else. A rabbi like the administering angels is a rabbi who has no understanding of the excitement of all kinds of sex. That is an advanced level of holiness, not available for most people, not even for most rabbis. And since most rabbis don’t have this perfection of holiness, they have active evil inclinations, which can very easily connect with a pretty woman with the worse sins. Nearly all men have this imperfection and are not angelic at all, but rather, are endangered by any sight of a pretty woman. The only protection for most men, even great rabbis, is to have the kind of open intimacy with their wives which may not please the wives so much as to completely satisfy the husband, who eats his “fish and meat” and is completely satisfied. The wife may not be totally pleased, and she may even go to the greatest rabbis and complain that her husband did this to her or that to her in intimacy, but if the husband has a choice of doing that or doing it with another women who may be somebody else’s wife, and produce mamzerim, we know why the Rambam and the Shulchan Aruch clearly emphasize the freedom of the man to do what he needs to protect himself from sinning with other women.

We can understand this from the basic language of the Rambam. “All that a man wants to do with his wife, he should do it.” That means exactly what it says. A man has a need for his wife for a certain kind of intimacy. If the husband desires to do this act with his wife, and the wife doesn’t do it with him, for whatever reason, either because she refuses to do it, or he refuses to do it, the desire of the husband doesn’t disappear. It would appear when the husband notices the wrong woman, who may be married to somebody else, but who likes this husband as he likes her. To protect the husband, and his family from disaster, the husband is commanded to do what he wants to do with other women only with his own wife, not with a strange woman, and thus be satisfied in a proper way, and not to feel a need for other women. Because any man who has any kind of sexual need that is not available from his wife for whatever reason, is one step away from Gehenum. So he is not on the level of the administering angels, and is ready to go to a hot place. To save himself and his family, he is told: Do it with your wife. Don’t live in danger.

And the wife must accept this, as if she was a fish or a piece of meat. Better an insult than to find out that her husband is sleeping with a woman married to somebody else, besides her, his own wife.

We now return to the great question that the passage in the Torah instructs a Jewish man “and make your wife happy” which means, as Rashi and the Zohar explain, that he is to make his wife happy even if it costs him his own happiness. He must make her happy, not together with him, but only for her. If so, we surely have a problem with treating his wife like a fish or a piece of meat. What about the mitsvah “and he shall make his wife happy?” What happiness is there in suffering physically and emotionally by being a fish or piece of meat?

But this passage “and he shall make his wife happy” is considered by the Zohar as talking about the first year of marriage, and indeed that is clearly stated in the passage that requires making the wife happy. The first year of marriage must be dedicated not to the passions of the husband but to making his wife happy, not making himself happy. Therefore, if the first year in marriage the husband refrains from certain appetites in intimacy, and yes, this could be a problem, nonetheless, the first year is devoted to one thing, making the wife, not the husband happy. Afterwards, when the husband for the first year has shown the wife his great love for her, despite his inner problems with his biological drives, the wife can more readily accept his love for her, which she clearly witnessed the entire first year, and accept whatever the husband requires to maintain his holiness in marriage. Thus, the first year the husband may refuse his biological appetites in intimacy, to make his wife truly happy with him, even though he may not be happy himself with this making his wife happy and not himself. But after the first year, we do not allow the husband to deny his appetites with his wife, because if he does that, he is endangering himself to end up sleeping with a strange woman. That surely is not what the wife wants. Better for her to be a fish or a piece of meat, but to have a husband who does not sleep with other women, even women married to another man.









[1] Berochose 17A
[2] Bamidbar chapter 27 from passages 1-21
[3] Devorim 24:5