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.
