By Danya Ruttenberg
In this detailed choice of essays, a few of modern-day smartest Jewish thinkers discover a huge diversity of basic questions to be able to stability old culture and glossy sexuality.
In the previous couple of a long time a few factors—post-modernism, feminism, queer liberation, and more—have introduced dialogue of sexuality to the fore, and with it an entire new set of questions that problem normal traditions and methods of considering. For Jews of all backgrounds, this has usually ended in an unsatisfied standoff among culture and sexual empowerment.
Yet as The Passionate Torah illustrates, it's of serious significance to work out past this obvious clash if Jews are to include either their non secular ideals and their sexuality. With incisive essays from modern rabbis, students, thinkers, and writers, this assortment not just surveys the demanding situations that sexuality poses to Jewish trust, but additionally bargains clean new views and insights at the altering position of sexuality inside of Jewish theology—and Jewish lives. masking subject matters reminiscent of monogamy, inter-faith relationships, reproductive know-how, homosexuality, and a bunch of different hot-button matters, those writings think about how modern Jews can have interaction themselves, their family, and their culture in a fashion that is either horny and sanctified.
Seeking to deepen the Jewish dialog approximately sexuality, The Passionate Torah brings jointly tremendous thinkers in an try and bridge the space among the sacred and the sexual.
Contributors: Rebecca Alpert, Wendy Love Anderson, Judith R. Baskin, Aryeh Cohen, Elliot Dorff, Esther Fuchs, Bonna Haberman, Elliot Kukla, Gail Labovitz, Malka Landau, Sarra Lev, Laura Levitt, Sara Meirowitz, Jay Michaelson, Haviva Ner-David, Danya Ruttenberg, Naomi Seidman, and Arthur Waskow.
Read Online or Download The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism PDF
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Additional info for The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism
Example text
R. Alexandri said: He will minister judgment to the heathen people by citing as examples the upright ones among them, the example of Rahab, of Jethro, of Ruth. How will he do so? ” And God will ask: “Were you more so than Rahab whose house was in the side of the wall so that on the outside she would receive robbers and then whore with them inside? ” A third group of traditions revises Rahab’s past entirely and transforms her from a harlot to an innocent innkeeper who ultimately married Joshua (BT Megillah 114b).
What shall I do? he said. If you listen to my advice, he replied [the student], divorce her. But, he said [the teacher], she has a large marriage settlement [ketuba]. Said the other [the student]: I will lend you money to give her for her ketuba. So he [the teacher] got up and divorced her and the other [the student] went and married her. When the time for payment arrived and he [the teacher] was not able to pay him, he said: Come and work off your debt with me. So they used to sit and eat and drink while he [the teacher] waited on them, and tears used to fall from his eyes and drop into their cups.
So he [the teacher] got up and divorced her and the other [the student] went and married her. When the time for payment arrived and he [the teacher] was not able to pay him, he said: Come and work off your debt with me. So they used to sit and eat and drink while he [the teacher] waited on them, and tears used to fall from his eyes and drop into their cups. From that hour the judgement of doom was sealed; some say on two wicks in one candle. (Gittin 58a) Divorcing Ba’al 39 Both stories depict marital abuses by men stemming from their unilateral power to divorce, faithfully implementing the rules in Deuteronomy and their source in Genesis.