Sanctified Sex by Zion Noam Sachs;

Author:Zion, Noam Sachs; [Zion, Noam Sachs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PSY016000 Psychology / Human Sexuality, REL105000 Religion / Sexuality & Gender Studies, REL040010 Religion / Judaism / Rituals & Practice
Publisher: The Jewish Publication Society

Kanievsky’s Grateful Love versus Romantic Love

In attempting to shape his students’ love lives, Kanievsky polemicizes against two alternative marital ideals, both of which he rejects. On the one hand, he is reacting against Hasidic ideologies of kedushah, whose practices of marital asceticism appeal to his students’ aspirations for personal sanctity and self-sacrifice. On the other hand, he is also fearful of the opposite extreme—modernity’s secular cult of promiscuity that tempts his yeshiva students to indulge in romantic passion. While the Bible and Talmud often speak frankly about the role of romantic love fueled at least in part by sexual desire (e.g., Jacob’s love for Rachel), Kanievsky rejects romantic affection (libido) because, he believes, it is polluted with voluptuous craving. In Haredi courtship and mate selection the mystique of love and sexual attraction should play no role, though within marriage, the husband and wife are obligated to arouse and satisfy each other’s erotic desires.

There is a fine but important distinction to be made here. For moderns, Kanievsky’s positive orientation to sexual desire and emotional sensitivity to one’s spouse is automatically identified with romantic love. Yet the rhetoric of the whole Haredi world repudiates that term as a pejorative epithet for the superficiality and licentiousness of modern ideals of love and as a failed basis for mate selection that leads, as they think, to high divorce rates in the West. Rabbi Hayyim Hirschensohn (early 20th century, New Jersey) says our Biblical father Jacob’s love for Rachel was “not like love in the American tradition that comes before marriage and dies with [the onset of] marriage.”25 In the twenty-first century Rabbi Gamliel Rabinowitz, the head of the Sha’ar HaShamayim Yeshiva in Jerusalem, teaches that “love comes after marriage.” (Any love before marriage, he says, “arises from sin. Generally there should be no room for ‘feelings’ before marriage.”26)

For Kanievsky, Haredim do not reject romance because they are ascetic about sexual desire or because sex should only be directed to procreation without emotional or erotic love. Rather, Haredim promote a mature love of “giving,” not an immature romantic love of “taking” pleasure. The mature love of a married couple expresses itself in devoted gestures of caring, including providing satisfying intercourse, though it is “not motivated by desire at all, but by a good character trait (gratitude) that obligates us.”27 In that spirit, Kanievsky explicates the Talmudic maxim, “One should love his wife as [he loves] his body, and honor her more than his body” (TB Yevamot 62b):

It is clear that the Rabbis do not mean that you should love your wife motivated by the natural love of women, but rather . . . by the love of friendship (ahavat haverim), as it says, for she is your friend, your covenantal wife (Mal. 2:14). [Like same sex friends] the couple share common interests [and provide mutual benefits]. Each aids and is aided by the other. This is a love flowing from gratitude for goodness received (hakarat ha-tov).

One should imagine in his mind that if he had not found such a woman, he would have remained isolated and miserable (galmud).

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