Off the Shelf: The intimate lives of Jews

By Rabbi Rachel Esserman

“Oh, the subtitle is a pun,” I thought after receiving a copy of “Sex: Jewish Positions” edited by Miriam Goldmann, Joanne Rosenthal and Titia Zoeter (Hirmer Publishers/University of Chicago Press). Then I realized that “Sex” was not a book of essays offering different ideas about sex from major branches of Judaism, but rather a catalogue with essays based on art exhibits that appeared in the Joods Museum (which is located in Amsterdam) and the Judisches Museum Berlin. In addition to 12 essays on four different topics (“Procreation and Pleasure,” “Desire and Control,” “Sexuality and Power” and “Erotism and the Divine”), the book features 80 color plates of artwork, a large portion of which cannot be printed in a family-friendly newspaper. 

A short essay by museum directors Hetty Berg (Berlin) and Emile Schrijver (Amsterdam) notes that “most of what we know about Jewish sexuality today comes from movies and TV shows – and unsurprising, that knowledge rarely rises about stereotypes. Disrupting these stereotypes is the goal of our exhibit.” Using old and new artworks, and some very unexpected objects, they attempt to show that Jewish sexuality is “not set in stone” and, in fact, is far more adaptable and flexible than one might expect. I’m not sure if they completely succeed in their goal, but many of the essays offered interesting ideas about Jews and sex.

The fact that there are two major traditional approaches to Jewish sexuality can be found in Evyatar Marienberg’s essay “Traditional Sexual Instruction.” Although he discusses sex found in the Bible, the most interesting section looks at the different approaches to sex in the Talmud and Kabbalah. The talmudists’ texts focus on the practical aspects of privacy or procreation. The kabbalists, on the other hand, saw sex as a way to “imitate divine realities.” For example, he writes, “If the Talmud spoke about Friday night as an appropriate time for relations, rationalists explained this by referring to the burdens of weekdays, while mystics saw it as related to the cosmic movement of souls.”

In an interview with Talli Rosenbaum, “Sex is Force,” Rosenbaum offers three different ways that rabbis have spoken/written about sex. The first seems to fall on the side of asceticism, what she calls “minimiz[ing] the experience. Other sources speak to the pleasures of sex, seeing it as divine gift and holy obligation.” Rambam (Maimonides) suggests moderating between these two positions. Rosenbaum notes that “this approach recognizes that Jews have sex, just as all humans do, and engage in sex for pleasure as well as procreation.”

Different and controversial approaches to sexuality can be found in Jay Michaelson’s “The Eruption of Eros in Jewish Messianic Heresies.” Michaelson looks at the sexual transgressions that occurred in the Jacob Frank and Shabbetai Zevi messianic movements. Both men are considered false messiahs who believed the way to bring about the messianic age was to transgress traditional rabbinic approaches to sex. Most interestingly, the author believes that a remnant of those movements still lives today: “As benign as the chanting of a Hasidic niggun may seem today, it was, at its inception, understood as an ecstatic, (spiritually) erotic ritual, a new, normative translation of Sabbatean religious grammar. The logic of eroticized mysticism remains, but sublimated into spiritual practices that are today so commonplace as to be scarcely recognizable.”

Other essays focus on women’s sexuality, sexual sciences (with essays about Sigmund Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld), sex in the “Song of Songs,” sex and gender, and reproductive ethics. As with many anthologies, some sections will be of more interest than others.

As for the artwork: Much of it is difficult to describe in a family-friendly newspaper. My favorite drawing makes use of the T-shirts that say, “I’m with stupid,” but which points to a part of the anatomy I’m not allowed to describe. However, I would not have understood the message being delivered by much of the artwork without the explanations that accompanied them. That doesn’t mean they aren’t well done or interesting to look at. But, for example, I would not have thought the photo of an Israeli soldier showed “hypermasculinity and homoerotiscm to challenge normative Israeli constructions of the ideal Jewish man” if its caption that hadn’t mentioned that. Some artists’ works feature mezuzot, teffilin and ketubot to offer their commentary about sexual aspects of Judaism.

Readers interested in sex, gender and Judaism will find something of interest in “Sex: Jewish Positions.” I know that others might be offended by the ideas and images offered, but the scholarship is excellent and the artwork intriguing and, at times, thought provoking. It will be interesting to see if an American museum offers its own version of these exhibits someday.