What is Torah Sexuality?
What are Torah gender roles?
What does the Torah say about marriage?
What does the Torah teach about family?
We explain these through analyzing Bible and Talmud stories. We delve into rabbinic lore and Cabala.
The most ancient gender clash was that of Adam and Lilith, his first wife, according to the Cabala. We discuss this at length, including the various incarnations of Lilith, as the mighty meritocracy force meandered into history and fulfillment in various great women.
What are people and how do they get along with each other? This is a great mystery. The bible tells us terrible stories about brothers killing each other, such as Cain and Abel. The brothers of Joseph sold him to Egypt as a slave. What went wrong? We study the biblical stories to find out.
Here are the pillars and problems of people's lives: self-actualization, human value, pride, human relations, love and hate. How easy it is to flash from love to hate, from pride to despair, from relating well to another to anger and vicissitude.
We compare Torah ideas with secular concepts and practices regarding sexuality, gender and marriage. What must religious people know? How can others benefit from Torah teachings about sexuality, gender and marriage?
We encounter the greatest of mysteries: What does G-d see in people of value that He created the universe for them and watches their every thought, word and deed? And when we absorb this stupendous idea and come to love G-d for it, how do we understand it more deeply?
Go www.secretscale.com to see Rabbi Eidensohn's latest book Secret of the Scale: Torah Insights into Marriage, Human Harmony, Self-Actualization and the Art of Appreciating People
Will
our children learn about sexuality from the Torah, from G-d, or
will they learn from snickering friends and por-nography?
Our site will teach young and old the Torah's ideas about sexuality by utilizing biblical and Talmudic stories, concepts from the Zohar and holy works, and secular and scientific con-cepts in human relations.
| Dear Friend Years ago, when my older children began leaving home and bringing blessing into the world, I sat at the Passover Seder family gathering surrounded by happiness that only a grandparent can know. But I was sad. I was sad because I worked with collegiates and singles who had serious gender problems. I dealt with secular people who, when they became my age, often had to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives and broken marriages. And I asked, "Why can't other people be happy?" That was in the eighties. Things are much worse now. And my sadness grows. This website is an effort to share the wealth. It has something to say for the secular person. It has something to say to the religious person. It is a study of Torah sexuality. I hope you will gain something from it. This website was inspired by Joel who is now recovering from surgery. In the merit of his good ideas and wonderful inspiration may he have a speedy and pleasant recovery. Let me speak first to the secular person. Then I will speak to the religious person. But everyone should listen to both talks, because each of us is both religious and secular, because we have souls, and because we live in a secular culture. Therefore, the problems of the spiritual and the secular really apply to some degree to everyone. Let us turn now to thoughts about the Kinsey report at this link. When you are finished, you may return here. A Tale of Two Ladies We turn now to a "Tale of Two Ladies". One of them is someone like my daughter, and the other is a secular girl or even a religious girl growing up in a secular, say collegiate, environment. Secular Sis, we will call her, goes to public school. In the earliest grades, she reads books with women police and fire fighters. She thinks, "Oh, one day I will be a police." Secular Sis watches television, and she notices, even from the ads, that women must be sexy. So Secular Sis becomes very self-conscious, and is envious of the pretty girls. She tries so hard to be lovelier than she is that the American Psychological Association in February of 2007 said that commercials about sexy women are destroying young girls emotionally, psychologically, and even physically. Some starve to get thin. Thin and lovely is what a girl must be. My Daughter has a childhood. She has parents and teachers who watch like a hawk what she reads. No television. No magazines with "be sexy or else" messages. My Daughter grows up as she is, and accepts Heaven's decree about her endowments. In our community, a man who looks primarily for a pretty woman is a dog. She knows that, and whatever she looks like, she relies on her parents to find for her the right match. Secular Sis, and the boys in her neighborhood and school, are saturated with "fun" and "sex." At a very early age, Secular Sis surrenders. The boy had a great time, but not Secular Sis. A woman who gives all to a boy hates men, it is that simple. Somewhere inside of her is a pride that will never be extinguished. My Daughter will never hate a man for that reason. Anyone who wants her is going to wait a long time, long enough for him to be so desperate for a wife that he may just behave. Everything is possible. Sex must be the end product not the beginning of the process. A man who wants a woman for her body has a prostitute. But if a man wants a woman because G-d wants families, and he finds, among other things, a lovely woman, his wife will become "the crown of her husband." Torah sexuality is a glue that attaches the practitioner to another and to heaven. We elaborate on this "glue" in our discussion of rabbinical and Cabalistic teachings on sexuality. Sexuality is a great pleasure, like eating, but like eating, it can create obesity, even serious illnesses, when done the wrong way. Too much pleasure from eating and sexuality drain the pleasure mechanism so that it must be revved up with greater and greater dosages of excitement, eventually even by doing perverse things, and still, the addiction is not relieved, until one goes deeper and deeper into the until something collapses in the mind, body, or emotions. We discuss the pleasure of sexuality here.
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