by Joel Derfner
This is all a very idyllic view of the matter, to be sure. Yes, for many Jews the question is often more important in theory than the answer, but nowadays that doesn’t stop crazy people from feuding viciously with other crazy people because one of them used the wrong knife to kill a chicken. But if we’re talking about the Judeo-Christian tradition—or, we might as well say, the Judaic tradition—then I see no reason not to go by what we think it used to be rather than what it happens to be today. Why shouldn’t we be able to Norman Rockwellize our past just as delusionally as the goyim?
“So what I’m thinking,” I said to Mike, having explained all this, “is that, if ‘Judaic tradition’ means something completely different from ‘Judeo-Christian tradition,’ maybe the ‘Judaic tradition of marriage’ means something completely different from the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition of marriage.’”
“Maybe it means that you have to obey me.”
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Sunday, September 19
The answer, I was not surprised to learn after another day at the library, is yes, the Judaic tradition of marriage means something very, very different. Very, very, very different.
Divorce and remarriage, for example, have always been part of the Jewish marital tradition (in contrast to Jesus, who said, “Whosoever shall put away his wife and marry another committeth adultery against her, and if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery,” I’m looking at you, Newt Gingrich). The Talmudic divorce laws are, unfortunately, pretty sexist, but there are also some surprising exceptions. On the one hand, only a man can initiate a divorce, which suggests that an unhappy wife has little recourse. On the other hand, the ketubah is a serious matter: If a man divorces his wife and it’s her first marriage, he has to pay her, depending on the authority you consult, either a) enough money to buy a minimum of a hundred goats, b) enough money for the interest to buy a minimum of a hundred goats a year, or c) enough money for the interest to support her for the rest of her life. Subsequent marriages have the same rules but it’s only fifty goats instead of a hundred. (I must point out that the goat is my unit of measurement, not the Talmud’s. The actual sum involved is two hundred zuzim, but it’s been centuries since anybody knew how much a zuz was worth, so I went by the traditional Passover song about a child whose father buys a goat for two zuzim. According to this reckoning, two hundred zuzim would buy a hundred goats. A goat these days will run you somewhere between $100 and $350, which means the ketubah was worth up to $70,000, but that would be in B.C. dollars, which don’t exist; the best I can do is to say that $70,000 in 1800 A.D. would be worth $885,710.32 today, but the calculation is artificial enough that I’d rather just stick with the goats.)
Furthermore, even if her husband doesn’t want to divorce her, a woman who wants to leave him can sue to have the court force him to do so, and there were at least some periods during Jewish history during which she pretty much automatically won. If the court finds in favor of the wife and the husband refuses to divorce her, he’s beaten until he consents. The list of reasons a woman can sue for divorce is extensive and includes things like providing her clothing inappropriate for her age, and, stunningly, failing to meet his sexual obligations to her.
The sages make this very clear: sexual pleasure is the woman’s right and the man’s obligation. Different frequencies are required depending on the man’s occupation, so that a man of independent means, for example, has to offer his wife sex every day (though if he has several wives he just has to rotate through them daily); the Mishnah goes on to tell us that the frequency with which other men must offer their wives sex is, “for laborers, twice a week; for ass-drivers, once a week; for camel-drivers, once in thirty days; for sailors, once in six months. These are the rulings of Rabbi Eliezer.” A man has a duty to make sure his wife enjoys sex; he also has to keep an eye out for indications that she’s in the mood and offer it to her without her having to ask for it.
More succinctly put, the Talmud says that a man has to have sex with his wife on demand or she can divorce him and take him for a whole lot of goats.
Now I know why I think of myself as the girl.
Adultery, on the other hand, unlike divorce and women’s sexual pleasure, is an issue on which we’re in perfect agreement with Christians; after all, it says it right there in the ninth Commandment, Exodus 20:14: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” If a woman commits adultery her husband can either divorce her (paying her the appropriate number of goats) or sue her. If he sues her and she’s found guilty, she’s stoned to death, unless she’s the daughter of a priest, in which case she’s burned alive; either way, the man with whom she committed adultery magically dies at the same time. The Talmud is vague on the mechanics of this, but I find myself hoping that it’s just like the Skeksis and the Mystics in The Dark Crystal, and wherever he is he’s just suddenly pummeled to death with invisible rocks or he spontaneously combusts (I should note that my friend the Orthodox gay ex-rabbi calligrapher says he doesn’t remember this, but it came from a source that was full of other stuff he said was on the money, so I stand by it). If the woman is found innocent, her husband is flogged and has to pay her two years’ worth of a skilled laborer’s salary.
(All of this is theoretical, by the way; after the temple was destroyed there were no priests and therefore no priests’ daughters to burn alive.)
According to the Talmud if the man is married, and the woman is single, then it’s not adultery. A man can have as many wives as he desires, although with a mind to his obligation to give each one sexual pleasure (remember, he rotates through the list) rabbis recommend four as a practical upper limit, so that no wife goes too long without the opportunity for sex. Premarital sex, although the rabbis frowned on it from a societal point of view, is actually fine as far as God is concerned.
Judaism tends to be pretty sex-positive in general; the Vilna Gaon says that one ought to get an erection while studying Torah, and the eighteenth-century founder of Hasidic Judaism explains that the reason Jews rock back and forth while praying is that prayer is sex with the feminine aspect of God.
Whoops. Mike’s home. Time to argue about what proportion of the cupcakes for the reception will be chocolate. I myself don’t see the need for more than two or three non-chocolate cupcakes, but Mike has promised me a persuasive argument for a one-third chocolate, one-third lemon, and one-third red velvet split.
No ketubah yet, but it turns out that, according to the Talmud, a ketubah written on the horn of a cow is valid, so we may have more options than I realized.
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Monday, September 20
Prostitution—this has to be the last day I spend at the library, because it’s really cutting into my HGTV-Urban-Oasis-Giveaway-card-filling-out time—is technically against the rules. However, the Talmud tells some interesting stories about rabbis who, as they traveled from city to city, would send ahead a week or so before their arrival so that when they got to town they could ask, “Who will be my wife for the night?” The town would produce a suitable woman (it’s unclear to me whether she had any say in the matter), the rabbi would marry her, they would spend the night doing the sorts of things one imagines they might do, and then the next day they would divorce, at which point the town would pay her the divorce settlement of a hundred goats (and she would be free to marry again if she liked). Which seems like a high price to pay even for a night of unimaginable ecstasy, but hey, I paid $12.50 to see Season of the Witch, so who am I to talk?
The Talmud doesn’t love jacking off. Here’s one place where the goyim have it easier than we do, at least as far as men go. Judaism takes very seriously God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply,” and, while few sages go so far as to forbid masturbation entirel
y, nobody’s particularly fond of the idea of spilling seed. (Rabbi Ishmael commands, “Thou shalt not practice masturbation either with hand or with foot”; when I got back from the library this afternoon I spent twenty minutes trying to maneuver myself into a position from which I could masturbate with my foot. When I finally managed it, I was good for about ten seconds before feeling spasms of excruciating pain in some leg muscle I didn’t know I had, so all I can say is that Rabbi Ishmael must have been one flexible bastard. Luckily my failure did not impede my ability to write the cards for the HGTV Urban Oasis Giveaway.) Here again the law is mute when it comes to women, so apparently they’re free to masturbate to their hearts’ content.
Anal and oral sex are both fine. “Meat which comes from the slaughterhouse,” points out one rabbi when asked about this, “may be eaten salted, roasted, cooked, or boiled; so with fish from the fishmonger.” And what about the fact that a male orgasm during anal or oral sex spills seed nonprocreatively? Apparently this isn’t a problem “unless it is his intention to destroy the seed and it is his habit always to do so. However, if it is occasional and the desire of his heart is to come upon his wife in an unnatural way [i.e., anally or orally], it is permitted.”
When it comes to abortion—not that Mike and I are likely to have to confront the question, but what the hell, it was only a few more pages of reading—for the first forty days a fetus is “considered to be mere water,” and the majority opinion seems to be therefore that abortion during that time is no problem. After that, the fetus is alive, but still most certainly not a person, and its life is absolutely less important than its mother’s. Though there were some conservatives who dissented, most rabbis agreed that the moment at which it becomes a human being is when it has come halfway out of its mother’s body; others went further still and argued that a newborn isn’t human until its thirteenth day. I don’t suppose they allowed infanticide if a baby was born and a week later you decided you didn’t want it, but there it is.
On the question of homosexuality the Talmud is, alas, less enlightened than one would wish; anal sex between two men is forbidden (though now that I think about it I didn’t find anything on the books prohibiting anal sex when you’re talking about more thantwo men, so maybe orgies and double penetration are exempt). The sages are silent, however, about any other kind of gay male sex, and, though what little they say about lesbian sex is disapproving, it’s extraordinarily half-hearted. So the Judaic part of the Judeo-Christian tradition allows guys to suck each other’s cocks till the cows come home, and women can do whatever they want with each other as long as they don’t mind the occasional finger being wagged at them.
(Furthermore, for the Biblically prescribed punishment to be carried out, there have to be two witnesses. There’s a great story in the Talmud about a rabbi who catches two guys screwing. He says, wait, you’re screwing, you’re not allowed to do that. And they say, “Yes, but you are one, and we are two.”)
One of the best books I found was by Steven Greenberg, the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi. Called Wrestling with God and Man: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition, it proposes a new interpretation of the Biblical passages we’ve read heretofore as forbidding gay anal sex; Greenberg suggests, compellingly, a reading of the text that leaves sexual orientation and position alone and forbids any intercourse, gay or straight, whose purpose is to degrade or humiliate (which I suppose might be unhappy news to S/M fetishists but my guess is that they’re not too concerned with the Talmudic correctness of what they’re up to). He acknowledges that this gay-friendly interpretation flies in the face of thousands of years of Jewish tradition—except I suspect he would probably also say that it’s completely in line with thousands of years of Jewish tradition, which is all about arguing, reinterpreting, and continually rediscovering the meaning of a living text.
“So what you’re telling me,” said Mike after I shared what I had learned with him, “is that the Judeo-Christian tradition of marriage actually includes divorce, polygamy, prostitution, abortion, and gay oral sex?”
“And gay orgies and double penetration. Don’t forget the gay orgies and double penetration.”
“Somebody better tell Rick Santorum.”
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Tuesday, September 21
Yesterday my stepmother (who when I’d mentioned early on that I had no idea what kind of a wedding I wanted or how many people I wanted to invite looked at me as if I’d just eaten a baby) asked me where we were registered, and I told her about my plan to have a friend email everybody and tell them to donate to charity.
“No,” said my stepmother.
“What do you mean, no? You were supposed to say, how selfless of you.”
“I mean, no. It’s fine to tell people to give money to charity, but you also have to register somewhere, because if people want to give you a real gift, it’s inconsiderate not to let them.”
So, after she remained unswayed despite all my efforts, Mike and I have registered at Z Gallerie, which is the gayest store on the face of the earth.
It is one of the world’s great tragedies that the physical Z Gallerie store in New York is no longer open, because when Mike and I needed a vacation but couldn’t actually take one it used to be almost enough to go there and spend a few hours wandering among their collection of gewgaws, statuary, art, glass, and cute kitchen paraphernalia. Sconces made out of iron, sconces made out of silver, sconces made out of pewter, sconces made out of wood. Art deco end tables. And kitschy stuff, but classy kitsch, like black bat sunglasses for Hallowe’en that actually make you look sexy, or silver moose salt and pepper shakers. At least half of their wares involve either mirrors or feathers or both. Z Gallerie was where Mike got the purple star Christmas tree ornament that started this whole thing in the first place. Really, the best way I can think of to describe Z Gallerie is to say that it sells Gay Stuff. You walk in and you’re breathing gay dust.
So here are some of the things we’ve registered for (following the principle that there should be gifts at all price ranges, for guests at all income levels):
Scented candles (Sandalwood, Tuscan Blood, Madagascar Spice, Bali Lime Papaya, Egyptian Bergamot, Tunisian Jasmine).
A set of glasses whose rims are cut on the diagonal.
A set of copper napkin rings cast to look like pheasants, with feathers attached.
(See? Gay, gay, gay.)
Terracotta placemats.
Mirrored sconces.
Sconces with feathers.
Mirrored sconces with feathers.
Various vases, lamps, and tables united only by their utter gayness.
A copper fountain for the garden. A coffee table that looks like a seventeenth-century expedition trunk. An art deco chaise longue. Carved panels for the wall.
Something that has a mirror and feathers on it and I don’t even know what it’s for but it’s gorgeous.
WE’RE SO GAY.
Meanwhile, I have asked Sarah (my accomplice on the reality show) to send the following email to all the people we’ve invited.
Dear Potential Guest at Mike and Joel’s Wedding,
I hope you’re as excited as I am that Mike and Joel are finally tying the knot. I’m writing because I just had a conversation with them that seems worth mentioning to other guests.
What Mike and Joel want most for their wedding is for us all to be there to share the occasion with them, but for those of us interested in celebrating with a gift, they’re hoping we’ll make donations in their honor to Doctors Without Borders, Freedom to Marry, or another charity important to us. If you can’t bear to mark the event without a physical gift, they’re registered at Z Gallerie, but they would be happy with anything it pleased you to give them.
Sincerely yours,
Sarah
It’s too bad Z Gallerie doesn’t carry Karl Rove’s head.
Of course, they c
ould always get a shipment in next week.
Then they could cover it in mirrors and feathers and sell it to us.
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Wednesday, September 22
And now I wish to God we had been slightly less gay and registered, like normal people, at Sears or something, because our dishwasher broke yesterday, and when the plumber came out to take a look at it he told us we had to replace it. I have therefore moved the portable dishwasher up from the basement so that our dishes can still get clean while we look for a new one.
Mike and I bought this house from the daughters of the ninety-year-old man who had been living in it for fifty years, the last twenty alone after his wife died. When we moved in, the kitchen was an empty box containing literally nothing but a small refrigerator and a beat-up sink, so changing that was high on our list of priorities. I found some cabinetry on Craigslist, and Mike called a plumber about installing appliances. “The sink can go there,” Mike said when we were making plans, “and the stove can go there.”
“What about the dishwasher?” I said.
“What do you mean? We’re not getting a dishwasher.”
“Um, yes, we are.” We had never lived together before, and though we had talked about a lot of the conflicts we might face this was not a problem we had foreseen.
“No, we’re not. I’ve never had a dishwasher, and I wouldn’t use one if we got it.”
“You think having a dishwasher is a sign of moral weakness, don’t you?” I said.