"In my book, Standing Again at Sinai, I discussed some of the complicated history of Jewish perspectives on sexuality as they affect women. The rabbis, I argued, were deeply ambivalent about sexual desire. They called it yetzer hara, the evil inclination, and saw it as both necessary to the existence of the world and potentially disruptive and destructive. As an essential component of human personality, sexuality needed to be carefully channeled and controlled. But what were the mechanisms of that control and at whom was control aimed? On the one hand, men were perceived as more able to control themselves and were, therefore, responsible for reigning in their urgent sexuality and avoiding occasions that might trigger inappropriate thoughts and uncontrollable passion. On the other hand, simply by virtue of existing, women were the ubiquitous temptations, the sources and symbols of illicit desire. To speak of control was necessarily to speak of women—of the need to cover women, to avoid women, and to contain women in proper families where their threat was minimized if it could not be entirely overcome. "
Judith Plaskow, Rethinking Jewish Sexual Ethics
God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public Life
Recent Comments