Celebrity Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, spiritual counselor to Michael Jackson, onetime Republican candidate for Congress and author of the best-selling \u201cKosher Sex\u201d and \u201cKosher Jesus,\u201d has a new book for Jews and non-Jews alike: \u201cKosher Lust.\u201d Its provocative subtitle: \u201cLove Is Not the Answer.\u201d The answer, Boteach says, is lust, the God-given fuel for a healthy marriage. Love, he argues, cannot sustain marriage, but lust \u2014 what he calls the unfairly maligned member of the Seven Deadly Sins \u2014 can.<\/p>\n
Boteach, an Orthodox rabbi married to his wife for 26 years, writes in the context of heterosexual marriage, rooting lust in the attraction of opposites. Gay spouses, however, may nonetheless find the rabbi\u2019s advice relevant.<\/p>\n
Religious News Service asked Boteach to explain his lusty theology. Some answers have been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n
Q: You say lust is a stronger foundation for marriage than love. Isn\u2019t that a sad statement ?<\/p>\n
A: I\u2019m not saying there shouldn\u2019t be love in marriage. I\u2019m saying that love should be subordinate to lust in marriage. People love their cars. People love their pets. People have love from their parents, and yet we all leave the cocoon of parental affection because we don\u2019t want just love in life, we want \u2014 women especially \u2014 to be chosen.<\/p>\n
Marriage for women is a profound risk. They take someone else\u2019s name. They\u2019re the ones having babies. Very often women are saddled with two jobs, one at work and one at home. Why would they do this if they already have love from their parents? There\u2019s one thing that their parents cannot give them, and that\u2019s what they crave most: to be desired.<\/p>\n
Q: How do we know if we\u2019re lustful enough? How often should a couple be having sex ?<\/p>\n
A: Let\u2019s not make the mistake of making sex about quantity or about quality. Couples who have an amazing sexual encounter, but only every six months, that\u2019s woefully inadequate. Couples who have sex every single night, but it\u2019s for the national average of four minutes \u2014 inadequate. It\u2019s the degree of passion and the degree of connection that counts.<\/p>\n
Sexuality is the soul of relationship. But our definition of sex is so goal-oriented today that I don\u2019t want to answer the question with a number. We treat sex as a scratch that has to be itched, and it\u2019s one of the reasons we have really bad sex. The answer to what constitutes a normal healthy sex life comes down to the degree that we really feel desirous of the other person. Is a husband really fixated on his wife? When he fantasizes erotically about a woman, is he fantasizing about his wife?<\/p>\n
Q: So, Rabbi, what are your thoughts on orgasm ?<\/p>\n
For most people it\u2019s sad. It\u2019s \u201cdid it produce pleasure or not?\u201d Maybe the pleasure is more intense than a great doughnut, but once you put it merely in the realm of pleasure it can be a solitary experience. And for a lot of people it is a solitary experience, even if it\u2019s not masturbation. A lot of men have sex with their wives and it\u2019s about their own pleasure. Women complain about this all the time.<\/p>\n
But the moment you see orgasm as a transcendent experience and one that can lead to mystical union, it\u2019s truly transformative. We don\u2019t know how to deal with orgasm in American sexuality. For us, it\u2019s just something that proves that the sexual encounter is over. The whole experience of sex is a means to an end. It leads to bad sex and short sex.<\/p>\n
Q: What do Christians misunderstand about lust ?<\/p>\n
A: Christian theology is much more about transcending lust, and I can\u2019t embrace that theology. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a real understanding of Christianity because every religion is about a lust for life. It\u2019s about a lust for God. When you denigrate lust and you say it is of the devil, I think you\u2019re condemning couples to marriages that do not provide for their core needs.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t believe in lust for lust\u2019s sake. I believe in lust for the sake of oneness, unity and connection. There\u2019s a spiritual dimension to that lust.<\/p>\n
Q: \u201c Lust for God\u201d \u2014 that idea is going to make some people uncomfortable .<\/p>\n
A: I don\u2019t think we should define lust so narrowly. Lust is intense desire. I think one of the reasons that Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) is becoming so successful and that Judaism as a system of faith is not growing is that Judaism teaches you to love God. Kabbalah teaches you to lust after God.<\/p>\n
If you look at translations of the Song of Solomon, they\u2019re often not literal because it\u2019s just considered inappropriate. It\u2019s a biblical book speaking about women\u2019s breasts. But Kabbalah has never shied away from speaking of God in lustful terms. Kabbalah actually utilizes sexual imagery to connote and capture the intensity of the God-man experience. Maybe we have to overcome that uneasiness. But we\u2019re not attempting to sexualize the relationship with God. That\u2019s ridiculous.<\/p>\n
Q: You say the 10th Commandment, \u201cThou shalt not covet thy neighbor\u2019s wife,\u201d helps prove your pro-lust point ?<\/p>\n
A: If it was a condemnation of lust, it would have said, \u201cDo not covet any woman.\u201d By direct implication, you ought to be coveting your own wife.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Celebrity Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, spiritual counselor to Michael Jackson, onetime Republican candidate for Congress and author of the best-selling \u201cKosher Sex\u201d and \u201cKosher Jesus,\u201d has a new book for Jews and non-Jews alike: \u201cKosher Lust.\u201d Its provocative subtitle: \u201cLove Is Not the Answer.\u201d The answer, Boteach says, is lust, the God-given fuel for a healthy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4755,3421,792,31,68,335],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5453"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}