I’m coming.
Do you want to talk about sex?
What do you think about sex? Carnal acts? Quiet, forbidden things that we don’t talk about because it’s not polite? What do you think about it?
I’m coming.
What would you tell me about it if I asked you? Single girl, not engaged, never had a boyfriend? Good American Jewish girl raised on a steady diet of overly sexualized advertisements for Jeans and perfume that I don’t try to see but can’t quite escape?
I’m coming.
What did you think when you picked up a chumash the first time after you were old enough to know what things meant, and you read in Vayeitzeh, as Yaakov marries each of his wives “Vayavoh Eilehah Yaakov,” “and Yaakov came to her”. What do you think that means? “He came to her”?
I’m coming.
I remember when I was in tenth grade and a Chumash teacher who should have known better told a room full of girls who had spent their entire adolescence holding out against a bombardment of casual sex that, ultimately, sex, or “relations” as she called it, was not supposed to give pleasure. The highest level of sex was to create children.
I’m coming.
Hundreds of years ago, when women of the British aristocracy did not have a say in who they would marry, their mothers told them to close their eyes and think of England. Because sex was not an emotion. It was an act. An act that would create children and secure the future of the nation.
Is that what Yaakov was doing? Securing manifest destiny through the only act that could ensure procreation? Was he closing his eyes and thinking of B’nei Yisrael?
I’m coming.
When I ask you if you want to talk about sex, I’m not asking for the act. I’m asking you for what it really means. What is sex accomplishing? Is it a release? Is it what I’ve been saving myself for? Is it a benchmark? Is it an answer? Is it an end, a goal in and of itself?
I’m coming.
Because I don’t want to believe that all Yaakov had was an act. A moment of conception where he had done his duty. Like the love ‘em and leave ‘em act that characterizes the world that I live in, a world where woman and men exist for temporary use and then become as disposable as latex gloves or plastic flatware.
I’m coming.
We’re told that G-d created the universe with a word. Chassidic lore tells us that the words we say create angels that act against us or on our behalf when we pass into the next world. A word can mean so much. So when I ask you if you want to talk about sex, am I using the right word?
I don’t think I am.
Sex is not the word I want. Sex is…What is sex? Sex is organs and a series of body parts that may or may not be connected to a soul. Sex is that short, staccato word pasted on magazines in various permutations to sell Calvin Klein and makeup, the things that make us sexy, but not the things that create the something which that short, single syllable doesn’t seem to encompass.
I’m coming.
We’re told that G-d created the universe with a word. Chassidic lore tells us that the words we say create angels that act against us or on our behalf when we pass into the next world. A word can mean so much. What did you think when you picked up a chumash the first time after you were old enough to know what things meant, and you read in Vayeitzeh, as Yaakov marries each of his wives “Vayavoh Eilehah Yaakov.” “And Yaakov came to her”. Why “Vayavoh”? Why not “tashmit hamitah”? Why not “arayot”? Both terms referring to sex, relations. Why “vayavoh”?
What’s in a word?
Because “Vayavoh” isn’t sex. It’s a conjugation of the word boh, to come. Because sex isn’t an act. It’s a coming. It’s a step on a journey towards arrival. Not an ending place. It’s a journey towards the torah’s other word euphemistically signifying contact. To know someone. Abraham knew Sarah, Adam knew Chava. The goal is not an act. The goal is to know. To explore every aspect of another living being, another half. To know G-d because the relationship between a husband and a wife is the closest we will ever come to the relationship between G-d and creation.
I’m coming.
So I guess, in the end, my tenth grade teacher got something right. Because it’s not sex. It’s relations. We’re trying to relate. Trying to move deeper into the mind and soul, bring it up, bring it higher, bring it to the next level. Going on the journey. Something’s ahead, just beyond the horizon. Let’s go together because we can’t make the journey alone. We’re moving nearer, and we know that the something up ahead is a something that is part of what will make us complete, part of what will allow us to understand the wholeness that is G-d.
We are coming.
