Sanctified Sex: The Two-Thousand-Year Jewish Debate on Marital Intimacy

by Noam Sachs Zion

Sanctified Sex draws on two thousand years of rabbinic debates addressing competing aspirations for loving intimacy, passionate sexual union, and sanctity in marriage. What can Judaism contribute to our struggles to nurture love relationships? What halakhic precedents are relevant, and how are rulings changing?

The rabbis, of course, seldom agree. Underlying their arguments are perennial What kind of marital sex qualifies as ideal—sacred self-control of sexual desire or the holiness found in emotional and erotic intimacy? Is intercourse degrading in its physicality or the highest act of spiritual/mystical union? And should women or men (or both) wield ultimate say about what transpires in bed?

Noam Sachs Zion guides us chronologically and steadily through fraught seminal biblical texts and their Talmudic interpretations; Talmud tales of three unusual rabbis and their marital bedrooms; medieval codifiers and mystical commentators; ultra-Orthodox rabbis clashing with one another over radically divergent ideals; and, finally, contemporary rabbis of varied denominations wrestling with modern transformations in erotic lifestyles and values.

Invited into these sanctified and often sexually explicit discussions with our ancestors and contemporaries, we encounter innovative Jewish teachings on marital intimacy, ardent lovemaking techniques, and the art of couple communication vital for matrimonial success.

656 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2021

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Religion and sex: it can be difficult to separate the two because many people’s attitudes about appropriate sexual behavior were informed by their religious education. However, as Noam Sachs Zion notes in the impressive “Sanctified Sex: The Two-Thousand-Year Jewish Debate on Intimacy” (Jewish Publication Society), Judaism has two conflicting ideas about sexual behavior and intimacy. Zion’s in-depth look at how Jewish traditions evolved and changed is 544 pages long (and that’s not counting the footnotes, bibliography and index). Even at this length, Zion writes that he focuses only on the Ashkenazic world since those are the traditions and laws with which he is familiar.
See the rest of my review at https://www.thereportergroup.org/past...

[Reuven Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers a study on the various Jewish perspectives on martial intimacy going back to the differing views present in the Talmud down to contemporary models for husband-wife interactions. The author does a decent job at collecting the relevant sources in Chazal and presenting them using contemporary terminology. Of the different approaches that he presents, he seems to approve most of the sex-positive attitude espoused by Rabbi Yitzchak Isaac Sher (1875–1952) and the Steipler Gaon Rabbi Yaakov Yisrael Kanievsky (1899–1985), although he also documents and analyzes the ascetic practices of some Chassidic groups like Slonim and Ger. This reviewer recommends that readers skip the parts of the book related to Kabbalah because they are based on academic sources rather than legitimate Kabbalistic interpretations, as well as the chapters on non-Orthodox approaches to sex.

[Sharon Litwinoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting history and I discovered some tidbits that stuck. But it took a very long time for me to get through (I don't move quickly through non-fiction/academic language, so take that with a grain of salt) and I felt I could've spent the time better. Maybe actually in chevruta about these topics instead of just reading about them.