Ecclesiastes teaches us that to everything there is a season. Nearly 20 years ago I wrote a book called Chutzpah in which I argued that the Jewish community needs more chutzpah. American Jews need more chutzpah. Notwithstanding the stereotype, we are not pushy or assertive enough for our own good and for the good of our more vulnerable brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. Despite our apparent success, deep down we see ourselves as second-class citizens — guests in another people’s land. We worry about charges of dual loyalty, of being too rich, too smart, and too powerful. Our cautious leaders obsess about what the “real” Americans will think of us. We don’t appreciate how much we have contributed to the greatness of this country and don’t accept that we are entitled to first-class status in this diverse and heterogeneous democracy.

Today there are voices, both within and without the Jewish community, asserting that the season for chutzpah has passed and a new season of silence is upon us. Former President Jimmy Carter asserts that the voice of the Jewish community is too loud for its own good and for the good of the United States. Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt complain that the voice of the Jewish lobby is too powerful and should be muted. Anti-Israel professors at major universities, from Harvard to Columbia, claim that Jewish voices are silencing the voices of their critics. Jewish students on campuses worry that if they speak out in favor of Israel, their grades will be lowered.

The debate has shifted from a discussion about the merits of the Arab-Israeli conflict to a debate about debate, speech, and academic freedom. It is a tactic designed to empower opponents of Israel and silence supporters of Israel. We can’t fall for it. Those opponents of Israel who wrap themselves in the banner of free speech are proclaiming free speech for me but not for thee. They are among the first to try to silence speech that is offensive to them or their causes.

There are surely seasons for quiet reflection, even for silence. This is not that season. Those who would silence us are setting a trap. If we speak out in opposition, they see our chutzpah as proof of their point that we are too powerful and that we try to silence our critics. If we turn to silence, they win, for they surely will not join in silence.

The one area where silence today may turn out to be a virtue is in the area of quiet, behind- the-scenes diplomacy designed to bring about the kinds of pragmatic compromises that cannot be done effectively in public.

So let us continue to speak out on behalf of just causes without fear of being considered too powerful, too pushy, too influential, too rich, or too chutzpahdik. But let us also be silent when silence is necessary to produce a compromised peace. To everything there is indeed a season.

The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism , by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Indiana University Press, 2007. 320 pages, $24.00

The Family Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives , by Marla Brettschneider, SUNY Press, 2006. 232 pages, $24.95

Two new books provide food for thought about contemporary Jewish identities in the United States. The Family Flamboyant: Race Politics, Queer Families, Jewish Lives by Marla Brettschneider, and The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism , by Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz, have much in common. Both books are informed by the authors’ deep commitment to social justice, their insights as Ashkenazi Jewish lesbians, and their experiences as coalition organizers. And both authors offer a nuanced, passionate, and sophisticated analysis of slippery Jewish identities in relationship to racial politics and inequality in the United States.

Each author inserts compelling autobiographical experiences into their political analyses. Brettschneider reveals the unsavory and overt racism and homophobia of the adoption system in the United States based on her own experiences of trying to adopt as an outspoken Jewish lesbian. Kaye/Kantrowitz draws upon her experiences of living in diverse places in the U.S., her struggles for racial and economic justice, and her memories of growing up in a secular, Yiddish-inflected family in Brooklyn. And both books provide meticulously documented empirical and theoretical evidence for the arguments they advance, offering a veritable bibliographic trove of resources for scholars and lay readers interested in these literatures.

In The Colors of Jews, Kaye/Kantrowitz maps out an ambitious intellectual and activist agenda. In the first third of the book, she does a fine job deconstructing the complicated histories of race and Jewishness, and the pernicious myths about Jews and African Americans in the racial hierarchy of the United States. She also provides a lucid analysis of how the concepts of Jewishness have been racialized in relation to other groups throughout history and in different places, including Israel. For some readers unfamiliar with these ideas, I imagine reading The Colors of Jews might prompt a feeling that the solid ground of Jewish identity (read: Ashkenazi Jewish whiteness) is shifting under one’s feet.

The second section describes the world of Jewish activists organizing for social change and racial justice. Here, Kaye/Kantrowitz analyzes case study examples of cutting-edge nonprofits, multiracial Jewish congregations, and research centers that are challenging conventional notions of whiteness and Jewish identity. She includes extensive material from interviews with activists about issues of race, ethnicity, and inclusion. And she gives detailed descriptions of the coalitions that progressive Jews try to create to work within, across, and beyond Jewish communities to dismantle racism.

In the final section, Kaye/Kantrowitz outlines her vision of diasporism (and an explicit rejection of Jewish nationalism), and how such a political move can link progressive Jews together and in coalitions with others, across the lines of racial, economic, and social differences. She writes, “Diasporism places at the center our memory of strangeness and our desire (not duty, desire) to welcome strangers. Diasporism means, given the multicultural nature of the Jewish community, inside the Jewish community we should expect to experience the simultaneity of home and strangeness.” (p. 221)

For Brettschneider, these issues of race intersect with a trenchant critique of the adoption system and reigning ideologies about heterosexuality, family formation, marriage, and monogamy. In short, her project is to use political philosophy and experiences from her everyday life, to re-think basic cultural assumptions about race, family, sexuality, and identity. She includes much discussion and empirical evidence for how “mutually constitutive identities” influence who has power and how the intersections of race, class, and sexuality shape people’s lives.

Suffice it to say, Brettschneider is not pleased with the historical and contemporary conditions of family formation and how those ideologies preclude/obscure creative thinking about intimacy, love, and human relationship. The first chapter of her work covers similar terrain as The Colors of Jews , but with far more academic theoretical contextualization that might be helpful for Jewish studies scholars unfamiliar with this literature. In the most disturbing chapter, Brettschneider provides a description of her own convoluted, complicated, and sometimes painful path toward adopting two African American girls with her partner Dawn. She also lodges a searing critique of the not-so-implicit injustices and rampant problems (for example, antisemitism, racism, classism, and homophobia for starters) of the adoption system in the U.S., with forays into global examples of market forces of international adoption at work as well.   She writes: “There are clear hierarchies of human worth in this country and the adoption world has done the market research, assessed the situation, organized a filing system, and very neatly attached price tags to services and humans according to their appropriate rank.” (p. 49). And yet, this same system provided the author with not one, but two opportunities to open up their hearts, lives, and home, to become the self-described loud, proudly queer and Jewish mothers that they now are. So at the end of the day, Brettschneider’s own story is, despite the ugliness of the system she critiques, happy if paradoxical and bittersweet.

My one criticism of these books is actually a broader plea for scholar-activists more generally. Today, more than ever, we need books like these that critique and challenge the entrenched inequalities and forms of oppression (racial, class, and gender) that characterize U.S. history and society. But we need more than just critique. We also need visionaries who can inspire the compassion, joy, and passion to “fight the good fight,” by outlining what is possible to imagine. That’s a tall order. Sometimes I worry for the health and coronary well-being of activists like Kaye/Kantrowitz and Brettschneider, given the depth and breadth of their anger at the structural and ideological arrangements of the global order. In such relentlessly bleak analyses of systemic injustice, I often wonder if and where there is room for hope, joy, pleasure, and potential happiness, both individual and collective, in the myriad efforts to create healing and transformation in our broken world.

Dear Judith,

When I was a teenager exploring Judaism, I read your book Standing Again at Sinai. What struck me most vividly was your insight that deep within Jewish thought a hierarchical rejection of difference exists that goes far beyond the marginalization of women. Inviting women to shape the future of Judaism, then, leads to fundamental theological shifts within the tradition, as it questions all the binary distinctions of Jewish life and law.

In the 17 years since you wrote that book, quite a lot has happened in the Jewish world. Women’s mounting participation in Judaism has continued to reshape its essence. At the same time transgender liberation movements have increasingly questioned gender itself and asked whether the categories male and female can (or should) be the basic way we divide up humanity.

Sometimes the goals of feminist and transgender thought appear to be at odds with each other. And yet I believe that to raise the voice of women and trans people within Judaism, we must begin with similar agendas and goals: recognition of marginalization, rejection of hierarchical binary thinking, and an attempt to create more space within the covenant for a variety of identities and embodiments.

How might women and trans people support each other in this project of renewing the tradition? How can we deconstruct the binary divide between men and women while working to lift the subjugated voice of women within Judaism?

You asked nearly two decades ago how the central categories of Jewish thought would be altered by women shaping Torah. What does Sinai look like to you now? How will the tradition be transformed as we begin to find ways for women, transgender, intersex people, and everyone else to also stand again at Sinai?

— Elliot Kukla

Dear Elliot,

When I reflect on Standing Again at Sinai and the work I have done since, I see the most fundamental theological question I raise as that of authority: Who has the authority to define the ongoing meaning of Judaism? Who has been included and who has been excluded from the conversations through which Jewish life takes on meaning? How do hitherto marginalized groups mobilize the authority of tradition and authorize ourselves to enter into the process of shaping the Jewish future?

I’m excited by the ways in which the entry of transgender and intersex persons into Jewish debates about gender and sexuality both highlights dimensions of the tradition that have long been ignored and expands on some central feminist insights. Feminists first drew a sharp distinction between sex and gender in order to make the point that neither the psychological and emotional characteristics of men and women nor their social roles are biologically or divinely ordained. Transgender activists argue that the sex/gender distinction is itself problematic and that the very notion of only two sexes is produced by the same set of social processes and power relations that create gender hierarchy.

The challenge as I see it is to formulate feminist and transgender issues in ways that draw connections between our struggles. I say this because I worry that the Jewish community has a short attention span! Despite women having reshaped Judaism in profound ways in the last decades, an enormous amount of work remains to be done. It is much more interesting and fun to put programming time and energy — and even funding — into the latest hot issue than to look yet again at the more intransigent aspects of sexism.

How then do you talk about transgender issues in ways that don’t “change the subject” from that of the continued subordination of women? And from my side, how do I talk about the continued subordination of women in ways that challenge the gender binary?

— Judith Plaskow

Dear Judith,

You ask how we can talk about transgender issues in ways that don’t “change the subject” from the continued subordination of women. For me, transgender issues are not a new “subject” at all but rather a continuation of the conversation about how gender-based oppression impacts the lives of all people whether we identify as women, transgender, intersex, gender queer, sissy boys, or something else.

Sexism affects trans people in multiple ways. Male-to-female transgender women are held to impossible and damaging misogynist ideals of beauty in order to be seen as “real” women. Female-to-male transgender men are often regarded as not “male enough,” unable to be seen for who they are or to wield male social power. Furthermore, binary hierarchical gender norms make the lives of people who live between male and female genders invisible.

Likewise, transphobia (the fear of gender variation in society) circumscribes women’s lives. Women continue to be oppressed not only because femininity is devalued but also because of the narrow boundaries that define “acceptable” female appearance and behavior.

I respect your desire to not get caught up in the latest hot issue, but it is important to be clear about what is at stake for my community in this conversation: transgender people face unemployment rates that hover around 80 percent; they experience significant obstacles when accessing healthcare, education, protection from violence, and other basic services. Mostly, this treatment stems from the belief that there are only two ways of being created in the image of God — male or female.

I’m curious about how the growing awareness of genders beyond male and female impacts your own theology. My generation is indebted to you for advancing feminist thinking. What tools can we use to continue to shift gender boundaries to include the liberation of people of all genders?

— Elliot

Dear Elliot,

Moving beyond the notion that there are only two genders will mean asking new questions of tradition and expanding the categories of Jewish thought in a way that builds on the feminist transformation of Judaism. For example, while contemporary Jews have trouble thinking beyond the gender binary, the rabbis of the past were quite aware of the existence of persons who did not fit into a dichotomized gender system. The tumtum and androgynos (hermaphrodite), who today we would label “intersexed” persons, are categories that appear many times in rabbinic literature. The rabbis defined the tumtum as an individual who is actually a man or a woman, but who appears to have no genital organs because his or her genital area is covered over at birth. They defined the androgynos as someone who has the genitals of both sexes, so that it is impossible to determine whether s/he is male or female. Although the fundamental approach of rabbinic texts is to use these categories as thought experiments that serve to clarify and bolster a rigid gender grid, contemporary Jews could seize the opening they provide to extend or undermine a binary understanding of gender and to question our own gender dimorphism.

The concept of transgender may also be a much more fruitful way to think about God than simply adding female images to the overwhelmingly male language of tradition. Using male and female imagery for God, as do some new prayerbooks and feminist liturgies, tends to reify and reinforce stereotypically masculine and feminine qualities. Imagining a transgender God builds on the feminist project of recovering the female aspects of God but highlights the shifting nature of the divine gender and the ultimately problematic nature of gender categories. It incorporates the idea of multiplicity and fluidity as well as insistence on the inadequacy of male metaphors.

Both the category of androgynous and the notion of a transgender God raise a major question. Should the goal of these changes, on both the theological and the communal levels, be the dissolution of gender or the multiplication of genders? I am not willing to surrender the category of woman while people called women continue to be discriminated against — but I would like to hold that category more lightly.

— Judith

Dear Judith,

It seems that only the multiplication of genders and not the dissolution of gender can serve the goals of both feminism and transgender activism.

A post-binary gender identity is only liberating for those of us who truly see ourselves as post-binary and feel trapped and invisible when held within the categories of male or female. Some transgender people identify wholly with their preferred gender. For example, a person might have been assigned male gender at birth and raised as a boy but now see herself as completely female. For that person the category of “woman” is the most liberating gender there is, as it reflects her inner sense of self.

Gender liberation is multifaceted. On the one hand, we must fight to create space within genders for more complex and diverse ways of being male or female. At the same time, we need to allow room between genders for post-binary identities that encompass more ways of being human.

I agree that we can draw upon classical Jewish texts — the tumtum and androgynos — as a resource in these goals. Although I concur that the rabbis’ primary approach to these gender-variant figures was to use them to bolster a rigid gender grid, other voices emerge from our tradition that offer different perspectives.

In the Mishna, Rabbi Yossi says that the androgynos is neither essentially male nor female but a “created being of its own.” This phrase is a classical legal term for exceptionality; it is an acknowledgement that not all of creation can be understood within binary systems. In my reading, it is also a theological statement. It is a proclamation that God creates diversity that is far too complex for humans to understand or ever fully categorize. There are parts of each of us that are uncontainable. All of us — whether we see ourselves within or between male and female genders — are uniquely “created beings of our own.” This idea allows for infinite gender identities that are all created in the image of God.

I continue to be inspired and encouraged by your ideas. How do you answer your own question? Do you seek to multiply or dissolve gender? I am captivated and deeply moved by your image of God as transgender. What sources from within Judaism might we draw upon to bring this image into our liturgy and theology?

— Elliot

Dear Elliot,

I agree entirely that, in the world in which we live, the multiplication of genders best serves feminist and transgender objectives. So long as social, political, economic, and religious power and resources continue to be distributed along gendered lines, I cannot imagine surrendering gender categories. Moreover, I don’t see how there can be real change in gendered power relations unless the multiple perspectives and insights that emerge out of women’s and transgender experiences are recognized and valued. Still, I understand gender — including the sense that it reflects one’s inner self — to be partly a creation of social institutions and practices. Therefore, to my mind, your goals of creating space within and between genders — goals I affirm — press toward the dissolution of gender. I want to see a society in which gender is simply one of numerous facets of identity and is far less salient than it is in ours. So for me, there is a fruitful tension between the idea of multiplying and dissolving genders.

The image of God as transgender is an attempt to capture this tension. The sources within Judaism that might be used to develop this image are largely the sources that feminists have been talking about for the last 40 years: the existence of female images, such as Shekhinah, that have been overlooked and left out of the liturgy; the natural images that suggest that God is beyond gender; the gender-crossing imagery in which a “male” God has the so-called feminine qualities of feeding and nurturance as well as the feminine divine that represents justice; and the new female and natural images that are part of many feminist liturgies. I also want to include the metaphoric shifts in the way the people of Israel are imagined in Jewish texts — most often as a male community but sometimes as a feminized community (to maintain a heterosexual position in relation to the deity).

The entry of women and of transgender people into Jewish leadership roles multiples the metaphoric potentialities for envisioning the relationship between God and Israel and thus the nature of God. There’s an analogy between undermining the gender binary by multiplying social genders and exploding

the notion of a male God by multiplying metaphors for God and our relationship with God. We can think of God as masculine, feminine, female, male, both, neither, in various combinations, and in terms that have nothing to do with gender, so that through multiplying, we dissolve.

— Judith

On October 12, 2007, over 100 musicians prominent in the contemporary revival of klezmer music gathered on the steps of the Eldridge Street synagogue on the Lower East Side of New York for an historic photo. This Ashkenazic Jewish music tradition had faded to a whisper in the 1950s and 1960s but returned with an unexpected crescendo in the 1970s, and the photo was intended to document the thriving creative community that the klezmer world has become. Among the faces in that photo are several people, like myself, who are openly gay and lesbian; our disproportionate presence is an oft-noted and curious fact about the current klezmer and Yiddishist scenes.

In conjunction with the photo shoot, I and twelve other musicians from around the world embarked on a weeklong concert tour. After the first show, a lesbian couple posed an interesting question: How did I feel about all those songs about khusns and kales, brides and grooms? What meaning could they have for me? My solo feature had been a ‘kale bazetsn’ full of cantorial inflections and high emotion that was played to encourage the bride to have a good cry before her ceremony; the ritual was, perhaps, a proto-therapy for a young woman who would be leaving her family and town to live with a man she hardly knew. Why was I so eager to evoke such a world?

In 20 years of playing klezmer music, I had never before entertained the question. Beyond a vague wish to apologize when presenting certain material, and a parallel project to write more relevant lyrics for our songs, I had never examined the contradiction between songs celebrating brides and grooms, and my life as a lesbian. The dilemma for women — and especially lesbians — caught between the pulls of Judaism and secularism or assimilation is, deep down, a tension between a premodern way of life and our own. Why engage with that old world at all, let alone celebrate it? What indeed does the kale bazetsn, with its implications of female restriction and inagency in the most intimate areas of life, have to do with “out” lesbians in 2007?

What we seek and celebrate and try to recreate from that world is the “communitas” that’s missing from our own. The nostalgia for a past that was in many ways so awful, so full of violence and horror (pogroms and forced conscription and other realities of Jewish life) suddenly becomes understandable; as painful as that world could be, people felt embedded in a group in a way we long for today, sometimes consciously and sometimes without being able to name the feeling as such.

Klezmer musicians are striving, among other things, to revive the practice of community dancing. In a traditional circle dance like the hora, the dancers are all physically connected and in total visual communication. Most important, the group is physically moving as a unit and the individual, buoyed along, feels personal boundaries dissolving into a greater whole. Awash in the euphoria of the music, participants enjoy community warmth difficult to experience today. Compare the image to the iconic dance depicted in the iPod ad — an individual in a state of solitary pleasure, sealed off from all other human beings, and the musicians who provide that pleasure a mere abstraction.

While the heterosexual klezmer musician may be presumed to have a natural affinity for those old bride and groom songs than we queer klezmers have, the real motivation to keep those songs alive is probably the same for all of us. In this way, as is so often the case with gay people, our outsider status illuminates an otherwise hidden reality for the group as a whole.

But why is there not just a gay presence in the klezmer/Yiddishist world, but indeed an especially large one? As an imaginary Jewish landscape without real-world institutions like synagogues to contend with (that lesbian couple’s local shul, for example, turned them away when they tried to join with their kids as a family), “Yiddishland” is a safe haven, a frontier world we can begin to populate unmolested. And so we have — in workshops such as Klezkamp, at festivals like Ashkenaz in Toronto, in our bands and somehow, paradoxically and sometimes uncomfortably, in our kale bazetsns.

Susan Berrin: Let’s begin with your own personal Jewish history, and how it has influenced your work as a sex therapist with couples.

Esther Perel: Both my parents were the sole survivors of their family, so I used to think about the Holocaust in terms of loss, suffering, and pain. But as I was thinking about my book, and wondering what drew me to eroticism, I began to think about survivors as primarily two groups of people: those who survived and those who came back to life.

Those who survived were people who often lived quite tethered to the ground with their energies focused on recovering some basic sense of security and safety in the world, but they rarely have pleasure guilt free and reclaim a sense of joy in life. The other group, those who came back to life, found some basic sense of security or at least accepted that maybe such a thing doesn’t really exist but were able to reconnect with a sense of creativity and playfulness and eagerness toward life. This group could experience pleasure and allow their children to experience pleasure without guilt. My parents were among the second group of survivors, and from them I absorbed a mystical meaning of eroticism: how to preserve a sense of aliveness and vibrancy and vitality and how the erotic is an antidote to death.

When I work with couples and I hear them complain about the listlessness of their sex life, I don’t just hear them wanting more sex, I hear them wanting to reconnect with a sense of renewal and connection and playfulness that sex used to afford them. And that’s why more than being interested in sexuality, I really was interested in the erotic, in how people fight a sense of deadness that sometimes creeps into life.

Berrin: So what would you say to a couple experiencing a loss of desire?

Perel: Desire is connected to our sense of self-worth. Couples have a way of being together that stops the flow of their erotic interest. A lack of desire can be a result of too much distance and lack of connection or it can be the consequence of excess closeness. Fire needs air and many couples don’t leave each other enough air. Desire needs a synapse to cross. Desire ceases when there is nothing to desire — that is, an individual has no desire for the sex he or she can have. The loss of desire is often far more the result of fear than the passage of time. Fear of bringing our deepest wishes, needs, and vulnerabilities to the one we love. Sex in a long-term relationship is always risky because erotic sex with the one we love is perhaps the last taboo.

What really helps people is to connect with their own erotic selves, what is blocking their capacity for pleasure, their sensuality, their own sensuousness. We’re all born sensuous but we become erotic. We must develop an awareness of our body, a connection with our own skin, and a desire to want to please it, touch it, dress it, wash it, let it breathe the air.

Berrin: Does Judaism put up blocks and obstacles to that experience of pleasure?

Perel: Not Judaism but Jewish people. Judaism is not anti-carnal, but it has developed a sexuality that is not purely pleasure bound; pleasure is connected with reproduction. It has a purpose. Eroticism cultivates pleasure for its own sake. If poetry is the eroticism of language, then eroticism is the poetry of the body. That’s the difference between sexuality and eroticism. In Judaism, the prohibition against masturbation, for men, that is spilling seed, fosters a total dependency on their partner.

Berrin: Kedusha is often translated as holiness, but it means separateness. How does the concept apply to the erotic, that is, wanting what you can’t have, what’s set aside?

Perel: While the laws of nida were built around increasing the possibilities for fertility, they also, implicitly and explicitly for that matter, increase the desire and the interest and the wanting when you are once again allowed to return to your spouse. The notion of creating a boundary, a time when you are not supposed to be intimate, also energizes the time when you may be sexual. An underlying assumption in the system is that separateness increases desire. But I’m not sure it always works like that for people practicing nida.

The very existence of rabbinic discussion of the erotic in Jewish text shows that there was an awareness of erotic yearnings for the forbidden; sex is described as something important, a major element of matrimony. That conveys a positive value. There is no sin attached to sex, no sense of the debasement of the flesh, or it being inferior. Reading Jewish text, you discover lots of rules, but you don’t get a sense of shame and vilification of the flesh, which is quite a feat for a religion whose closest neighbor for so many centuries was dominant Christianity that espoused celibacy and the inferiority of the body.

But the lack of exposure and ignorance about sex can create problems. There is text and then there is life. Historically, with the glorification of study and mental capacity and the elevation of education and the intellect, the body was basically neglected. So, while we are supposed to have great sex, our bodies are often treated like shmatas. That’s the essence of Woody Allen with his nerdy body who is so preoccupied with sex — repression always fuels interest. And repression has a way of fueling passion. That’s part of the forbidden. Can you want what you already have or is desire rooted in absence and in longing? One has to be happy with a lease with an option to renew. Marriage for me is that you have a lease with somebody with an option to constantly renew.

Berrin: But the ketuba is a legal contract that outlines marriage as ownership.

Perel: The notion of ownership is about the commitment of marriage and not about the desire in marriage. Within Jewish law they are interwoven. The ketubah outlines the obligations, what each is due as a husband and a wife. But desire works around different rules than commitment. Commitment is about reliability, familiarity, and predictability, which flourishes in an atmosphere of mutuality and reciprocity — elements that anchor and ground our lives with security. Desire operates along different rules that have much more to do with the unpredictable, the mysterious, even risk. And every person, every relationship, straddles these two poles. The rules of commitment and ownership in Judaism do not assure the sustaining life of desire. It may sustain sexual activity but it doesn’t guarantee desire. Love is about having and desire is about wanting. Desire needs a bridge to cross with someone to visit. It needs otherness and takes place in that space between self and other. Wanting is the movement of an arm reaching out, but in order to reach out there needs to be a space. Otherwise your arm stays glued to your body.

Commitment comes with responsibility but desire is much more rooted in freedom. And that balance between freedom and responsibility, between love and desire, is a fundamental human tension.

Berrin: Is there some way that this tension plays out in a Jewish home that is specific to it being Jewish or is it simply universal?

Perel: I think it’s universal. But while my non-Orthodox patients understand sex as it’s related to desire — you don’t do it if you don’t feel like it — my religious patients live more comfortably with the idea that sex is not just about you; they straddle individualism and a culture of interdependence where the needs of the collective are more important than one’s own needs.

There’s a paradoxical relation between the domestic and the erotic, our need for security and our need for adventure. The challenge is reconciling a need for what’s safe and predictable with a wish to pursue what’s exciting, mysterious, and awe-inspiring. We want today what we always wanted in marriage — respectability, companionship, children, economic support, but now we also want our partner to be our best friend, our trusted confidante, and a passionate lover to boot. Marriage and passion are strange bedfellows, and we’re living twice as long.

Some years ago, I taught several classes on Jewish sexual ethics to teenagers. Each time, I’d start the semester by asking students to tell me about “kosher sex.” The students would immediately come forth with a list of impressions of traditional Judaism, some more accurate than others: “you can’t do it when you have your period,” “you can’t have sex until you’re married,” “you have to have sex through a hole in a sheet,” “you can’t be gay,” and so forth. The growing list on the blackboard comprised almost entirely limitations and prohibitions. Certainly, there are important limits worth discussing in any conversation about sex, but teenagers — or anyone, really — seeking to understand themselves, human relationships, and their burgeoning sexuality, need something more than just a bunch of “don’ts.”

After the first round of brainstorming, I asked my students to define “kosher sex” according to their own values and sensibilities. Suddenly, the list would get more interesting: respect and communication were seen as important as safe sex, sober sex, and emotional commitment. They emphasized the importance of consent, caring, and clarity.

Many of the ideas that my students articulated are Jewish values, even if they weren’t labeled as such. Of course, Judaism demands consent and teaches respect, and many rabbis encourage condom use under the rubric of pikuach nefesh (saving a life). (This principle should be regarded as a baseline when we consider the messages we send regarding same-sex relationships, given that about a third of queer youth attempt suicide.) The importance of caring for oneself and others lies at the heart of our sacred texts.

Even otherwise liberal people often fear that speaking frankly about sexuality, in all of its messy complexity, will encourage young adults to become sexually active — but this is unrealistic. Young adults in America are having sex at younger ages, irrespective of patently ineffective “abstinence education.” (It should also be noted that students who take pledges of abstinence are more likely to forego condoms and contraception when they do become sexually active — an average of only eighteen months after taking said pledges.) If anything, teaching Jewish teenagers about the importance of mutuality, respect for self and others, and about the sacred nature of intimate connections will help them to make decisions that are not born out of insecurity, peer pressure, or even, perhaps, hormones detached from the heart.

There are myriad Jewish texts that can help us talk about Jewish sexual ethics in a way that cuts to the heart of the enterprise of loving: The Song of Songs tells us about embodiment, sensuality, and reciprocity. Martin Buber’s I-Thou helps us learn not only how to see the “other” and how not to exploit, but how to understand that the “I” of the equation is just as worthy of consideration and respect. Kabbalistic literature invites us to consider the ways in which our sexuality could be a path to union with the Divine, and the Torah portion Kedoshim teaches that becoming holy means using our sexuality with great care. Even concepts that might not be relevant in contemporary praxis can prove fertile ground; after all, if the mishnah in the talmudic tractate Kiddushin suggests that a couple can be betrothed through the sex act, what does that tell us about the kinds of lasting, complicated bonds that are created when we come together?

Of course, teaching about the specifics of Judaism and sex can also be instructive and help us pass on our tradition even as we challenge the sexism or homophobia within it.

Jewish teens learn their religion’s take on sexual ethics by amassing a laundry list of vague “dont’s” through a grapevine of rabbis, fearful parents, and sometimes unprepared youth educators. Though I agree with Ruttenberg about speaking frankly with teens about sexuality, Jewish sexual ethics should be addressed only once teens have a clear foundation of the overarching and related importance of perpetuating Jewish survival through dating, marriage, and family life. As a young man in college, rarely do Jewish sexual ethics cross my mind when I make my decisions. Rather, I am influenced by the values that my parents, youth educators, and mentors instilled in me: that I represent the Jewish people, that I am a key to their survival and future.

We need to know, and teach, the crucial cultural and spiritual benefits of creating and maintaining Jewish relationships. Before discussing Judaism’s stand on safe sex, parents need to discuss with their bar or bat mitzvah aged teen the values of maintaining the Jewish people.

Growing up in a strong Reform Jewish community and attending a Jewish summer camp, provided teachers, counselors, and educators that were open and willing to answer all questions. The concept of “kosher sex” never entered the minds of my fellow religious schoolmates or camp friends, though, until high school. One situation sticks out in my mind: During our last summer as campers at URJ Camp Harlam, we had the choice of what classes, and one of the topics was Jewish sexual ethics. What my friends and I discovered was similar to what Danya Ruttenberg describes in her essay: a list of “don’ts” instead of what Judaism actually says about having a healthy relationship. It was during this session that we learned about Judaism’s different texts and stances on sexuality.

My camp encounter with Jewish sexual ethics was a key moment in formulating my personal belief system. At the 2005 URJ Biennial, I heard Rabbi Eric Yoffie’s sermon where he addressed the problems with sexual ethics and education within Judaism. As he put it, “the guiding principle of sexuality in the Jewish tradition is k’doshim tih’yu, ‘You shall be holy,’ which means that sexuality is linked to blessing, commandment, and God.” After listening intently to the sermon I became more aware of how Judaism speaks about sexuality.

Today, the Reform movement is beginning to educate children (beginning with bar/bat mitzvah preparation) on Jewish sexual ethics. This initiative will offer a new generation of young Jews a more stable set of values. I applaud Danya’s suggestion — “We only have to be brave enough to proclaim that this, too, is Torah, and to be willing to discuss Jewish sexuality with the frankness and fearlessness that it deserves” — because it’s important to explore sexual ethics as a teen in order to solidify a set of values that one can carry on throughout life.

Though I believe that sex belongs in marriage, I know all people don’t feel that way. Judaism has helped me understand that my body is mine, and just like tattoos and piercings make a body impure, so does pre-marital sex — at least for me.

I agree with Danya’s students when they speak about the emotional ramifications of sex. It complicates everything. Abstinence-only sex education, which is supported by many of today’s politicians, is definitely not the way to go. Teenagers especially need to be aware of options available to them, seeing as most of them will not choose abstinence.

The ethics around sex continue to change. My generation generally views pre-marital sex as no big deal. My parents’ generation, as baby boomers, was split: some were conservative while others, “hippies,” experimented with sex and drugs. Now, all of those “hippies” are parents who are watching their children make their own choices. Sexual ethics go back and forth across generations.

While the Torah outlines specific sexual behaviors, as individuals we must develop our personal moral code. And no matter what code we adopt, we still have the laws of Judaism that we choose to follow or not.