Highlights Love, Sex & Marriage

We were very fortunate to have aguest speaker, Rabbi Abner Weiss, who is the Rabbi of Beth Jacob Congregation spoke about Love, Sex and Marriage within the Jewish Family at the JDCC get-together on February 23, 1994 at the home of Sharon & David Soudakoff. There was a great turn-out of 22 people.

The first important point that Rabbi Weiss made was that there are different levels of friendship and “knowing someone.” Loving someone is being able to accept them as “who they are,” not wanting them to change to suit your “needs.” Before one establishes a friendship with another person, they are acquaintances. As they get to know each other better, they become friends, and as stronger friends, they share feelings and secrets with one another. This is the foundation of trusting another person. We all share different things with different people in different ways. This is at the final and longest stage of a deep and strong friendship and comes after years of living and being married to someone.

The second point that he made is that within Judaism, marriage is a commitment that two people have made to each other, to accept things for better or worse, not to be thrown away on a whim. This is why Judaism does not accept the concept of living together so we will know if we are compatible or not. However, Judaism does recognize divorce if and when it is absolutely necessary because we are human and do make mistakes.

The third point that he made was that having sexual relationships within the framework of Judaism is a “holy act” when it is done with the right intentions, otherwise, it is a purely physical act. Judaism does not look upon sex as being a dirty thing, but quite the opposite.

The fourth point that he made is that Jewish law mandates a period of physical separation between the husband and wife. By not being available to each other for certain periods during of the month, you learn to communicate your needs and love to each other in other ways that help keep the marriage alive and as new as when you first met each other. This is because you are aware of these limitations and work with them. Everyone of us communicates with others in different ways. One of the most essential ingredients in making a relationship work is to make sure that you are speaking and understanding the same thing at the same time. We communicate in many different ways such as speech, body language, and facial expressions. In order to communicate effectively, one has to make sure that his message is not mixed in any way, shape or form. In other words, when you say that you love someone, it has to come through in all the forms of communication as being the truth. When someone says something, but his body and facial expression says something else, the other person has the right and should verify what is really going on. If we feel that someone is not being honest with us, we should say so and do something about it.

To sum it up, we all have pre-conceived notions that come from western cultures which do not reflect what Judaism has to say about Love, Sex and Marriage, and by approaching a commitment or a relationship in the right ways, we can enjoy our marriage in a much better way.

We had some new guests, welcome: Elaine Aikins, Bill Bernstein, Dina Dror, Patti Kolpa, Yair Shaar & Laura Liter.

Also a big thanks to a wonderful interpreting job done, Francine Stern.