Food and Sex in the Holy Land

Today I'm going to talk about:

FOOD AND SEX!

Here are subcontents:

FOOD:
1) The filthiness of the kitchen
1.5) Kitchen Duty

SEX:
1) Interesting sides of sex in Orthodox Judaism
1.5) Sexy Song of Songs
1.75) Purity vs. Specialness

FOOD PART 1: THE FILTHINESS OF THE KITCHEN

First, the kitchen. Today was my first kitchen duty, which means I need to get up earlier and help make breakfast, set up lunch, show up early to make dinner, and then clean up after each.  I actually find this pretty satisfying.  It feels good to contribute and do a little work and feed people.

But the kitchen is disgusting!!!!! I kind of dry heave when I’m in it. There’s not really AC (which I do not understand) so it’s very hot.  Food is not put away or covered properly so there’s flies and ants and… grasshoppers and beetles.  There’s this smell all the time… I can’t quite place it, but I think it’s something rotting.  People will take milk out and then just… leave it there, for hours. There’s grime on everything.  People use a dish, rinse it (without scrubbing or soap or anything) and then put it with the clean dishes!!!  Israelis may have stomachs of steel or something, but just thinking about this makes me sick.  My mother may not have been a Jewish mother, but she set extremely high standards for cleanliness, it appears.

We take dishes out of the dishwasher and they still have bits of food and grime on them (I wash them by hand because I can’t stand it).  Earlier I was washing a bunch of disgusting dishes and an Israeli who was cooking came and took them out of my hands.  “They’re filthy,” I said, “I’m washing them.” And she just shrugged and said “It doesn’t matter.” And put them away!

After I had some free time so I was helping out with the cleanup, and this Israeli told me I didn’t have to help out for another half hour, and I said I was free so I would anyway (secretly I just really wanted to actually clean some things…) and she smirked and said. “Chamuda.” (“Cute.”)

When I’m cooking with my mom at home, I get hungrier and hungrier as we cook, and sneak bites of things.  When I’m cooking here, I lose my appetite. I miss you, Mom.

It’s a little frustrating to me, the contrast between keeping kosher and keeping clean. I thought part of keeping a Jewish home was keeping things absurdly clean.  We have separate fridges, counters, sinks, plates, silverware, pots, pans etc for meat and for dairy.  Two complete sets of each and two sides of the kitchen.  We keep them strictly separate.

BUT we eat off of dirty dishes!!!! Which is really more important?!?

After our shift I was scrubbing the counter and my buddy was like “We’re done, Ariane. We’re done! Come on!”

PART 1.5 - KITCHEN DUTY

I wrote that first part after breakfast.  I'm writing this part after dinner.

So today’s kitchen duty ended up being heftier than most because there was a donor visiting so we did a big clean and made a huge dinner.  So I ended up being in the kitchen for a total of maybe 8 hours… I just did the math, I’m not exaggerating. My dad always says that if I move to Israel I need to make sure to get a job that suits my skills, and not end up on a kibbutz somewhere picking lemons for Zion.

I waved him off.  I'd pick lemons for Zion!  I'd scrub toilets for Zion! I'd do pushups for Zion!  Menial labor is not menial when it's for such a great big cause!

NO. KITCHEN DUTY FOR ZION IS STILL KITCHEN DUTY.

My work buddy said, "You know that sign entering Auschwitz? WORK MAKES YOU FREE? It's like that."

I said no no, it's more like what Jabotinksy said Israel needs, people who do everything, people who can be scholars one minute and kitchen grunts the next minute.

Hours passed as we scrubbed and cut vegetables and sliced onions and did dishes.  People got grumpier and grumpier.  I saw that Israeli rudeness everyone has told me about but I realize now I'd never previously seen. "Why are you using THAT sponge? Why are you cutting tomatoes like THAT? Why are you doing what SHE told you to do when you should be doing what I told you to do?" And I knew they were hitting their peak when they sighed and started talking in Hebrew to each other right in front of me.  I just tried to keep my head down and keep working.

I'm really good at cutting tomatoes now.

Things got a bit better when we were nearing the end and cleaning up after dinner.  We could all see the end was near and people lightened up.  There was this Israeli guy who'd earlier judged me when I said I was anxious about our upcoming camping trip who watched me carefully as I washed dishes in the sink next to his.  When my sink got clogged, I put my hair back and reached in with both hands, elbow deep in disgusting garbage water, tugging bits of food out of the drain, and he grinned at me and said. "I have so much more respect for you right now!"

Afterward one of the head girls came and apologized, she said it was just a long day for everyone and they shouldn't have been so overbearing.  I waved her off and I realize now that was sincere on my part.  It was a long day for everybody.  And as much work as I did, they still did the bulk of it.  For every onion a chopped the Israeli girl next to me probably chopped 3. And they were the ones organizing everything, making all those tomatoes into an actual meal.

I don't think I want to work in a kitchen for Zion. I'm glad I did it this time.  I'm glad I don't have to do it every day.


SEX PART 1: INTERESTING SIDES OF SEX IN ORTHODOX JUDAISM

I’m going to be honest and blunt here again, shield your eyes if discussions of sexuality make you uncomfortable.

So as a secular Jew, I'm mostly in the minority in this program.  It's kind of weird calling myself secular.  That's not what I am.  I believe in God, and I identify as Jewish.  But it seems like saying "I'm secular" makes people here understand me better than anything else I've tried.

Anyway, a good portion of the group are modern orthodox Jews, which I didn't really expect and has been challenging but also really fascinating. Of course I'm most interested in talking to the girls about what sex and romance are like in their worlds.

They are Shomer Negiah, which means they will not touch men until their wedding day.  They can brush past men if necessary, and one of them said if a man offers his hand when they meet she will shake it, because "his pride is more important than my purity."

Of course I have so many questions about this! I'm going to post this as questions and answers.  Picture us on our bunk beds in pajamas.  I'm combining them into "the girls" to protect their privacy on this blog.

ARIANE: Really? No kissing? No touching?
THE GIRLS: Really!

ARIANE: But... but... what does dating entail? What do you do?
THE GIRLS: We get coffee, get dinner, go to the movies, go for walks... the difference is we basically date with marriage in mind.

ARIANE: But does that remove the suspense? Is there any will-he-won't-he in a dating scenario like that?
THE GIRLS: Oh sure, tons. Will he call? Does he like me? Is this going somewhere?  It just eliminates the possibility that he's just looking for a fling or to use me because that's not possible for us.

ARIANE: How does the relationship grow and progress without any advancing physical intimacy?
THE GIRLS: We have really intense conversations.  We get to know each other incredibly intimately. One time I broke up with a guy and I was terrified because he knew everything about me, everything. There's an intense bond eve if you don't touch.

ARIANE: But how do you know you'll be physically compatible? How do you know he'll touch you in a way that you would like?
THE GIRLS: You can tell a lot about how someone will treat you.  How does he treat you in every other part of the relationship?  How does he carry himself? How does he treat others? What's the vibe?

ARIANE: But what if he turns out to have some bedroom tastes severely different from yours?
THE GIRLS: Well, there's always divorce.
GIRL 1: Yeah that happened to someone I know.  It does backfire sometimes.

ARIANE: What are the benefits to all this, though? Why wait, really?
THE GIRLS: It intensifies the physical relationship between a man and wife.  You learn everything together.  Everything is new and exciting.  So many couples are already bored of each other by the time they get married if they've been having sex all along.
ARIANE: But if you're going to get bored, you're going to get bored.  Maybe after marriage, but isn't it the same idea?
THE GIRLS: No, because there are rules governing sex in a marriage.  You know how men can't touch women the week of their period or the week following?
ARIANE: Yes.  Pretty insulting.
THE GIRLS: Not really. It's designed to keep your sex life spicy.  Married couples operate in a 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off system.  You can't touch each other for two weeks because of the prohibition. But you're still living in the same space, so there's all this intense tension that just builds and builds.  Then after two weeks, you have wild passionate sex for two weeks, and so on.  God is totally looking out for your sex life.
ARIANE:  ...WOW.
THE GIRLS: There's another rule that I like - you can only have sex in half-light.  It's nice because I will always retain some mystique, all my little blemishes will never be on display for someone to see.
ARIANE: ...WOW.

I don't really agree with these things in principle, but I'd never really thought about the period prohibition as a way of maintaining sexual tension in a marriage.  It reminds me of Carrie keeping her own apartment away from Big in Sex and the City and how it helps their relationship to have time apart.

 On the guys side, I had a really interesting conversation with one dude who said he was very skeptical of the way sex is handled in orthodoxy.  He said it's asking you to constantly fight against your own body, your impulses and instincts, and that maybe people aren't meant to live in eternal conflict with themselves like that.  He also reminded me that these laws don't just apply to touching women - Orthodoxy forbids men from masturbating because of the sin of lost seed.

My internalized therapist shudders at this.  That sounds like the fastest way to create serious neuroses. No romantic touch, no relief even from your own hands. I wonder if there are any studies on this?  How does this really effect people in the long run? I feel like we're unlikely to know because insulated religious communities don't seem that they'd likely participate in a study like that.  Does anyone know?  There must be something... somebody's Divinity School thesis or something.

PART 1.5 - SEXY SONG OF SONGS

But something snapped inside me when we were talking about Song of Songs today.  If you haven’t read Song of Songs, please go do so now.  Here’s a link. (there are 8 short chapters, navigation at the top and bottom, the supposed narrator roles are bolded) It’s short and gorgeous and very sensual.

So, like every part of the Torah, you can read Song of Songs a million ways.  One of those ways, is a love story between the Jewish people and the land of Israel.

But one of those ways is a love story between a woman and her lover.  This is an amazing thing.  After a long, long Bible full of prohibitions against sex, stories of rape and abuse, stories of purity and abstinence, here is a very rich and sexy song that celebrates love, anatomy, experimentation, embracing, passion, and the pleasure and bliss that comes uniquely from people entwining.

Even if you want to read this as an allegory for the Jewish people and Israel, you have to respect that this allegory is written in sexual terms!  Even if the writers only intended for this to be a Zionist text, it’s a Zionist text written like sex! You can’t ignore this!  Why would you want to?  It’s so beautiful and full.  It’s encouraging us to fill our hearts and bodies for the land, to love the land as we’d love a lover.  What do people do when they first come to Israel, or when we return? Fall on our knees and kiss the ground.  We hike and sweat and our skin bakes in the sun, and then we dive into deep dark cool pools and then dry in the desert air.  This is such a physical place. This is such the opposite of musty dark halls and ghettos in exile. This is a growing thriving place overflowing with life.  And life, you know, produces life through love.  The first commandment is to be fruitful.

It frankly breaks my heart that one (or three, or however many contributors to the Talmud) would ignore this in favor of breaking it down into rules.  The Song of Songs itself says:

Love is fierce as death,
Passion is mighty as Sheol;
Its darts are darts of fire,
A blazing flame.
Vast floods cannot quench love,
Nor rivers drown it.

Love bows to no laws! Your man or your country, love like a fire!

There’s one verse repeated several times in Song of Songs which is:

Do not wake or rouse
Love until it Please!

And this is interpreted by the rabbis, and by us in class consequently, as, “don’t hurry love, don’t push love before it’s time”

To which I say…

WHAT?!?

I raised my hand and asked that we look at the preceding lines:

His left hand was under my head
His right hand caressed me (His right arm embraced me)
I adjure you, O maidens of Jerusalem:
Do not wake or rouse 
Love until it please!

I think this means the opposite of don’t rush love, especially in the context of Song of Songs, which is full of heaving breasts and doe eyes and midnight meetings and dew dripping from bangs and fertile fields and juice and fruit.   I think it means, “Don’t disturb us.” Like “Let sleeping dogs lie.”  Let lovers lie, too.

Our teacher acknowledged this was a potential reading but not the reading in the Talmud, so basically there’s no point talking about it right now.

…

THIS is what I so resent about the Talmud. Its readings are the “most important.” Even when their readings are a bunch of old men taking the Song of Songs and turning it into a dry dissection of when and when not to move to Israel.  Isn’t stripping the love and sex out of Song and Songs a misreading?  If not a misreading, it’s at least really depressing.

To me, anyway.

My classmate pointed out to me that this is not a literature class.  This is a class on Zionism. That’s why we read it the way that we did.  But I still argue there’s nothing more powerfully Zionist than a passionate love story between a people and their land.  Why would we not discuss a love letter from our ancestors to our homeland?

And what's more, reading the "don't rouse love" line in a certain way completely impacts the way you'd read this as a Zionist text.  If you say it means "don't rush love" it would support the idea that we need to wait to enter the promised land until the correct time.

But I think Song of Songs argues for the complete opposite of don't rush love.  Let's look at the most famous passage:

I slept but my heart was awake.
    Listen! My beloved is knocking:
“Open to me, my sister, my darling,
    my dove, my flawless one.
My head is drenched with dew,
    my hair with the dampness of the night.”
3 I have taken off my robe—
    must I put it on again?
I have washed my feet—
    must I soil them again?
4 My beloved thrust his hand through the latch-opening;
    my heart began to pound for him.
5 I arose to open for my beloved,
    and my hands dripped with myrrh,
my fingers with flowing myrrh,
    on the handles of the bolt.
6 I opened for my beloved,
    but my beloved had left; he was gone.
    My heart sank at his departure.[a]
I looked for him but did not find him.
    I called him but he did not answer.
7 The watchmen found me
    as they made their rounds in the city.
They beat me, they bruised me;
    they took away my cloak,
    those watchmen of the walls!
8 Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you—
    if you find my beloved,
what will you tell him?
    Tell him I am faint with love.

Don't hurry? No! This passage is saying: DON'T WAIT! When love knocks, answer! Don't hem and haw in bed.  Don't fiddle with the lock.  Answer! Let it in!

If this is Zionism... go to Israel! Don't wait for the perfect time! Get off your butt and go!

I feel like I make a caricature of myself always bringing this kind of thing up in class.  It’s funny because I feel like people in the States are always implying I’m prudish and here I feel on the other end of the spectrum. It’s probably all in my head here, and no one is actually judging.  But in my head I feel strange expressing myself about this here.

PART 1.75: PURITY AND SPECIALNESS

Which leads me to talking about how it feels to be somewhat of a heathen in this environment.

First, for those of you reading this who are not familiar with Israel, you should know that much of Israel (most?) is similar to the states in its rather free love attitude.  I don't want you to read this and think that Israel is a sexually repressed country. Quite the opposite.  But right now I'm talking about purity here, so I'm going to dwell on that.

Remember also that I'm currently at a school for zionist thinking in the Judean Desert which is enclosed and which has a number of Orthodox participants, so this is a very particular environment.

I have to be really cognizant of my body in this atmosphere.

First, I need to be very careful about touching men.  At home, I'm a very affectionate person.  I love to hug my friends.  I love high-fives.  I love patting people on the back when they do a good job.  Etc.  Here, I need to assume I can't do those things.  If I have the impulse to hug someone, I have to remember to say "Do you hug?" before I glomp them.  And sometimes they say "no, I don't." and then there's that awkward moment where I'm like "oh, well... uh... okay bye!"

None of the guys here are so strict that if I accidentally bumped into them it would cause a problem.  But I did run into people like that in Jerusalem.  I was in a cafe and I was standing in a narrow hall next to a box of forks.  An observant man wanted to put a fork in the box and I offered to put it in for him, but he refused to hand it to me (either because you can't hand things to women on their periods and he didn't know whether or not I was on mine, or because he was worried he'd accidentally touch me in handing me the fork) so we had to awkwardly shuffle down the hall and back again in opposite positions.

So I kind of feel like I have a girl-plague.

Then I have to be thoughtful about how I dress. We all hiked down in very high heat to a valley where there was a spring.  And I was the only girl who put on a bathing suit (well, one of them also wore a bikini top!). The other girls swam in their clothes. One girl said, "Man, I wouldn't wear a bathing suit in this crowd..."

Clearly I have no shame

And I have to say I've never seen men avoid me in a bathing suit before. But a lot of them did, or seemed to.

Then I have to be thoughtful of how I move. At Shabbat there were some Eastern songs and my instinct is to dance! In a kind of.... belly dance-ish way?  I don't mean like gyrating.  Just kind of swaying and waving my arms and stuff.  It felt natural and fine.  And one girl said she didn't have the nerve to dance like that in this crowd.

All of this together makes me feel kind of like an explosive. I guess it's nice that women have that power in a culture that puts them on pedestals.  But is it power or is it paranoia? I mean, my body might offend people just by existing or moving or being draped in a certain way.  It's already getting to me and it's only been a few weeks.  What if you grew up like this?  I need this study.

I find the idea of value in modesty a little problematic.  On the one hand, it's a bit romantic, and you could argue you respect yourself by not treating yourself like a sexual object or dressing to attract others.

On the other hand, I had a conversation with one guy who was saying that when he sees women on the street who are very immodestly dressed, it causes him pain, because he thinks, "You are so special.  Don't give that away so easily."

And I kind of balked and said, "I don't think my specialness can be rubbed off like I'm some kind of shiny penny.  My specialness exists regardless of how I dress..."

And I believe that.  I believe bikini Ariane and kimono Ariane and Ariane in her winter coat and scarf and hat are equally special. Is it really respecting women to think they need to protect their specialness? Why would you allow your love and admiration and respect for someone to decrease with the amount of clothing they wear?

I think the intention might be a good one but I just don't know about the execution.

Troubling.

On the other hand, what would dating feel like if you knew the guy you were with wasn't expecting you to put out that night?

There's something nice about that.


ENCORE PART: DEPRESSING THOUGHTS OF THE DAY

On the topic of saving children in the holocaust and how to allocate resources, David Ben Gurion said, "Would rather save 250,000 Jewish children by bringing them to Palestine than 1,000,000 by bringing them to England."

For serious, BG?!?

Then we learned about Ben Gurion being an asshole and blowing up a ship full of arms for Israel and almost killing Begin.

Then we learned about the Struma, a ship of about 800 Jewish refugees heading for Palestine.  There was only one toilet and they were out of food and water and their motor broke. The British refused to let them dock there, the Turks refused to let them dock or resupply them.  The Turks towed them out to the black sea and left them there, where the Russians decided they didn't want to deal with them in their waters and fired them and sank the ship and they all died.

Thank God for Begin, I guess, who said all Jews were the responsibility of Israel. Thank God there's one country on Earth that cares about us.

I say "us"...

Although a girl in Jerusalem the other day said to me, "You're not technically Jewish."



OH, WHOOPS, REALLY?!?! THANK YOU FOR CLEARING THAT UP.