Creativity and Sexuality

A Kabbalistic Perspective

Mordechai Rotenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351525152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Judaism openly recognizes, as an integral part of human nature, the enigmatic relationship between yetzer, or physical desire, and yetzirah, or spiritual creativity. Creativity and Sexuality, written as a fictional dialogue, clearly delineates the psychic interdependence of these two drives, as well as the integration of the concepts as they are defined by both Jewish mysticism and modern psychology.Mordechai Rotenberg is interested in the impact of religion on the psychology of everyday life. He was prompted to write Creativity and Sexuality by the popularity of writings that explore Jewish texts on the subject of sexuality from a historical or literary point of view, but that do not hesitate to include psychological evaluations based on popular secondary psychological concepts. This work seeks to provide an accurate psychological analysis of sexuality and spirituality from a Jewish mystical perspective. As such, it both reconstructs the interdisciplinary bridge between Judaism and psychology and deconstructs some exegetical traditions. The goal is to present new paradigmatic options, which may help modern society struggle more efficiently with its sexuality. Ultimately, the author sees physical desire and spiritual creativity as a regulative continuum. People learn how to spend the tremendous power of energy that the sexual yetzer produces not only on physical sex, but on the spiritual yetzirah.In an introduction written especially for this new edition, the author explains the continuing relevance of Creativity and Sexuality, and the ongoing relationship between sexual desire and a healthy spiritual self-fulfillment. This volume will be of interest to students of Judaism, psychology, mysticism, and sexuality.

1
Creation and Procreation

ChaP: As chairperson (ChaP) of this year’s lecture series on creation, sexuality, and creativity, I have the honor to introduce Prof. RaM, who will deliver these lectures. Since Prof. RaM intends to present here a thesis on the possible impact of religious doctrines on sexuality by comparing Western dogmas to kabbalistic and other Jewish sources with which most of you are not familiar, I shall introject clarifying questions as we go along. As a matter of fact, this dialogic procedure was suggested by Prof. RaM, who felt that while free questions from the audience might disrupt the flow of his lectures, some of the comparative subtleties might get lost without the proposed encounter because, after all, he is only a “frequent flying” visitor in the United States, as he himself put it. I shall now give the floor to Prof. RaM.

RaM: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairperson, for drawing the audience’s attention to my intention to focus on the possible impact of religio-cultural notions on sexual conduct. If we may thus agree that one may notice gross differences in the way various cultures balance the universally opposing needs for repressing and expressing sexuality, then perhaps it is indeed wise to go all the way back to Genesis. That is to say, since sexuality is intertwined with the way we perceive procreation, let me begin my first lecture by looking at the possible impact of religious creation myths known as cosmogonies on patterns of sexuality from an illustrative angle.

ChaP: I think that I grasp correctly what you mean by “universally opposing needs for a simultaneous repression and expression of sexuality.” But for the sake of clarity, could you be more specific in regard to these polar trends.

RaM: Oh, sure! I think that every society’s need to encourage sexual expression, if for nothing else than promoting love and procreation, faces the immediate problem of restraining uncontrolled expressions of sexual passions. Society’s need to control these two opposing trends might be akin to the charioteer’s position in Plato’s Phaedrus (1975). He has to dominate a pair of horses of which one is easy to handle while the other wild, untamed horse attempts to pull the wagon off the main road. In any event, with this illuminative introduction of sexuality as requiring regulation between two opposing trends, let us tackle Western sexuality by examining a concrete event. Following my interest in issues concerning sexual behavior, I make it my business to participate during my visits to the U.S.A. in a variety of seminars and workshops on this subject in order to become acquainted with changing trends permeating approaches and educational or psychological methods that are being used to deal with problems pertaining to sexuality. In one of the educational guidance programs for parents that I attended recently, the counselor invited parents to role-play with him problems they encounter with their children around sex education. As a trigger for today’s presentation, I reconstructed the following dialogue between a concerned mother and the guidance counselor.

Mother: I don’t know whether I should be happy or worried, but my daughter refuses to accept her school nurse’s advice to carry in her purse a package of condoms as requested by the American Surgeon General.

Counselor: How old is your daughter?

Mother: Thirteen and a half.

Counselor: Did she experience already full intercourse with boys?

Mother: She says that she didn’t and that she is not interested in boys at the moment.

Counselor: So why are you concerned?

Mother: Because, I know that she avoids boys mainly because of her insecurity and shyness, not because she is not interested in boys, and I am afraid that when and if she will meet the right boy, she will be too embarrassed to demand of him to use a condom and that is dangerous due to the spreading problem of AIDS.

Counselor: So what she really needs is assertiveness training in order

to overcome her insecurity and be able to date boys. Once she will date boys, assertiveness training might focus on helping her to insist on having sex only with condoms. I might add that if you as a mother face difficulties following the above suggested training plan for your daughter, then possibly you yourself might need some assertiveness training that might help you to handle your daughter and other issues as well.

Ladies and gentlemen, I brought these short reconstructed citations only because they reflect the overexaggerated emphasis put on assertive behavior featuring American communication styles, which are possibly epitomized in attitudes and conduct that evolves around sex. By observing the exaggerated demand for assertive behavior, I would like to draw your attention to the counselor’s failure to mention the question of romantic love and the flirting dialogue that might pave the way for romantic relationships. While flirting, which I hope to tackle in my future lectures, is by definition ambiguous and de-assertive, and contains protective components against full physical involvement, the focus on the biologic act of sexuality as a taken-for-granted norm requires inevitably an either/or¹ assertion. It is hence this assertive-aggressive pattern of sexual interaction that I think can be understood only by tracing it to a basic religious, possibly latent, dogma and in particular to a creation myth that molded this behavioral pattern.

ChaP: Before you go on, may I comment that since the described counseling session represented a very secular if not antireligious approach to sex, I fail to see how a religious creation myth could have exerted any impact on the advice given to this mother. Moreover, I am afraid that your “by the way” remark concerning the oblivion to romantic love takes your case somewhat out of context. It is quite possible that you are not sufficiently sensitive to the state of emergency permeating such guidance sessions, which undertake to promote “safe sex” to prevent the threatening AIDS epidemic. This, however, does not mean that romantic love is banned in this country.

RaM: Since your question is twofold, let me state first that in my en deavor to trace impacts of religious doctrines on secular behavior, I follow the German sociologist Max Weber (1967). Weber was able to show that one may not explain the difference between the passive secular Indian and the active secular American without assuming that the behavior of these two is shaped by a religious ethic that became a cultural norm by having gone through a process of secularization. Indeed, I feel that it is only by accepting Weber’s orientation that one may understand cultural variations in dealing with the controversial need if not selfcontradictory prescriptions for handling sexual conduct. As to your second remark, I am glad to hear that romantic love is not condemned in this country. But for my purpose it is the priority given to the physical repression or expression of sexuality that counts. Thus, let me delve into the heart of our query.

The Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig (1972:199) states that the biblical book: “The Song of Songs . . . is a . . . genuinely spiritual song of the love of God for man. Man loves because God loves and as² God loves.”

By contrast, contends Rosenzweig (ibid.), such German scholars as “Herder and Goethe claimed the Song of Songs as a collection of ‘worldly’love lyrics [because] God does not love . . . [and consequently] Spinoza’s denial of divine love for the individual soul was welcomed by the German Spinozists.” Rosenzweig’s assertions provoke the following challenging question: If, indeed, human behavior is largely molded by people’s propensity to imitate a self-selected or a culturally internalized “God” (imitatio Dei), then perhaps contemporary patterns of lovemaking are differentially affected by particular theological doctrines of love (“as God loves”), which may be rooted in specific cosmogonies?

Thus, my point of departure begins from the observation that the impact of religious doctrines on secular behavior, including sexuality, might be appreciated, if we accept Max Weber’s socio-psychology of religion. Namely, if we agree that both Western patterns of religious repression and anti-religious expression of physical sexuality appear quite identical in terms of the assertive-aggressive manner that is applied to advocate one approach against the other. True, sexual advocation is not necessarily synonymous with actual sexual conduct. For our purpose, one may assume, however, that if feminists “advocated” demand for equality in initiating sexual contacts or contracts, this reflects also an assertive pattern in their concrete sexual behavior. To elucidate this qualifying observation we may assume that a visitor from a non-Western civilization in a Western country like the United States would probably conclude that sexual expression is being advocated quite aggressively via all the available means of public media.³ He would most probably notice also that sexual repression is being enforced in the media in a fashion that appears even more aggressive than the promotion of sexual expression, because any condemnation of, say, male dominant machismo practically means sexual repression.

In spite of the futile clarification efforts of his Western hosts, our visitor would undoubtedly find it difficult to perceive the subtle differences between the celebration of, say, sadomasochistic aggressive sex that is accepted as a legitimate outlet of sexual expression on the basis of adult consent, while condemning nonaggressive flirting attempts as sexual harassment. Consequently, our visitor might be struck by an unerasable “sociological” impression, that the behavioral patterns for fostering sexual expression and sexual repression appear highly identical. For brevity, this style of behavior might hitherto be termed “aggres- sertive” (aggressive-assertive).

ChaP: Perhaps there is a certain assertiveness or even what you term “aggressertive” overtone in the way we “advertise” our pro and con positions concerning crucial problems in our lives. But after all, since these men and women you describe are essentially in favor of sexual relationships, I have difficulties in accepting their positions as representing antonymies of expression versus repression of sexuality that are embedded in one religious doctrine.

RaM: True, the condemnation of sexual harassment on which I shall elaborate in my future lectures is not synonymous with total repression. I think, however, that the controversy over assertive repression versus expression of sexuality in the West might be better understood by once more using Plato’s two horses. Allan Bloom (1987:98) observed two opposing waves in what came to be known as the “sexual revolution.” “The sexual revolution marched under the banner of freedom; feminism under that of equality. Although they went arm in arm for a while, their differences eventually put them at odds with each other. . . . This [contends Bloom] is manifest in the squabble over pornography which pits liberated desire against feminist resentment about stereotyping.” Thus, the idea that sexual “freedom” and sexual “equality” represent two horses pulling in opposite directions, one repressing and the other expressing pornographic sexuality, is a case in point. Again, my emphasis on the “aggressertive” common denominator presumably permeating repressive and expressive trends in sexuality comes to reinforce my proposition that only by going all the way back to specific creation myths may we understand, for instance, why the feminist outcry fostered mutual assertiveness instead of male deassertive submissiveness. I think therefore that the significance of attempting to detect theosophical impacts on patterns of sexuality might be illuminated by first reviewing briefly the history of the controversy that evolved in the West from disputes over the puzzling implications associated with “sexual repression” versus “sexual expression.”

In his influential⁴ three-volume History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault (1990) refutes the common belief that the era beginning at the end of the sixteenth century was marked by a trend toward “sexual repression.” It was, maintains Foucault, the beginning of a long-lasting period during which the discourse, control, and dissemination of power techniques were exercised over sexual activities by those who claimed to master the knowledge concerning sexuality.

Nonetheless, as we close out the twentieth century, it appears that Western thinking is still dominated by Sigmund Freud’s (1963:180) basic formulation that the “neuroses . . . came about by sexual instinctual impulses being rejected (repressed).” Thus, Freud’s tenets that “psychoanalysis is able to show us . . . the effects of repression in the psychoneurosis [because] neurotic symptoms . . . are derivatives of the repressed” (p. 107) seem unchallenged even today in the sense that neurosis (which is a hallmark of Westerners) is understood as a defect caused by sexual repression.

ChaP: Okay! So Foucault thinks that sexuality is not repressed but controlled by power techniques used under the guise of therapeutic or educational knowledge, while Freud disseminated therapeutic methods to combat sexual repression trends that he believed do permeate Western societies. But why do we associate the idea of “sexual repression” solely with the West in the first place, and conversely, what are the religious implications and origins of the antirepressive revolt?

RaM: Yes! According to Western experts, the “repressive hypothesis,” in Foucault’s words, is first of all a Western phenomenon. However, in order to argue that the two opposing positions of repression versus expression are embedded in the same religious doctrine, I would like to introduce here a subheading that I term:

The Sex-Celibacy Pendulum

To trace the religious roots of the complexing or rather perplexing antirepressive trend, we might begin by establishing that this revolutionary trend appears to carry typical anti-Christian trademarks. Indeed, Freud, Foucault, and others have repeatedly pointed their blaming fingers at the Christian ascetic religion as the “bedrock” for our neurotic repressed sexuality.

The point is, however, that while prima facie modern thinkers seem to join hands in their antirepressive efforts, the idea or rather ideal of sexual repression is equally alive and kicking among psychologists, although in a disguised manner. Thus, Freud conceded, for example, that without some natural sexual frustration, which practically means repressed sexuality, there would be no civilization. In fact, Freud (1963:26) states unequivocally: “Education can without further hesitation be described as an incitement to the conquest of the pleasure principle and its replacement by the reality principle.”

What we have then is a Freudian self-contradicting canon. Whereas psychoanalysis constitutes an antineurotic (i.e., antirepressive) system, if one wants to facilitate the unobstructed progress of civilization, then one must replace (give up) one’s sexual pleasure principle and be governed by the sexually repressive reality principle.

Indeed, this Freudian pendulum that oscillates between creativity and therapy, between neurotic-repression and antirepression, between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, was already challenged by Wilhelm Reich (1975), Hebert Marcuse (1962), and others. Reich (1975:21) argued, for instance, that “the social phenomena imposing sexual repression on the individual and creating a mass plague—could not be the prerequisite of cultural development.” As many of you probably know, Reich (p. 27), who adopted a Marxist viewpoint, believed that “the problem of the sexual misery of the population can only be solved by a movement towards freedom from any kind of oppression (so that) the final elimination of the effects of thousands of years of sexual repression and the establishment of a satisfactory love life for the people, thus eliminating the plague of neuroses, will be possible only when work- democracy has been established.” Likewise, Marcuse claimed that instead of incorporating the sexual pleasure principle into a higher model of progressive freedom, Freudian psychoanalysis promoted a desexual- izing production-based reality principle. In other words, Marcuse disagrees with Freud’s either/or model according to which production-based progress is attainable only if the desexualizing reality principle replaces the pleasure principle. It is insignificant here whether we agree with Marcuse’s belief about the possibility to utilize sexuality for the sake of higher progressive freedom.

The swinging range of the pendulum seems to widen, however, the more we discover how beyond Freud’s self-contradictory canon, modern positions contradict each other in regard to the repressive-expressive dilemma of sexuality. While according to Marcuse, antirepressive therapy should have developed higher forms of civilized progress, Foucault’s condemnation of this antirepressive therapy as a knowledge-based form of social control seems to disseminate antiprogressive forms of hedonistic and even nihilistic sexuality.

If we move on in time to consider recent neo-repressive crusades launched, for example, by Mussaieff-Mason (1988), Forrester (1991), and others against the sexually seductive nature inherent in the psychotherapeutic encounter, or if we examine campaigns led by women against sexual harassment trends, the picture beco...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Creation and Procreation
• 2 The “Yetzer” as Creative Neurosis
• 3 Ecstasy and Spiritual Sexuality
• 4 Romantic Flirting versus Sexual Harassment
• 5 The “Mystic Closet” of Romantic Flirting and Prophetic Imagination
• 6 The Patriarchic Pendulum and the Balancing “Jewish Mother”
• 7 The Yetzer in the Socio-psychological Therapy Room
• Bibliography
• Index