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“Kosher Lust”; New Book From Rabbi Shmuley Boteach Teaches Love is Second to Lust

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Accomplished author, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach says lust is the key to a healthy marriage
Accomplished author, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach says lust is the key to a healthy marriage
Former Oxford University rabbi turned author Shmuley Boteach has released his 30th book. Included in the list are best sellers “Kosher Sex” and “The Kosher Sutra” which may be tame compared to his latest offering “Kosher Lust”. Boteach’s new book is causing quite a stir among conventional wisdom thinkers who believe “love” is the key to a strong marriage. Boteach uses the Bible’s famous relationships to make his point for him. “All the famous relationships of the Bible are lust relationships not love relationships”, says Boteach. Just look at our patriarchs. Jacob waits seven years for Rachel, and for him it feels like a few days. According to the rabbi American marriages are facing a serious crisis nowadays.

The primary concern especially from women is that their sex lives are atrophying. There is no intimacy in the marriage. The reason why women leave bad marriages is they don’t feel desired. Even in affairs, men don’t love the other woman but rather lust after her. If you put love up against lust, love won’t stand a chance, Boteach warns. He adds lust has gotten a bad rap, as dirty and forbidden, but Boteach makes the case that this lust is needed to return a failing marriage to a healthy one.

But sex starved couples need not give up hope and couples on the brink of divide can find their way back to one another. Boteach teaches that there must always remain some mystery in the marriage.

Sarah, after decades of marriage is still desired by Abraham because she always kept a calculated distance facilitating an air of mystery about herself. He says not to rob your marriage of mystery by walking around the room naked while your husband watches television. Obstacles create greater desire. In a lust centered relationship a woman can still hold mystery. There should always still be something left to discover.

Strive to make your spouse feel selected or chosen so he or she feels like the first and only in your life. Total trust is necessary say Boteach to pave the way for the necessary eroticism that can ensure electrifying and dare we say a “holy” relationship.

Boteach says he wants his readers to know that not all Orthodox Jews have sex through a hole in the sheet.

Lust was always supposed to be the cornerstone of a relationship. Everything else is secondary. Of course you need love in a marriage. Of course you need respect, appreciation, compliments, shared values. But if you are in a marriage where you don’t deeply desire the person you’re with, you are in a jail cell. It’s a form of incarceration. It may be a form of incarceration that has sex and love and caring and all those things, but you’re in a cell, because you don’t want to be there.

The essence of desire is choice. What I say in the book answers what Freud wrote to Marie Bonaparte, Napoleon’s great-niece in 1938. Freud said he’s been able to answer almost all questions of human psyche except one — one question that no one can answer: What is it that a woman wants?

I claim in this book to be the first man ever in history to answer that question!

It is based on my deep attachment to my feminine side. And the answer is this: A woman doesn’t want to be loved. If a woman wants to be loved, she would stay with her parents. Her parents love her unconditionally. Her parents are never going to divorce her. Her parents are never going to cheat on her. We rarely hear about parents going and taking the next-door neighbor’s kid secretly to the circus. So why do women, by the age of 14 or 15, why do they have to be kept at home coercively by these people who love them so much if a woman wants to be loved? Parents can give their daughters everything but one thing: they cannot give them the gift of chosen-ness.

First of all, there is nothing that I write in my books that I don’t seek, of course, to sustain in my own marriage and my relationship. That would be fraudulent. Now, I am a child of divorce. That characterizes so much of what I do. Some people tell me, “Get over it; it happened so long ago; you were eight years old; you’re now 47.” And I’ve tried; I’ve tried to have my parents’ divorce no longer motivate so many of my actions. I’ve always been this guy with a little inner brokenness — competing, clashing forces on the inside, trying to reconcile those clashing forces but also trying to derive and create a spark from those clashing forces. And when you’re a child, the trauma is that much more lasting, because you lack the defenses, where it’s internalized.

I now believe that even the Jewish people, that their main role in life is struggle. I don’t think we’re ever going to be Sweden or Switzerland. I don’t just mean the State of Israel; I mean the Jewish people. You can say we’re condemned to an eternal struggle, but maybe we’re blessed in an eternal struggle. And we can debate that. My wife and I, thank God, are blessed with nine children. My wife is nothing like me. She was blessed with two loving parents who adore each other to this very day. I remember a few moments of peace between my parents; my wife remembers one argument between her parents.

The Christian Bible and the writings of St. Paul replaced the Hebrew Bible’s lust marriage. I show the patriarchs, for example, all had lust marriages [which were replaced] with the New Testament’s love marriage. Saint Paul hated lust. He condemned lust constantly. He said that God himself is love; that’s where the expression comes from. He famously wrote, “Love is patient, love is kind.” He wrote beautiful things about love. But he hated lust. So lust lost favor, and love became the foundation. And marriage became not about fire and two people who have individuality that leads to desire, but it became more a partnership, the orchestration of two halves into one.

In the end Shmuley believes that lust can be created within any marriage and that the presence of “ongoing desire” is the glue that holds a marriage together.

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