Seven Colors of the Rainbow

Chapter VIII

No rule of creation says that any individual is bound to break the sexual laws because of his or her own true nature. There is no such thing as “an adulterer” or “a homosexual” any more than there is such a thing as “a thief.” All that exists is the temptation to wrongdoing that everyone experiences to some extent. Against this is only the need and desire of every person, Jew or non-Jew, to do as God wishes and to be respected and esteemed for it in His eyes.

The Torah refers to sexual immorality as “joking,” a term that neatly explains the choice of the word “gay” as well as describing other forbidden relationships. Such relationships seem to be the most amusing way to pass the time, but in fact they make the participants into the “jokers” who place the joke squarely on themselves. By contrast it is the permitted and encouraged sexual relationship which provides real laughter. The couple laugh happily together in the knowledge that they are not doing anything shameful or contemptible.

The great majority of people who have sexual intercourse for the wrong reasons do so because they are depressed. Depression is an internalized form of anger, and in this case, the individual acts out his or her anger against external circumstances by seeking forbidden sexual pleasures. Soon the sense of humor becomes affected, and without even realizing it, the person turns this internal anger against God: “Why did He make me so deprived and unhappy? I'll break His rules and get someone else to do it with me, so then when He sees it He'll be sorry!"

Depression is so widespread today that many people do not even know that they are depressed. This is not surprising when the media, in their programs and advertising, cater to this way of life. When something is so widely considered legitimate, few people are going to assume anything is wrong with them.

Yet what brings happiness is the ability to refuse depressive sex and the other forms of consumption, including narcotic drugs which are so often a sexual substitute. We can realize that all things in this world that seem to be hostile or sad are in fact made to lead to good and that, in particular, we experience good directly when we refuse sexual immorality, even though such a refusal may seem a pointless loss when everyone else is apparently “having fun.”

This is the working of the Sefirah of Kindness, the embrace of the “right arm.” What seems to be a restriction has within it the power to bring us to true happiness.

Today, conventional psychological wisdom allows most people to retain their childhood antipathy to the “punishing parent” right on through adulthood; no one can tell them that the restrictions and the punishments might have had something valuable to say to them. They come to believe that what they want is good for them because they want it, without ever asking why it is that they want it, and this is one good way to become an unfulfilled individual.

Every person has the capacity to understand and follow the ideas explained here. The more one understands Torah and its reasons, the happier and more confident one will be, but the Creator gives the basic understanding to every human being.

Of all the forbidden relationships, incest with close relatives is the one that people most often consider disgusting and repugnant in and of itself. People seldom feel tempted to commit incest for reasons of ordinary sexual satisfaction or to further a friendship with the related person.

Even when incest does occur it is mostly an occasional thing, usually one time only; a stable sexual relationship between close relatives is something completely unknown. There is no movement to legitimize it, and no one goes out into the world saying openly that he or she is accustomed to practicing incest for personal fulfillment.

This is because the love feelings that exist between close relatives are of a completely different nature from those between sexual partners. The love of man and woman is intense and fiery; they long to be together and cannot bear to be apart. But a brother and sister have a cool, distant love; they are happy to be together, but their love is just as stable if they only meet rarely. It is this coolness that provides the reassuring factor in close family relationships, the knowledge that with the relative one can experience a love without passionate commitment or energetic effort.

When people decide to have incestuous relations, they deliberately go against a fact of nature that they know to be true, usually out of pure spite or sadism, and often, even more unhappily, without the other person's consent. Someone who reaches this level has lost contact with normal life in general, and though it can happen for a number of reasons, with severe depression among them, the rabbis say that a man who gorges himself sexually will come to “eat his own flesh,” which means he will desire relations with his own flesh and blood. When sexual indulgence becomes an end in itself, the satisfaction within it is lost, and only the act itself in its most uncongenial forms appears as the lure.

Bestial relations are almost as revolting as incestuous relations to most people, but bestiality is more readily dismissed as laughable because no other person is involved and because of the ridiculous notion of setting up housekeeping with the dog. In crude or isolated company, a man may joke about the subject, but for a woman this is not nearly so easy, and few things can be so repellent as discovering that an acquaintance has extended his or her connections outside the species. These acts within more normal social settings stem from sexual overindulgence in general.

If a Jew has relations with an animal, then the animal must be killed by order of the court and its meat forbidden. The meat has a tainted status because it was a cause of sin, and people might come to look at it and to be tempted themselves, saying, “This is the animal which brought so-and-so to leave the path.” If a non-Jew has relations with an animal, the animal need not be killed.

In striking contrast to the revulsion toward incest and bestiality, there is a widespread tendency to be lenient toward homosexual behavior and to vindicate the desire for homosexual relations. Millions of men and women set up households on such a basis, and though they are not considered examples of peaceful, healthy living by everyone, they often show a surprising stability. People leading such lives often hold responsible senior positions and make contributions to the arts or sciences. Books are written about the relationships themselves, which many praise for their high quality, and the allegedly superior “sensitivity” of this form of connection is constantly held up as a value worthy of universal adoption. Earlier societies also had homosexual elements, and they formed a key part of the workings of the society as a whole.

Why should something on this level be forbidden? The Seven Laws do indeed forbid homosexuality, on the same level as the other offenses just described, and no one can legislate any change to permit them. The Torah makes a particular point of forbidding homosexual marriage contracts to the extent that it praises those non-Jewish societies who refuse to register such marriages as upholders of the law.

Female homosexuality does not incur the penalty because women do not possess the physical means for intercourse, but sexual relations between women are termed “abominable” in the same way as male contacts without penetration and may not be tolerated.

What form of kindness is so missing in such relationships that the Almighty would set His face against them entirely? Even in times such as ours when the practice of homosexuality is widespread, large sections of society feel as much disgust for this practice as for incest and bestiality. Advocates of homosexuality try to portray its opponents as backward or ill-educated, but most ordinary people are not taken in. The establishment of homosexual municipalities that serve as a kind of “gay Camelot” and the wresting of concessions from city administrations evoke strong adverse reactions in many quarters even though people realize that little can be done about it for the time being.

At the opposite extreme of all this statuesque beauty is the reality unhymned by poets, the brutal and selfish homosexuality of both men and women seeking to enjoy the sexual attributes of each other in the most cynical and disillusioning way.

When people become aware of homosexual behavior in their midst, the revulsion they feel is against the improper use of kindness. Two men may feel that they want their capability for love to be used for each other, but the Seven Laws tell us that this is misplaced love. The beauty of a love relationship is only actualized when the love goes to its correct destination; otherwise it is like a letter sent to the wrong address, where one person ends up reading what is meant for another.

When love is misdirected in this way, the sexual partners never find their “address” in heaven. Their relationship remains empty of all the transcendence that correctly addressed love receives from above. Homosexual lovers become mere objects in each other's sight. They increasingly use each other, they become irritated and annoyed with small things, and the object of their affection starts to wear out and to lose its attraction. They place a premium on “fresh” relationships because the beauty of youth is all that can console the lovesick partner for the shortness of his time on earth.

Many have noted that the special poignancy so often felt by homosexual partners and described in their literature derives from an inner realization that they are indeed playing an “end-game"-their relationship goes no farther than themselves. A man and a woman gain by relating to each other sexually as objects, if their purpose is love, because the ultimate purpose of their relationship is to produce “another object,” namely their child. Together they can set aside the limitations of personality and forget all its doubts and dissatisfactions. In these moments of intimacy, they receive the ultimate consolation for the transience of being in this world as a frail and perishable items, in the embrace designed by the blessed Creator, transcending it together with a partner who shares and understands that transience. But the homosexual participant never has children to live after him, nor does he enjoy a relationship that has its being in something eternal, something above the fading of his promise and the wrinkling of his skin.

Few men are more pathetic than the aging homosexual, uninteresting even to other homosexuals, abandoned to loneliness as the parade of new material passes him by. All the effort and trouble of married life and the raising of children is sound investment compared with the loss suffered by those who choose the “different way.” In the end, all the societies that encourage homosexuality will likewise fade and decline.

Adultery with the wife of another man is not rare, but its contribution to unhappiness is as great as any single factor in love life. Depression and boredom, far more than genuine love for the woman, are responsible for the desire to abandon the home in secret and find transitory pleasure elsewhere. A husband who permits his wife to make other connections while remaining married to her does not exempt her from the adulterous designation; he is deliberately destroying his home rather than letting it be pulled down around him.

A husband's duty is to satisfy his wife so that their home provides all her needs because, without this, her natural tendency will be to stray outside its confines. He has to give her all her sexual requirements, without allowing her to become demanding, and give her the honor and respectability that allow her to go about in society with a good name. This maintaining of the home is the key to the stability and happiness in the religious sense that the Seven Laws recommend. In a certain way, the woman is herself the home; her body itself is like a home for the unborn child, and her position as the valued and respected center of all home life is an expression of her essential feminine nature, whatever other interests she might wish to pursue. Even the most able women, whose careers take them to the peak of success in the outside world, are reluctant to deny themselves this satisfaction altogether.

In modern life, few are aware of what a home really is or of how much a woman's life is downgraded by treating her sexual capacity carelessly and separating it from homemaking. Prostitution is one of the worst manifestations of this, and anyone who thinks that there is such a thing as a “happy hooker” should be straightened out. Even worse than prostitution, however, is the situation in which prostitutes are not needed because the good girls have been made to take over their function.

Pre-marital relations are harmful to the capacity for a healthy domestic life, but adultery destroys it altogether. If a man enters a bed that marriage has reserved to another, he is not just borrowing the facilities; he is wrecking the link between the man and the woman, for which their marriage is intended, and affecting their entire capacity for loyalty and trust. Their relationship can no longer exist as it did before.

When a woman has sexual relations with the man of her choice, she entrusts him with a deeply essential part of her nature. His sexual power is not something made to amuse her, only to be discarded like a toy; it conquers her and makes her part of a dual personality, the connection between two people which produces their children.

In Jewish marriage, this “acquisition” of the woman is the legal part of the ceremony. For this reason a Jewish woman cannot divorce her husband, though she can compel the court to make him divorce her. For non-Jews, this is not the case, and the man does not legally “acquire” the woman as a wife. However, the character of the arrangement is similar in the personal sense. A husband takes on the duty of maintaining his wife as the embodiment of his home, and she undertakes to perform that task in full integrity as long as they remain together.

Even though the law does not forbid the husband's outside connections as adultery, it is still deeply immoral for him to cheat on his life partner and go outside her realm for his gratification. She has the right to know where he is and how he spends his time and to go to him for household expenses and the needs of the children. Loyalty to one's spouse is like loyalty to God. When one passes over the other's faults because of the marriage tie that God has made, not seeking selfish pleasure or sulking when pleasure is not provided, then the faith and loyalty offer their own rewards in the form of understanding, enhancing every aspect of personal and family existence.

In order for a marital relationship to be successful, the partners must maintain their capacity for modesty and even for shame; they should not be afraid to blush. If something happens to disturb their opinion of each other, they should not have to take incident so seriously. The question has to be, “Am I so great anyway that I have to get annoyed over this?"

Blatant sexuality in the world has made it hard for people to remember the possibility of delicate feelings, of personal intimacy that occupies the private world inside and has no need to compete with what happens elsewhere. Modesty is not inadequacy; boundaries are not restrictions. If anyone asks the reason why, then the answer only has to be that there are laws for people's lives just as there are laws for the natural world: “Things are made to fall down, not up, and I'm doing as I was made to do.”

This law corresponds to the blue color in the rainbow. Blue is the purest color and the closest to white, which represents original knowledge and truth. Blue is the color of the sky, a cool, soothing color, and it signifies the fulfillment of kindness and love, their peaceful nature which brings us near to heaven.

From Seven Colors of the Rainbow: Torah Ethics for Non-Jews by Yirmeyahu Bindman © 1995 Resource Publications, Inc. Published on this website by special arrangement with Resource Publications, Inc. Material may be downloaded for individual use but not otherwise published or distributed without the written permission of Resource Publications, Inc., 160 E. Virginia St. #290, San Jose, CA 95112.

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