The fourteenth category in Rambam’s presentation (the last—after this, there are five summary chapters left in this whole part of Moreh Nevukhim, which are particularly interesting, since Rambam tries to summarize his view of how to worship God) is that having to do with women and prohibited sexual relations. Already, Rambam’s grouping is interesting, in that he largely sees marriage and all the laws relating to it (we’ll see them in slightly more detail in a moment) as a question of proper and improper sexual relations.

Perhaps surprisingly, what leads him to this view is the question of friendship. Citing Aristotle, Rambam notes the great importance of friendship in human life, with three main values. In good times, friends help us relax and enjoy. In times of crisis, friends can provide support, and in old age, friends can provide aid and succor (for a more extended description of friendship and its value, see Rambam on Avot Chapter 1, Mishnah 6; for an interestingly different view, see R. Yonah’s commentary to the same Mishnah). The best friends, that is those with the strongest bond to a person, are those who share an ancestry.

AN ASIDE ON ANCESTRY

Rambam simply asserts the greater bond of ancestry, but it is something worth pausing and considering in our current social situation. In times gone by, the reliability of family as a baseline social circle for support, friendship, and love, was very clear. While Judaism is family-oriented enough that much of that survives, it is not clear at all that it does so in larger American society. That leaves people searching for a social milieu, a place to receive the aid and succor that a solid family grounding has traditionally provided. The social issues that ensue are ones that affect us all.

ANCESTRY AS THE KEY TO MARRIAGE

The need for well-defined family lines, for Rambam, is one of the two reasons for the prohibition against sexual intercourse outside the context of marriage (Rambam is of the opinion that the Torah prohibits any sexual intercourse without a marital bond). Since such acts can lead to children who do not have a clear ancestry—either because it is not clear who the father is, or, equally problematic, because the father does not feel the attachment to that child that he otherwise would—they destroy the social interest in children being born into a family circle that provides the baseline of support we have discussed.

Rambam only uses this idea to explain the need for marriage. By forcing men to both single out and perform a public act of marriage before sexual intercourse is allowed, the Torah insures that any offspring a man has will be clearly identified as part of his family, and the family circle that exists there. By extrapolating, we can see that his focus on bloodlines explains several other aspects of Jewish marriage. That a man can have many wives but not vice verse, for example, is simply a technical issue of clear family connections (on the father’s side). Rambam does apply his notion to the need for a public divorce. If divorce were simple (verbal, for example) a woman could commit adultery and then claim to have been divorced before. It is for that reason, Rambam says, that the Torah required another public ceremony to end the marriage.

We can also see why adultery is much more legally consequential for the woman than for the man is also understood from this issue. When a woman commits adultery, she threatens the man’s confidence that the children she bears are truly his. The man’s adultery, while a personal crime against the wife, does not affect her bloodlines, and therefore does not create the ancestral and social ramifications of the woman’s adultery.

It is to remind women of the problems in adultery that the Torah instituted the Sotah ceremony. The husband of a woman who acts properly and carefully, so that he is confident that she is not developing sexual relationships outside the marriage, would never put his wife through such an embarrassing and exhausting ceremony. What is interesting to me here is that Rambam sees this primarily as a deterrent law, not one meant to be put into practice. It is not, in Rambam’s presentation, that the Torah wished to have a mechanism in place to test whether certain women had committed adultery; it was a threat meant to teach women the proper kind of behavior within their marriage. Women would ideally learn from the laws of Sotah the kind of confidence they should give their husbands about their faithfulness—Sotah becomes largely an issue of spousal relations rather than policing adultery.

VARIETY AS A SPUR TO EXCESSIVE SEXUALITY

A second reason Rambam mentions for marriage is that it calms down one’s sexual appetite. He will express this again later, but Rambam is very concerned about excessive sexuality as a distraction from other equally important (actually, more important) areas of human endeavor. In the presence of prostitution—by which Rambam simply means openly available opportunities for a variety of sexual experiences—that variety itself will stimulate (at least some) men to search for ever-new such experiences. When one has committed to a single woman, the nature of that sexual bond (however good it might be) is not the same, nor does it lead one to voraciously seek out the newness that can characterize one who is going from woman to woman.

A weakness in Rambam’s view-noted by Ramban in his Commentary on the Torah-- is that a man can theoretically marry multiple women, so that (if he was intent on so doing) he could still lead a life obsessed with variety. I presume Rambam’s answer is that he could, but will be much less likely to do so in the context of marriage; once one has gotten used to the notion of building a household, raising children to whom one has a continuing bond, the interest in ever-new and exciting experiences recedes somewhat.

I remember years ago reading Milan Kundera’s The Incredible Lightness of Being, a book I do not recommend in any way; I read it in one of my periodic attempts to become more cultured, and (as often happens) was disappointed with what our culture holds up as its great (or even good) achievements. Anyway, the protagonist of this book is exactly the kind of sexual adventurer Rambam describes here; he is interested in all women, simply because they are all different and therefore all worth getting to know. Rambam is pointing out that that is the kind of life to which the free availability of women leads.

YIBUM AND THE STORY OF YEHUDA AND TAMAR

Yibum, where the wife of a man who dies childless is supposed to marry his brother, does not quite fit Rambam’s presentation, since there would be no damage to bloodlines were the Torah to simply have allowed the wife of the deceased to marry whomever she wished. Rambam simply says that it perpetuated a longstanding custom, which we can see from the Yehudah and Tamar story in Bereshit (as Pines points out in the notes on page 603). While factually this may be correct—Ramban, I believe, makes a similar comment in his Commentary on the Torah—it does not explain why the Torah chose to ratify this custom and maintain it for the eternity of Jews. I suppose I find this particularly surprising, since it seems to me that it could fit easily into Rambam’s bloodlines notion. Since this man had chosen to continue his bloodline with this (or these) women, having them simply go off and marry other men compounds the tragedy of the ending of his bloodline.

By having the wife (or, at least, one of them) marry a brother, the Torah is helping us mitigate the tragedy of his childless death. Since the brother’s blood is close to that of the deceased, and will be combined with the wife’s, marrying a brother allows one of the choices for continuity of bloodline that the brother had made to be realized to the extent possible.

YEHUDAH’S CONCERNS IN PAYING TAMAR

Having obliquely mentioned the Tamar story, Rambam pauses to explain one of Yehudah’s comments during the incident. After having slept with Tamar, Yehudah leaves several personal items as surety against his giving her her due payment. First, Rambam notes that prostitution was permitted before the Torah was given (meaning that the concern with social circles and bloodlines is only meant for Jews; it might be a good idea for non-Jews, but it is not mandated in the same way). As a result, the money paid a prostitute had no opprobrium attached to it, it was simply wages for services rendered. Rambam actually views the money given a wife for kiddushin, betrothal, the same way. Although he doesn’t elaborate, it would seem that the man has to pay the woman for foregoing other sexual opportunities—since she is doing so for his sake( since her bloodlines are always clear) it is something she should be compensated for (at least, that is an explanation that works in terms of how he calls that money wages).

In any case, the notion of Yehudah paying for such activity does not bother Rambam a whit. The lesson he learns from the incident, however, is that Yehudah recognizes the value of not making a public spectacle of such issues. When his messenger cannot find the prostitute to recover the personal items (by paying the agreed-to price), Yehudah lets the matter drop rather than turn it into a public investigation. That, Rambam says, teaches us that modesty in such matters is a value independent of proper activity. Yehudah is not embarrassed to pursue the issue because he has done something wrong; he simply values modesty more than the monetary loss he will incur by letting it drop.

A second lesson in Yehudah’s actions, for Rambam, is his deep concern to live up to his financial obligations. He is relieved, when the messenger returns, that the attempted to fulfill his responsibilities faithfully, and cares much less about the outcome than about his probity. This Rambam identifies as the lesson and legacy of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and that we try to follow until this day.

Rambam’s thoughts on sexuality in Judaism continue at some length, and we will continue our discussion next week. See you then.