Sunday, April 18, 2010

Religious Jews: Celebrating sexual repression

In a blog discussing a holiday celebration this line caught my eye :You won’t see them half naked or men and women dancing together." http://lifeinisrael.blogspot.com/2010/04/haredim-do-celebrate-yom-haatzmaut.html


I am struck by the description and fear that the religious jew has of flesh and members of the opposite sex.


What if a religious celebration was described as, groups of sweaty men all dancing close together, touching and hugging each other with no women present?


This is how the religious writer describes how the religious celebrate:"But in many of the yeshivot, special learning connected to the issues of our sovereignty will be learned, stores are closed, and families spend time together and spend quality time in nature."




As if only the religious spend family time together, or shut their stores, or take a hike in a nature preserve. Clearly the author has a bias if the religious are described as celebrating with their family and the secular are described as dancing half naked.


I am further at a loss to understand where the fear of flesh or the opposite sex comes from. Why is it healthy to repress a person's sexuality and then marry them off in their late teens or early twenties? Why is it healthy to force people to have no interaction with flesh or the opposite sex? I submit that the religious attitude to sex and flesh is repressive and unhealthy and damaging. 


If the religious want to celebrate a holiday by keeping the men and women separate, then so be it. But to portray the homo-eroticism of single sex lifestyle as healthy and portray the secular as sexual deviants is not just biased but flat out wrong.

4 comments:

Beisrunner said...

You accuse religious Jews of homosexuality because they sometimes celebrate holidays in single-sex environments. Do you also accuse of incest, because they sometimes celebrate with their families? Are you simply incapable of picturing a relationship between two people that does not involve sex?

Beisrunner said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
The Way said...

You seem to have missed my point.

The author of the article described secular celebrations as half-naked sex crazed fiends while the religious celebrate in healthy family settings.

I was simply pointing out that the author has a clear bias and that one could easily word the religious celebrations to make them look a particular way as well.

I stand behind my tangential point. Which is, a single sex lifestyle is unhealthy. Raising children in a closed single sex society does them a diservice. It leaves them unprepared to deal with the outside world, people of either sex, and their own bodies and emotions.

While the religious community views sexual repression as something of value I view it as deviant and damaging. Further, sexual repression in Judaism is based on Christian values, not judaic. Unfortunatly, the orthodox jewish world does not realize that it has become an offshoot of christianity and is following the same path of self destruction.

Beisrunner said...

In other words, two wrongs make a right. :)