By Chana Boteach, JNS
We will fight against the death our enemies try to choose for us and we won’t stop until they are destroyed.
Entering the ninth month of this terrible war has been especially harrowing. As our hostages continue to be held in unfathomable terror, my mind is consumed with the women, because we all know what can happen in nine months. I shudder to think of it.
Tragically, we Jews are no strangers to this level of terror. Historically, Jewish women have been targeted with horrific sexual violence: From the ancient Greek warlords who would force themselves on every new Jewish bride to the suicides of Ukrainian Jewish women during the Chmielnicki Pogroms. Those women jumped to their deaths, desperate to avoid a fate of sexual violence they saw as worse than death. Then there were the Nazi officers who disregarded their laws against having sex with a Jew if it meant raping their women.
But in 2023? In a world where women are seemingly safe and sexual violence is universally condemned? Who could have imagined this could happen?
In the days and months after Oct. 7, aside from the agony of seeing the faces of fallen soldiers and watching the world regress into grotesque, irrational, libelous Jew-hate, I couldn’t work at all. My work with Kosher Sex used to thrill and uplift me, but I was now haunted. I was tormented by the accounts of survivors and emergency responders who had witnessed the carnage and evidence of truly evil sexual assault of both women and men; as well as the images I had seen of women lying in fields, clothing ripped off, their bodies stripped and contorted, violated in their last moments of life and even after in death.
But the nightmare continued with an endless stream of testimony from former hostages who recounted their assaults, the footage of terrorists mocking and threatening our terrified young female soldier hostages with impregnation and the silent world of moral frauds who deny that these atrocities even occurred.
Now here we are, at nine months, knowing that these monsters continue to perpetrate everything they threaten while our hostages wait every day for us to save them and we can’t stop it. Suddenly, my work that was centered around uplifting the concept of sex had descended into hell.
The messages flooded my inbox and Kosher Sex DMs. Women in particular wrote to me seeking advice on how to navigate sex with their spouse when they couldn’t bear to touch or be touched. The trauma was widespread and deep and an act focused on creating closeness was now pushing couples apart.
Sex is not just an act of the body but a fusion of the body, mind and soul. Though our bodies were still intact, our minds and souls were shattered. But then there were also the couples in which one partner felt that they needed sex more than ever to connect in any way they could with their spouse because the sense of isolation, loneliness and despair was overwhelming.
I never imagined I would ever encounter a situation in which I would have to address this. Of course, in my line of work, I’d spoken to many people who were dealing with sexual trauma, but this was something else: A whole nation trying to make sense of what had just happened and how to process these feelings.
On top of the macro-trauma, fear and pain that the Jewish people were experiencing, there was the micro of the Jewish home: How does a couple connect when they are affected in such different ways by this anguish? All I could do was encourage couples to communicate and be open with their spouses about their feelings and decide for themselves what felt right.
I closed the Kosher Sex shop in Jerusalem for almost two months. The work didn’t feel holy to me anymore; it felt desecrated. But I did make a video on my social media. In it, I explained that there are laws for intimacy during these times that Judaism outlines, because tragically for Jews, loss, suffering and war have become all too casual.
I spoke about the Shulchan Aruch and how it stipulates that during an “Eit Tzara,” a “period of suffering” such as a famine, couples who refrain from intercourse are considered “righteous.” It seemed logical: How can couples truly enjoy the throes of passion when there is such widespread suffering? In Judaism, sex between a couple is holy and God revels and takes part in their closeness. Now it seemed God wanted there to be distance. We all felt that distance: from ourselves, our partners, a hateful, ignorant world and God Himself.
Then came the month of Nisan, six months into the war. My head was still spinning from this new reality for Israel and the Jews but I stumbled upon something: I knew that Nisan is the month of miracles, the month in which God finally has mercy on His people, leading them from slavery into freedom and destroying their enemies. I looked deeper into the story of the Exodus for something to hold on to.
Amid all of God’s Passover miracles, we are told that “in the merit of Jewish women, our people were redeemed from Egypt.” This merit wasn’t women's more natural inclination towards spirituality, their modest dress or prayers. It was their power of seduction.
The male Jewish slaves of Egypt were broken. Literally, their bodies were forced into “back-breaking labor,” but the real collapse was of their libidos. In the most famous instance, Moses’ father Amram separated from his wife Yocheved and took sex off the table. Though the purpose of sex in Judaism is intimacy, not just procreation, the slaves' drive had been beaten into nonexistence. They saw no reason to reproduce and thus continue the Jewish people. It seemed like God had abandoned them. Pharaoh was drowning all of their newborn sons in the Nile, a real genocide; so what was the point? As a result, they distanced themselves from their wives.
But the Jewish women’s spirit endured. They went to their battered husbands and soothed them with promises that soon they would be free men. They pulled them under the shade of apple trees and teased and flirted with their husbands, “and then they would take the mirrors, and each gazed at herself together with her husband, saying endearingly to him, 'See, I am more beautiful than you!’”
The men, if only momentarily, would forget the bitterness of their lives and allow intimacy to reconvene, giving them the strength to go on and also continue our great nation.
These mirrors were later used to create the Kiyor, the wash basin used to purify the priests before their service in the Temple. Moses initially rejected these mirrors, thinking they were tools of vanity and arousal. It was God who told Moses, “Accept them, for these are dearer to me than everything else.”
After learning this, I began to see a shift. One that not only brought me back to my work and gave me a new sense of purpose in helping couples connect and create, but one I saw in my customers too. I get all kinds of people in the shop: soldiers, Haredim, Arabs, non-Jews, younger and older couples. But what has surprised me most is who is buying for whom.
It used to be a lot of husbands coming in, buying presents for their wives. But lately, it’s flipped. It’s the women coming in to buy gifts for their husbands, especially their soldier husbands serving in the war. It’s like what I read about in Egypt but 3,300 years later: Women taking the lead and using sex as a means to comfort their husbands and bring them closer and back to life.
Our collective trauma when it comes to sex hasn’t gone away and will remain for who knows how long, but it is being transformed. Just like in Egypt, the despair is forging a new will; one that pushes us to return to ourselves and our partners and fight like hell. Fight not just on the battlefield and the media but for our homes and relationships, because this is the Jewish way and how we’ve gotten through all along.
This is what Hamas and all of our enemies have tried to destroy. Because in essence, sex is life. It is connection, creation and continuance. Jews have always celebrated it. The laws about sex in Judaism are there not to suppress sex but to optimize it. To make sure that it is always the force of joy, of life.
The sexual violence perpetrated against our holy Jewish brothers and sisters had nothing to do with sex. Rape is not about sex but about power. Taking something so holy to us and degrading it in the most evil, demonic way was about obliterating our very Jewish foundation of always, always, always choosing life.
On Oct. 7, they succeeded: They stole irreplaceable, incalculable life from us. But we will fight against the death they try to choose for us and we won’t stop until our enemies are destroyed, our hostages are home and the light is back in our homes.
