Chana Boteach for JNS – July 18, 2024

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, who jumped from bridges  and drowned, desperate to avoid a fate of sexual violence they saw as worse than death, to the Nazi officers who disregarded their laws of 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. 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. 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 kept on- continuously released testimony of former hostages recounting their violent assaults, the footage of terrorists mocking and threatening our terrified young female soldier hostages with impregnation and a silent world of moral frauds who deny that these atrocities even happened. And 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 dm’s. Women in particular, writing 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 that is 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 and though our bodies were still intact, our minds and souls were shattered. But then there were also the couples where 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, despair was overwhelming. I never imagined I would ever encounter a situation where I would even 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 on 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 to 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. This work didn’t feel holy to me anymore, it felt desecrated. But I did make a video on my social media. And in it I explained that there are laws for intimacy during these times, that Judaism casually outlines, because tragically for Jews, loss, suffering and war has become all too casual. 

I spoke about the Code of Jewish Law- the Shulchan Aruch, and how it stipulates that during an “Eit Tzara,” a “period of suffering” such a famine, couples who refrain from intercourse are considered “righteous.” It seemed logical- how can couples truly enjoy the throes of passion when their 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. And how we all felt that distance- from ourselves, our partners, a hateful, ignorant world, and God Himself. 

But then came the month of Nissan, coinciding with 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 Nissan is the month of miracles, the month where 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 takes sex off the table. Though the purpose of sex in Judaism is intimacy, not just procreation, their drive had been beaten into non-existence and in the case that it did result in offspring, they saw no reason to continue the Jewish people. It seemed like God had abandoned them and anyway Pharaoh was drowning all of their newborn sons in the Nile, a real genocide. What was the point. So 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 allowed 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 actually 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. Not just one that brought me back to my work and gave me a new sense of purpose in helping couples connect and create, but in my customers too. I get all kinds of people in the shop- soldiers, Haredim, Arabs, Non-Jews, young and older couples, but what has surprised me most now is who is buying for who. 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, just 3,300 years later. Women taking the lead and using sex as a means to comfort their husbands and bring them close 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 – 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. 

And 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. And 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 force of joy, of life. 
The sexual violence perpetrated against our holy Jewish brothers and sisters had nothing to do with sex, as we know rape is not about sex, but about power. Taking something so holy to us and degrading it in the most evil, demonic way- it was about obliterating our very Jewish foundation: of always, always, always “choosing life.” And 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.