chaimoigen wrote on 13 Sep 2024 16:43:
Alright.
Don't know if this qualifies, but it's a long maybe-controversial post I wrote a while ago. Never put it up - maybe cause it sounds like it.s being delivered from atop a soapbox? But there are some points that I'd be curious to hear your take on. So here goeth nothing:
I was asked if it's possible to explain, understand and feel why masturbation and pornography are obscene and objectionable in-and-of themselves, notwithstanding the Issurim and the spiritual damage that we are taught they cause.
To be clear: The Issurim themselves suffice for me, even if they were to be a Chok. But I am convinced, for many reasons, that these Issurim fall within the category of actions that the Torah teaches us to know and understand are wrong, and there is an understanding we can grasp, (in addition to whatever deeper reasons there are). ואיכמ"ל .
It's easily understandable why these behaviors are terribly destructive in the context of a marriage. Looking at pictures of another woman, fantasizing about her, and acting out - this is a form of cheating on one’s wife. Destructive to the relationship on many, many levels.
I think that it’s also easy to understand why pornography is negative, even not in the realm of marriage. The objectification of women as sex items, the lies about sex that are inherent in porn, all reinforced by the rush that viewing porn brings: All this skews one’s perception and perspective of women and relationships in ways that are incredibly destructive to future relationships on many levels. [That's even without the research that demonstrates that watching pornpgraphy rewires your brain and creates actual damage, which may be debatable.]
However, it's a bit more challenging to explain what is deeply negative about a single guy masturbating, for personal pleasure. Feels good. What's wrong? Why do we sense that it's wrong? Why is this act almost universally considered to be shameful and obscene? Did you ever notice that even among the lowest dregs in society, the suggestion that someone go do it to himself is quite an insult? Why?
I feel that one aspect may be as follows. Sorry if it is a bit of a graphic lecture.
The Rambam (דיעות פ״ד) says the זרע is a person’s Koach. Of his Guf, his very Life force, and his Maor Enayim. The Gemora tells us that you feel the energy of זרע in your entire being. So the implication is that wasting it is wrong. It’s a waste of life force, of something precious. But let’s delve more deeply into this, maybe to understand what that would mean for a single guy.
Here are some thoughts.
Human sexual energy harnesses everything inside of you in forging a connection with another person.
There are many levels to connect on. Physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual bonding, giving, and pleasure. One invests and gives one's very self in the other. [e.g. "giving" a kiss is giving yourself in a deep way.] With sexual energy, you give everything you got, deep into the other person. Literally but also on many, many levels.
When a relationship is fully optimized, this investment is actualized into a connection with long-term commitment, with love, and part of the connection is to connect as thinking personalities, with your whole personalities and being. You want to share a home, a life , a future, much more than a bed. You even want to have children together.
Even in a lesser connection, the couple are still in a relationship in which they come together to give each other physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual pleasure. Romance. Even a couple "just having fun" are connecting with their personalities, conversation, emotions, etc.
The shallower the connection, the less that they connect in any way beyond the physical, the more vulgar it is. A one-night stand with a person you never got to know is just sweaty grunting in the night. And if you paid for the experience and didn't talk with her, it's even worse. It's ugly by anyone's standards. There's nothing human or pretty about it. It's a waste. You're giving yourself away, body, spirit and humanity cheap, for nothing.
When you think on it, fundamentally, masturbating is the same.
Masturbation (almost always) requires fantasizing. אין קושוי אלא לדעת. Because you need something, someone to connect to, for the energy to kick in. And then you give yourself away, all of you, to an image that isn't there at all. It's a ugly exercise of investing your spirit and your imagination, your emotional heartachingness and your needs, your whole human energy- all to connect to nothingness.
I think anyone can feel that to use a plastic sex doll is a perversion of your humanity. Would you really want to be friends, to have meaningful conversation, with someone who whispers endearments to a plastic doll and kisses it?
Maybe masturbation, in a way, is essentially the same thing. It's wasting everything you have on nothing, it's giving yourself away for nothing. Unless you're satisfied with being nothing more than a grunting in the night.
Living that way is shameful and obscene, because it makes a man into an animal, and diminishes a person fundamentally. If you live in a fantasy world and pay your fantasy mistress all the currency of humanity that you own, you'll be left a person without much human currency. Empty, numb, and grunting in the night.
Now for a Yid, it's far, far worse.
As a Yid, your Hergeishim are Kadosh, your Neshoma is Kadosh, your Zera is Kadosh.
It's all there, given to you for a reason.
You are given these gifts to create with, to use the energy of creation to bring a Bayis Neeman, Shechina, and Zera Kodesh into being.
If instead of investing it properly, you merely flush it all down the toilet, you've destroyed something very precious and irreplaceable...
Yourself.
And that's truly obscene.
What an eloquent and piercing אפּטייטש. Thank you R' Chaim for pulling this out of your stencils for us!
