Last week, the Jewish blogosphere was full of stories about Natan Alexander, a young Israeli rabbi who has started a business selling sex toys to Israelâ??s ultra-Orthodox. Most of the articles about Alexander made this a man-bites-dog storyâ??the Orthodox! having sex like regular people! But as Daf Yomi readers have learned over the last several years, the ethics of sexual pleasure has always been an important question in Judaism. And in last weekâ??s reading, in Tractate Nedarim, the rabbis offered one of their most comprehensive and enlightening discussions of the subject, which ended up with a ringing endorsement of Rabbi Alexanderâ??s view that when it comes to married sex, almost anything goes.
The swerve from the main subject of the tractate, the laws of vowing, to the subject of sex took place in Nedarim 20a. The rabbis have been discussing what to do when people take vows and then try to wriggle out of them with far-fetched excuses. For instance, say someone takes a vow declaring a certain item to be cherem, â??dedicated,â? the way sacred items were dedicated to God in the Temple. Ordinarily, this would be a binding vow. But what if the person has second thoughts and starts to claim that what they meant to say wasnâ??t cherem but chermo, â??a netâ?? Obviously, making a vow by a net is meaningless, and so wouldnâ??t be enforceable. But would anyone think of swearing by a net in the first place? Isnâ??t this an obvious lie, which demonstrates contempt for the institution of vowing?
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