Of Marriage: Relationship and Relations 25

sexuality as transient, vulgar, and possibly exploitative, devoid of

interpersonal commitment or social and legal sanction. Moreover,
even with reference to the context of marriage, we recoil from the
supposed transmutation of the erotic into a quasi-mystical experi-
ence, bordering on the transcendental, encountered in some quar-
ters. Conceptually and historically, such associations are idolatrous
rather than Jewish. With regard to the basic phenomenon of sexual
experience, however, our instincts and our attitude are clearly posi-
tive. We have no qualms.
Relatively few are familiar or, perhaps even comfortable with
the substance or rhetoric of Shelahs formulation:

With respect to copulation, when enacted with holiness

and purity, is most holy, bestirring [matters] above; a
person sanctifies himself in the nether [world], and he is
sanctified greatly from the upper, and he fulfills [the com-
mandment], You shall be holy, for I am holy, Hashem
your God. For every copulation resembles that of Adam
and Eve, performed in His form and image.55

But as to the fundamental attitude, we are very much attuned.

This attitude is clearly manifest in a section from Rav Kooks
Orot ha-Kodesh, aptly titled Ha-Netiya ha-Minit le-Atid (The Fu-
ture of Sexual Inclination):

The sexual inclination goes and pours forth toward the

future, toward the perfect existence; it will bring a time
when the existence of the world to come will be present in
this world. For the future existence is filled with splendor
and pleasantness. Great, therefore, is this intense desire,
this powerful longing of the eternal inclination; and the
tendentious Holiness settles its light only upon [this
desire]. And the pure soul steers this desire towards its
destination.56

The passage presumably reflects a general tendency to affirmative