Sex, Marriage and Family in World Religions (5 page)

Fifteenth, these traditions varied in their handling of sex, marriage, and family depending on whether they perceived themselves to be a majority or minority religion. Judaism since the diaspora has viewed itself as a minority religion, and this affected some of its perspectives on sexual issues, especially in contrast to the official views of the state or the dominant religion. Buddhism has seldom viewed itself as a dominant religion within a particular territory or state. On the other hand, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Confucianism have all perceived their traditions at various times to be dominant religions, and this has affected the range of issues in sex, marriage, and family that they addressed. As majorities these groups have often looked to the state to implement their basic teaching on sex, marriage, and family. In the twentieth century secularism, socialism, and pluralism alike have eroded these state-sanctioned religious understandings of marriage and family. In some communities, such as Europe and Canada, dominant religious communities have largely acqui-esced in these movements or have had insufficient power to resist them. In other communities, such as Latin America, Russia, South Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, once dominant religious communities have developed their own internal religious legal systems to govern the marriage and family affairs of their own voluntary members.

Sixteenth, although the origins of Hinduism, Judaism, and Confucianism are obscure, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism are more open to historical i n t r o d u c t i o n

xxvii

investigation. Early Christianity and Islam were more progressive in their treatment of gender issues, women, and children than later expressions of the religion, especially as it became more established by the state, closer to powerful political and economic interests, and therefore mirrored some of the hierar-chical structures of empires, kings, and caliphs. Studying the origins of a religion is helpful in determining some of its basic impulses, directions, and resources on sex, marriage, and family. At the same time, religions do indeed complicate and mature as time passes. Understanding a religion from the perspective of its more complex later legal and philosophical developments, as in the case of twelfth-and thirteenth-century Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and later developments in Confucianism (neo-Confucianism) is crucial for understanding the wisdom of a religious tradition on sex, marriage, and family.

HOW AND BY WHOM SHOULD THE BOOK

BE USED?

We envision this book as a basic textbook for courses in colleges, universities, and professional schools. It should work for both undergraduates and graduates.

Of course, the text must be adapted, supplemented, and used selectively depending on the context and purpose of the class where it is used. In addition, the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University that supported the creation of this text hopes to provide other resources that will help professors and students carry the dialogue more directly into the twenty-first century.8

More specifically, we think this text can be used to teach comparative religion and history of religions. Most of the distinctive features of these religions can be discerned through the prism of their teachings on sex, marriage, and family. In addition, what the concepts, symbols, and teachings of these religions really meant can sometimes be seen with vivid clarity when viewed from the perspective of their implications for the sexual and familial field of meaning.

This leads to a deeper and more concrete understanding of the religion itself.

But, as we have pointed out in this introduction, the field of sexuality is in and of itself worth studying from the perspective of these religions. There is little doubt that defining and guiding sexuality in marriage, in family, and perhaps outside of marriage and family will be one of the major preoccupations of the twenty-first century. As we have said above, we expect a grand cultural dialogue on these issues. We expect, and hope, that the great world religions will be a part of this dialogue.

We also believe that this text can be used in a variety of more specialized settings. We will list a few of them. We believe that academic programs in the sociology and psychology of the family should introduce courses using this resource. We believe that social work schools preparing students to work with xxviii introduction

families from increasingly more diverse religious and cultural backgrounds should offer such courses. The field of family law should help its students understand the family codes and legal rationalities within these religious traditions. Psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and school counselors working with diverse families should know much of what is in the volume. For general understanding, for practical work with people, and for preparation for the emerging world dialogue on sex, marriage, and family, we recommend this volume as a resource.

n o t e s

1. William Goode,
Changes in Divorce Patterns
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

2. Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(New York: Scrib-ner’s, 1958), 181; Ju¨rgen Habermas,
Theory of Communicative Action I
(Boston: Beacon, 1981), 340–341.

3. Alan Wolfe,
Whose Keeper: Social Science and Moral Obligation
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 52–60, 133–140.

4. For summaries of studies and statistics supporting these claims on a comparative international basis, see Wolfe,
Whose Keeper,
56–58; David Popenoe,
Disturbing the
Nest: Family Change and Decline in Modern Societies
(New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988); David Popenoe,
Life Without Father
(New York: Free, 1996); Linda Waite, ed.,
The Ties That Bind: Perspectives on Marriage and Cohabitation
(New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2000).

5. For the specific effect of these trends on children, see Paul Amato and Alan Booth,
A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); see also the recent report distributed by the YMCA of the USA, Dartmouth Medical School, and the Institute for American Values,
Hard-wired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities
(New York: Institute for American Values, 2003).

6. Anthony Giddens,
The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies
(Cambridge: Polity, 1992).

7. Popenoe,
Life Without Father,
196–201; James Q. Wilson,
The Problem of Marriage
(New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 207–221.

8. See, e.g., Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im et al.,
Islamic Family in a Changing World:
A Global Resource Book
(London: Zed, 2003); Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, eds.,
Interreligious Marriage: Threat or Promise?
(forthcoming); Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im,
The Future of Shari’a
(forthcoming); Don S. Browning,
Marriage and Modernization:
How Globalization Threatens Marriage and What to Do About it
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); Don S. Browning and David Clairmont, eds.,
American Religions and the
Family
(New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming); Michael J. Broyde and Michael S. Berger, eds.,
Marriage and Family in the Jewish Tradition
(Lanham, NY: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Paul B. Courtright,
Dower and Divorce in Diaspora
Hinduism
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, in press); Robert M. Frank-lin,
Crisis in the Village: Restoring Hope for Families in African-American
Communities i n t r o d u c t i o n xxix

(forthcoming); M. Christian Green,
Feminism, Fatherhood, and Family Law
(forthcoming); Steven M. Tipton and John Witte Jr., eds.,
The Family Transformed: Religion,
Values, and Science in American Life
(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005); John Witte Jr. and Eliza Ellison, eds.,
Covenant Marriage in Comparative Perspective
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); John Witte Jr.,
Ishamel’s Bane: Illegitimacy
Reconsidered
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

Sex, Marriage, and Family

in World Religions

j u d a i s m

Michael S. Berger

Judaism, like other millennia-old world religions, has within it many voices and opinions on such core human subjects as sexuality, marriage, and family. Unlike other world religions, however, Judaism has been, for most of its history, the tradition of a minority—a powerless, stateless, and oftentimes persecuted, minority. To be sure, an early period of independence, roughly coeval with the Bible, produced the literature (or its antecedents) that would become the foundational text of Judaism. But beginning with the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 586 bce and the consequent exile of Judeans to Babylonia and Egypt, minority status became the norm for Jews, with few exceptions, all the way up to the modern period.

This reality had a profound impact on every facet of Judaism. Survival was the constant call, and the tradition mustered all of its resources—theological, legal, social, and economic—to meet the challenge. The family was, in many cases, the primary vehicle for preserving distinctiveness from the majority culture, and so the tradition used law, custom, and lore to govern its formation and maintenance. Indeed, from the Bible forward the Jewish people is portrayed at its core as a large extended family descended from the patriarch Jacob, and from the Second Temple period forward Jews increasingly insisted on endogamy to ensure a common heritage.

2

m i c h a e l s . b e r g e r

Practically speaking, however, boundaries were far more permeable than was claimed; the forces preserving distinctiveness were always offset by those promoting accommodation. Jews were in regular contact with their neighbors, producing a startling array of Jewish thought and practice in all areas, including marriage and family. Indeed, some of the most significant alterations in the form and content of Jewish marriage, such as the emphasis on documents or the switch to monogamy, can be understood in this light. Therefore, the history of Jewish views on sex, marriage, and family can be most helpfully understood as the oscillation between the two poles of continuity, with the Jewish covenant on the one hand and correlation with one’s surroundings on the other.

s e x , m a r r i a g e , a n d f a m i l y

While the majority of the Hebrew Bible, known as
TaNaKh,
recounts the period of Israelite settlement in the land of Canaan, most scholars insist that the majority of canonical texts reached their current form in the Persian period (sixth to fourth century bce) when Jews lived as a minority population both in the province of Yehud in the Land of Israel and elsewhere in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Out of their minority perspective this collection of texts came to be the main scripture of the Jewish people because virtually all its books are
about
the Jewish people—or, more specifically, its covenant with God.

Given the portrayal of the Jewish people as an extended family, one might think that such a parochial story would begin with, or would quickly reach, the story of the nation’s progenitor, Abraham. However, the first eleven chapters of Genesis speak of God’s relationship with the world, beginning with the creation of a highly ordered and differentiated world. Each creature is part of a species, a group that is meant to know its place in the world and maintain its boundaries and functions. Man and woman are both informed and blessed to procreate, to “be fruitful and multiply” and assert stewardship over the created order. This state, termed “very good” in divine eyes (Gen. 1:31), is presented somewhat differently in chapter 2, which offers the creation of woman as a response to the first man’s lone-liness: “Therefore a man leaves his father and mother, clings to his wife, and becomes one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). Thus, between the first two chapters, there emerges a sense that the union of man and woman was inherently good, intended since creation for the purposes of procreation and companionship (whether practical or emotional). But this idyllic state collapses as the first couple eats from forbidden fruit, with the consequence that they sense, for the first time, sexual shame (Gen.

3:7). Painful childbirth, female sexual passion, and male domination of the female are all presented as punishment for the woman’s submission to temptation and her insistence that her husband join her in the sin (Doc. 1–1).

Humanity’s decline continues until God chooses Abraham, promising him that his descendants would become abundant, great, and would receive the
Judaism
3

Land of Canaan as an inheritance (Gen. 12:1–3). This divine blessing, later symbolized through circumcision (Gen. 17), comes to be the reward of a covenant whereby Abraham’s descendants must obey God’s law as it was revealed to Moses at Sinai and during the wilderness wanderings. The people’s status as God’s “special treasure among all the nations . . . a kingdom of priests, a holy nation” (Ex. 19:5–6) is predicated on their living according to demanding standards, including a host of sexual norms (Doc. 1–2). These are deemed the idolatrous and abominable practices of the local tribes, and the Jews must maintain their purity and holiness—or suffer a similar fate of displacement and exile.

The
TaNaKh
’s presentation of the history of the Jewish people as that of an extended family—twelve tribes, the descendants of the sons of Jacob, settling on ancestrally allotted land—highlights the text’s assumption that the covenant is meant to be lived out in the context of large, agrarian patriarchal families, with very specific division of labor between men, women and children and traditions passed from parents to children. The consequences of this orientation for our subjects cannot be overstated, yet virtually all have a “covenantal over-lay” as well. Strict rules of endogamy and exogamy, including the prohibitions against incest mentioned above, controlled marriage with the aim of producing legitimate heirs; yet the text often adds the importance of these rules in maintaining allegiance to God: alien, non-Israelite women will lead men astray (Docs. 1–3, 1–4) unless, like Ruth, they accept the God of Israel. Polygamy is allowed (concubinage seemed to be the preserve of the aristocracy) so long as primogeniture is not disrupted; yet grave spiritual dangers accompany the pursuit of women other than one’s wife, and monogamous marriage becomes the metaphor of the God-Israel covenant (Docs. 1–5 to 1–7). The ideal woman, extolled in Proverbs’ famous poem in chapter 31, is both a competent manager of the household, overseeing food and cloth production, as well as a God-fearer (Doc. 1–8). To maintain order and preserve tradition in these agrarian hierar-chies, respect of parents is demanded in the Decalogue; incorrigibly disobedient children are to be publicly executed. At the same time, parents must educate children and pass on the tale of the nation’s birth and Sinaitic covenant with God, so that they may fear the Lord as well (Docs. 1–9 to 1–13).