Advertisement

Passionate Debate

Share
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

The day the Monica Lewinsky tapes were released in the United States, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach was in a London synagogue lecturing nearly 100 young British Jews and referring to Lewinsky’s actions as part of a lesson. The discussion focused on how men and women dwell too much on external qualities when looking for a mate.

“A man’s first question is, ‘What does she look like?’ A woman’s is, ‘What does he do?’ ” Boteach told the amused listeners. “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. No matter how good looking he is, if you walk into McDonald’s tomorrow and there’s Bill Clinton saying, ‘You want fries with that?’ I can’t see Monica Lewinsky showing him her thong.”

Not exactly what you’d expect from a rabbi.

But Boteach, who was born in Los Angeles and is now based in Britain, has made a career out of pushing the religious envelope. Yet this talk is mild compared with the current controversy surrounding him. And “Kosher Sex” is what the 32-year-old rabbi is all about these days. It’s the name of his seventh book, which will be available here in March and--hold onto your yarmulkes--excerpted in Playboy in January.

Advertisement

The book espouses the joys of sex in marriage, according to Jewish law, including that the man must bring his wife to orgasm before himself and how abstaining from sex for about a week before and after menstruation enhances desire. He also condones oral sex and erotic toys between married couples.

Boteach’s flamboyance has made him a hit with younger Jews and mass-market audiences but enraged some of the Jewish establishment. He was the subject of a BBC documentary and recently was runner-up in the Times of London’s annual Preacher of the Year competition--the first time a rabbi made it to the finals.

Meanwhile, an even larger audience looms in the United States. He has had meetings with syndication giant King World and Barbra Streisand’s Barwood Films about doing a talk show with his longtime friend, Cory Booker, an African American Rhodes scholar who is now a Newark, N.J., councilman.

“I’ve never met anyone else like him,” Barwood President Cis Corman said. “That he can be that controversial and ambitious and larger than life, and still be observant and have integrity is fascinating. I know he rubs certain people the wrong way and gets himself into trouble. But I don’t think that will hold him back in any way.”

But observant Jewish circles regard “Kosher Sex” as his latest headline-grabbing tactic to lure disenfranchised young Jews back into the fold. Boteach severed ties with the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitch movement after clashing with it over his fifth book, “The Jewish Guide to Adultery,” and allowing non-Jews into his Jewish outreach organization, the L’Chaim Society. But this new controversy has forced him to resign as a speaker from one London synagogue and, he says, cost him nearly one-third of his annual $1.2-million funding, which he raises from private donors.

“People felt uncomfortable with a rabbi as a sex guru,” says Boteach after the lecture, adding that his book publisher, Doubleday, sealed the Playboy deal without his knowledge. “I could have yelled and screamed and threatened to sue, but I chose not to. If you’re trying to bring about the values and holiness of sex, then you have to go through those avenues which represent the opposite to most people.

Advertisement

“I give the editors credit for choosing an excerpt about my opposition to pornography and how it leads to boredom with the human body. My greatest argument against pornography is that it’s boring.”

While Boteach may be a showman, he insists his advice is in accordance with Jewish law. Traditional Judaism regards sex as a loving expression between married couples and contains in its teachings rituals that elevate it to a more spiritual level.

“Kosher Sex” is about intimacy in marriage and using sex to achieving intimacy,” Boteach explains. “The No. 1 cause of divorce is sexual boredom. Today, marriage is so casual, and that’s why it’s such a turnoff. Most people marry to settle down. Or they don’t marry because they think it’s about giving up fun. But a healthy, physical, passionate life is perhaps the most sensual part of marriage.”

Those who knew him as a youngster recognized both a rising star and maverick nature.

“He was clearly brilliant,” says Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz, founder of the Chai Center in Mar Vista. “Everyone figured he was going to be big at something. Just what, we didn’t know.”

Schwartz adds: “He’s a breath of fresh air who’s broken out of the encrusted mold of generations past. He has done more in 10 years to put Judaism on the map for nonaffiliated Jews in Britain than Chabad [a Jewish outreach organization] has in the 50 years it has been in London. But the Jewish establishment likes to control him, and he can’t be controlled. His only flaw is that he is too young to take counsel or direction from anyone.”

Boteach’s focus on Jewish marriage springs from his own parents’ divorce when he was 8. He moved with his mother to Miami, while his father remained in Los Angeles.

Advertisement

“Their divorce had a profound, adverse effect on me,” he says. “Ever since then, I’ve tried to heal myself by healing others.”

Ordained a rabbi in 1988 after studying in Miami, Israel and Australia, the Lubavitch rebbe sent him to England, where he founded L’Chaim at Oxford University to encourage student participation in the university’s Chabad House. He later opened branches at Cambridge University and in London, luring a range of speakers from Mikhail Gorbachev, Benjamin Netanyahu and Stephen Hawking to Boy George and Jerry Springer.

Between lecturing, fund-raising, production company development meetings and book tours (he hits Los Angeles in March), Boteach lives in north London (on a street called Christchurch) with his Australian wife, Debbie, and their six children.

Moreover, he notes that his book’s advice is not just for Jews.

“Christians have always had a huge problem with sex, and it’s destroyed Christian marriages to a large extent,” he says. “The moment you believe that sex is a concession of human weakness and frailty, you’re not going to celebrate it in marriage.”

To quote sex researchers Masters and Johnson, he says, “If things don’t work well in the bedroom, they’re not going to work well in the living room.”

Advertisement