Love, Marriage, and Family in the JewishLaw and Tradition is everything you wanted to know about the Jewish view on marriage, sexuality, and child bearing in clear and concise language. This comprehensive book looks to inform the reader about all the Jewish laws concerning family, marriage, procreation, and child rearing.
The concepts of gender, love, and family - as well as the personal choices regarding gender-role construction, sexual and romantic liaisons, and family formation - have become more fluid under a society-wide softening of boundaries, hierarchies, and protocols. Sylvia Barack Fishman gathers the work of social historians and legal scholars who study transformations in the intimate realms of partnering and family construction among Jews. Following a substantive introduction, the volume casts a broad net. Chapters explore the current situation in both the United States and Israel, attending to what once were considered unconventional household arrangements - including extended singlehood, cohabitating couples, single Jewish mothers, and GLBTQ families - along with the legal ramifications and religious backlash. Together, these essays demonstrate how changes in the understanding of male and female roles and expectations over the past few decades have contributed to a social revolution with profound - and paradoxical - effects on partnering, marriage, and family formation. This diverse anthology - with chapters focusing on demography, ethnography, and legal texts - will interest scholars and students in Jewish studies, women's and gender studies, Israel studies, and American Jewish history, sociology, and culture.
A popular and authoritative presentation of Jewish teaching on love and marriage based on the traditions and laws of the Bible and of its accepted interpreters throughout Jewish history.
Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage offers a treasury of tales that speak to the tenderness and passion, difficulties and blessings of love. Jewish tradition overflows with love stories from the Bible, Talmud, and Midrash. Folktales continue the tradition, and contemporary writers highlight the way their faith and love interweave and enrich each other. From Adam and Eve to Song of Songs, from legends of Solomon to the letters of Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus, these are stories of heartbreak, devotion, and celebration. They tell of how people fall in love and how they grow in love. The narratives are as old as the Bible and as new as the twenty-first century. They come from places as far-ranging as Yemen and New York. The relationships are heterosexual and homosexual, arranged and spontaneous, young and mature. Though the stories reflect the times and places in which they were told, they have a universal message about longing and romance, relationship, respect, and commitment. Noted storyteller Peninnah Schram and Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso collect these narratives and letters for the first time, inviting readers to delve into these stories for entertainment and inspiration, at engagements, weddings, and anniversaries, to recall what once brought people close and what continues to hold them in love.
This wide-ranging anthology takes a close look at the breadth of human sexuality from a Jewish perspective. The essays begin with a look at biblical and rabbinic views on sexuality, and then proceed to explorations of sexuality at different moments in the life cycle, sexuality and the marital model, diverse expressions of sexuality, examples of sexuality education, the nexus of sexuality and theology, and the challenges of contemporary sexual ethics. The Sacred Encounter is a thought-provoking and important Jewish resource. Perfect for personal study, or for high school or adult classes. Published by CCAR Press, a division of the Central Conference of American Rabbis
Marriage, Sex and Family in Judaism explores Jewish marriage from historical and contemporary perspectives, focusing on the religious and legal concepts of marriage, and the social impact of family in the Jewish community. The book does not advocate one perspective or another; instead, the essays range from conservative to liberal viewpoints, offering readers a well-balanced mixture of perspectives on Jewish marriage.
Steven Bayme examines the challenges facing American Jewry, the Contemprary significance of Israel and Jewish peoplehood, and the claims of Jewish tradition in the modern world.
In this book contemporary Judaism is presented in all its rich diversity, including both traditional and modern theologies as well as secular forms of Jewish identity. While the focus of the book is on developments that have taken place in the past two hundred years, they are set against a historical background, going back to the Bible. Beginning with a description of the Jewish people as it exists in today's world, it studies the unique concept of Jewish peoplehood and its survival over the centuries in the face of many challenges. An account of the key texts is followed by studies of the different interpretations of the religion, and the ways that life is lived out both in the home and in the community. Jewish theology is described both historically and in terms of contemporary issues. An important and distinctive section considers the goals of Jewish life and faith.
Two principles capture the essence of the official Catholic position on the morality of sexuality: first, that any human genital act must occur within the framework of heterosexual marriage; second, each and every marriage act must remain open to the transmission of life. In this comprehensive overview of Catholicism and sexuality, theologians Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler examine and challenge these principles. Remaining firmly within the Catholic tradition, they contend that the church is being inconsistent in its teaching by adopting a dynamic, historically conscious anthropology and worldview on social ethics and the interpretation of scripture while adopting a static, classicist anthropology and worldview on sexual ethics. While some documents from Vatican II, like Gaudium et spes ("the marital act promotes self-giving by which spouses enrich each other"), gave hope for a renewed understanding of sexuality, the church has not carried out the full implications of this approach. In short, say Salzman and Lawler: emphasize relationships, not acts, and recognize Christianity's historically and culturally conditioned understanding of human sexuality. The Sexual Person draws historically, methodologically, and anthropologically from the best of Catholic tradition and provides a context for current theological debates between traditionalists and revisionists regarding marriage, cohabitation, homosexuality, reproductive technologies, and what it means to be human. This daring and potentially revolutionary book will be sure to provoke constructive dialogue among theologians, and between theologians and the Magisterium.
In all three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, marriage is part of God's plan for humanity, as illustrated in the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, and the Koran as well as the religious literature of these three traditions
