by Jo Piazza
I traveled to Israel to work on several assignments, some of them light and frothy (“The World’s MOST IMPORTANT Hummus!”) and some serious (“Is Israel Safe for Tourists?”). And when it came to marriage advice, I knew I was looking for something; I just wasn’t sure what it was. I was fascinated by the Jewish laws that governed a husband’s and wife’s behavior in a marriage. I also wanted to understand how wives and mothers managed to stay strong and keep a family together in the midst of such a chaotic world, living in a country constantly rocked by violence and political tension.
I was having a hard time keeping my shit together in the midst of my incredibly safe and privileged life. Granted, our first year of marriage was more difficult than I’d expected it to be. I hadn’t expected to find out I was sick or for my parents to fall so ill. But Nick was the best husband I could have asked for, better than anyone I could have dreamed up. I had no reason to complain, and yet I was worn down. On my flight to Israel, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I hadn’t gotten a haircut since our wedding, and my eyes were bloodshot, with deep navy circles indented beneath them. I looked exhausted. I looked like crap. Something had to change.
After a long day floating weightlessly in the Dead Sea, I arrived in Jerusalem, a welcome antidote to the previous night I’d spent in Tel Aviv, a city that reminded me too much of the worst parts of New York and Los Angeles—the crowds, the lines at nightclubs that seem like they never close, the muscle heads working out on the beach in as little clothing as possible, and the residents’ obsession with telling me they were the best at everything.
Despite its being a city mired in a perpetual state of flux and often violence, the people in Jerusalem were much kinder, more soft-spoken, and more welcoming to foreign visitors than those in Tel Aviv, and I never once felt unsafe in the ancient city. I spent hours strolling the labyrinthine stalls of the Old City. I bought a rosary for my dad, who was raised Catholic, and had it blessed in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site where some Christians believe that Jesus Christ was crucified. Most shops in the meandering alleys of Old Jerusalem don’t have proper names. The stalls, no bigger than closets, are filled with precious stones from the Red Sea, frankincense, Stars of David, wooden rosaries, T-shirts with Hebrew words that say curses when viewed upside down, rip-off Hard Rock Café paraphernalia, bobble heads of every famous Jewish person ever, prayer shawls, and holy water. They trip over one another down the dim and dank alleys of the sweet-smelling old market.
That night I was going to meet Chana, an Orthodox Jewish woman who counsels secular women on the intricacies of Israeli marriage laws and teaches them how those laws can actually improve and strengthen any marriage, even one between two people who aren’t religious. I was raised Catholic and Nick, Episcopalian, but neither of us had been to church in twenty years. We adhered to a shared moral code of being kind to your fellow man, doing the right thing, and resting on Sundays.
Israeli law doesn’t allow marriages between Jews and non-Jews, or between Jews by birth and converts to Judaism, to take place within the state. In order to be legally married in Israel, the bride and groom must perform traditional Orthodox Jewish wedding rites and rituals and be married by an Orthodox rabbi (the vast majority of whom are men), even if they aren’t particularly religious.
The Israeli system for marriage is wildly complicated and controversial, even for practicing but non-Orthodox Jews. I had friends from college who lived in Israel for years but left the country to get married in Europe (Cyprus was a pleasant sun-drenched option) or even on a boat out at sea, just to avoid the hassle of having a religious wedding.
Chana makes it more pleasant for secular Jewish women to have their weddings in Israel by meeting with them and talking them through the actual meaning of the ancient Jewish rituals. Her philosophy is that understanding the rituals makes things less scary and awkward.
“No one should dread their wedding,” she explained when I met her. “That’s just not fair.” I’d expected Chana to be older, like the women I met at the Dead Sea, but she was my age, thirty-five, and already had six beautiful children. Chana was twenty-two when she got married, an old maid in Jerusalem’s Orthodox community. Her husband had been twenty-eight.
With pale skin and a lace-embroidered beret, Chana’s face conjured a Vermeer painting. She met me in her eighth-floor apartment and led me to her balcony to admire the view of the Old City before we settled easily onto her couch. Her oldest daughter brought us a plate of macarons, the French kind, not the Jewish kind. Her husband took the kids out for a few hours, which made it feel like we were old friends talking marriage.
Secular marriage comes with a lot of shoulds and shouldn’ts. You should love your husband or wife. You shouldn’t have sex with other people. You should cherish your spouse and protect them. You shouldn’t sneakily read their e-mails while they’re in the shower. But Orthodox Judaism comes with a very specific set of rules, and not just for the wedding but for the actual marriage.
Chana began by complimenting me on putting so much effort into my first year of marriage. “The first year is so important. That’s when you see the most divorces,” she added. “If you make the first year work, then you’re in a good place.”
“Thank you.” I paused. “So, what are the rules?” I jumped right in, ready to take dictation.
Chana let out a twinkly laugh.
“Where do I start?” she breathed excitedly. “Getting married is a journey into the unknown. But I should tell you about the mikvah first. That’s the thing that can be stressful for nonreligious women here when they get married. You have to have a mikvah here before you’re allowed to get a marriage certificate, and I think it’s a good thing. Most people don’t understand it and they don’t like it because they don’t understand it. I worry that secular people hate religion because they’ve had a bad experience with it. I want to fix that. A mikvah should be wonderful.”
A mikvah is a ritual bath undertaken by both men and women in which you immerse yourself in running water from a lake, a sea, or a natural stream. Israeli cities like Jerusalem and Tel Aviv have bathhouses specially designed for this purpose where at least some of the water is supplied by rain. You enter the water naked, with your arms and legs spread so that every inch of skin and hair is exposed to the water. As you duck under the water, you say a blessing. The most common one for brides and grooms is the shehecheyanu, which thanks God for preparing the bride and groom for their marriage: “Blessed are you, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who kept us alive and preserved us and enabled us to reach this season.” For women the mikvah is overseen by an attendant, often an older Orthodox woman. Chana admitted that they can be a little harsh as they physically inspect a woman’s body before she is allowed to immerse herself in the water. No one really wants to be inspected when they’re naked. I thought back to the women on the shores of the Dead Sea, carefully moving their hands along my body in places Nick hadn’t even explored.
The mikvah is a cleansing ritual, plain and simple, and in some ways it reminded me of the temazcal in Mexico, a way of purifying your body before you enter a new stage of your life.
Most nonreligious women go to the mikvah once, get their marriage license, and never go again. Chana goes every single month seven days after her period. She loves it.
“It’s a time just for me.” Of course she needed a time just for her. She has six children!
For Chana the mikvah is her time of self-care. It gives her a sense of renewal, of finding herself again. She doesn’t just go to the bath. This is like a monthly spiritual spa day. She immerses herself in the water, does her nails, moisturizes her entire body, and trims her hair.
“You spend one whole day focusing on your own body,” she says. “Think of it like a reset button. I don’t know for sure if that was God’s intention, but I think it was. I think that’s the reason we do it, to give women a time to take care of themselves. It’s very easy to forget to do that in a marriage.”
She peered at me with curiosity as I explained about surrendering to the water and the old women with the mud.
“Sure, maybe,” she said with the right amount of skepticism.
Chana’s insistence on self-care made sense, here of all places. I thought back to the safety briefing on the plane. Secure your own oxygen mask first. This part of the Middle East was roiled with uncertainty, and keeping a family safe required a wife and mother to remain strong, to take care of herself so she could ultimately take care of everyone else. Taking care of herself was something my own mother had never been good at, especially in times of crisis.
I finally felt comfortable enough to tell Chana I was curious about the Orthodox rule about when women could have sex with their husbands or, more specifically, when they couldn’t. I’d heard that Orthodox couples were forbidden from having sex during specific times of the month.
Chana raised a very well-manicured eyebrow in amusement and lifted her hand to stop me from saying something embarrassing.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” she said. “According to Jewish law, sexual relations between a man and a woman are sacred and holy. But sacred and holy in a very positive way. Sex is a really good thing to Jews. You can only have sex within marriage and only with your wife. And then, after you are married, you can only have sex at certain times. That’s true,” Chana explained.
She caught me making a face and gave me a look that said, Stop being a judgmental twit. “We aren’t supposed to have sex during our period or for seven days after our period.”
“Because that ensures you have sex when you’re most fertile, right?” I responded. As a woman over the age of thirty-five, I was now well-versed in the science of fertility. “You want to maximize the opportunity to make babies.” I regretted the words as soon as they’d left my mouth. I could feel how I was reducing her spiritual beliefs to biological imperatives.
She shook her head and leaned into me as if she were revealing a great secret.
“People think these rules are all about having children, and that’s just not true.” As she sighed, I remembered the basketball team she was raising in this apartment. “That’s when sex is better for the woman. We believe that sex needs, seriously needs, to be good for the woman. During the times we have sex is when all of the hormones are right for sex to be very enjoyable for the woman. Your libido is great if you wait until seven days after your period.”
I chewed on my macaron longer than necessary to consider this.
Chana continued. “Now also imagine not being able to touch your husband for that time. Imagine how great that is when you can finally touch him and release all of that pent-up energy.” She told me that Orthodox Jewish marriage comes with a special bed. During the two weeks when a couple are not allowed to touch each other, it splits apart. Then it comes back together during the two weeks when they can touch.
“Wait.” I stopped her. “I understand about the sex. But you can’t touch for those two weeks? You can’t hug or kiss or tickle or squeeze?”
She shook her head. “You can’t touch. It makes it so much more exciting when you can. It’s easy to lose yourself in a marriage, especially when you become a mom. The two weeks apart lets you connect with your body, return to your womanhood. You learn to love your body again. The two of us move apart in order to get to know ourselves better and then come back to each other more complete. It keeps the passion in your marriage. Everything is lining up during that time, your hormones, your libido. Everything is great,” Chana said. I felt like I was reading Cosmo.
I thought about Chana’s advice. When did Nick and I have the best sex? It was usually after I came back from a long trip, having built up all that desire and anticipation for days and sometimes weeks at a time. This trip was a prime example of that. I’d only been gone a week, but it was evident from his texts that Nick had started to miss me like crazy. “I was bouncing up and down in my chair at work thinking about picking you up from the airport,” he’d written. “I was looking at our wedding pictures last night. I’m a lucky guy.”
I’d come into our talk with plenty of misconceptions. One was that Orthodox Judaism was inherently antifeminist, turning women in baby-making machines. I hadn’t expected to get enlightened and progressive advice on how to care for yourself, your satisfaction, and your relationship.
“Take some time apart,” Chana said. “For me, it’s like getting to have a whole new wedding night every single month….You know, Jo, it’s the relationship between the husband and wife itself that is seen as sacred and holy in the Bible. God dwells within each couple if you choose to let him in.”
“But what does that mean?” I asked like an impatient child. Since Nick and I are not particularly religious, saying that God was dwelling within our marriage made it sound like we’d invited a complete stranger to come over and watch us have sex.
She considered it thoughtfully. “When I think about letting God in, I think about the little things. I think about being nice to my husband at the end of a long day. I think about smiling at him when I don’t want to smile. It is so easy in our world to think about me, me, me. But now you need to think about the two of you. It is about those little things.”
I nodded.
“In Jewish law we talk about the marriage covenant. It’s something so much bigger than a contract. It’s about a desire to create good things in the world together. To have the same desires about goodness and changing the world together. When you’re focused on these shared rules, then you truly focus on getting through the little things and the big things together.”
Still trying to wrap my head around the meaning of the laws, I’d later talk about it with an Orthodox scholar back home in the States. Alissa Thomas-Newborn is the first Orthodox female clergy member in Los Angeles and one of only a handful in the entire country. She echoed Chana’s ideas, telling me that the Orthodox rules truly did allow time for a woman to take care of herself, to feel renewed and refreshed each month, and for a couple to reset their relationship on multiple levels.
“Think of it as a time to work on your communication muscles, to talk without thinking about the physical aspects of the relationship,” Thomas-Newborn told me. “Look at it as an opportunity, a wonderful one! It can be a time to explore the relationship in different ways.”
Chana also told me her theory of bricks, which is not in the Bible but is wonderful advice all the same. Every married couple should think about the theory of the bricks.
“Every crisis, big or small, is a brick. It’s up to you to decide what to do with that brick. You can use it to build a wall between you, or it can be a brick in building the foundation of your home together. You can choose to let that brick tear you apart or make the relationship stronger. Anytime I reach a low point in my marriage I try to think about how that crisis will eventually get us to a better place.”
Her husband came home with the children soon after, and amid the glorious cacophony I could see why Chana equally cherished both her family and her time alone. She hugged me warmly as I left and whispered in my ear, “Take care of yourself.”
I thought we’d have days of great sex when I returned from the Middle East. We’d moved apart, so we could come back to each other more complete. Right? Instead, Nick and I got into a fight, a really shitty fight.
It started small. We couldn’t figure out how to set up a bank account that would automatically pay the mortgage. Then we finally set one up with Wells Fargo, but it locked us out because we entered the wrong password too many times.
The obvious way to mitigate this marital stress was to do something simple and relaxing together. And so we decided to assemble some Ikea furniture. As we searched for lost screws and Riktig Öglas we began wondering if we should put the mortgage on a credit card, which led the conversation to my desire to get rid of most of our credit cards. Nick, on the other hand, wanted as many credit cards as possib
le to maximize our frequent-flier points. This made my stomach tighten and my breath get short. The thought of looming plastic debt each month gave me an anxiety attack. But we somehow got back to the matter at hand and logged on to our credit card account to see if we could link it to the bank to link it to the other bank to link it to the mortgage. The Riktig Öglas were now nowhere to be found and tensions were running high.
I perused the last month of charges. “Why do we eat out so much?” I asked. “Do you hate my cooking? The beer-can chicken wasn’t any good?”
Our talk grew more and more heated as we quarreled over how we spent our money. Did we even need this crap from Ikea?
Nick thought we could get rid of our car. We lived in San Francisco; why did we need a car? I loved the freedom of having a car to escape the city for the wine country or to buy toilet paper in bulk at Costco.
“We wouldn’t need a car if we lived in New York, but we definitely need it here,” I said. Before I knew it, I began listing all of the things I hated about San Francisco and reasons why living there was making me miserable—being yelled at in the grocery store for not bringing my own bags, getting disapproving stares because I’d never been to Burning Man, the fact that everyone looks down on you if you don’t work at Google or Facebook, the chilly fog that seeps into your bones and never lets you truly get warm.
I wasn’t completely miserable on the West Coast. Sure, I didn’t have any friends and the hills made my glutes constantly sore and I felt like a pariah for not composting my own garbage, but San Francisco wasn’t as terrible as I was making it out to be. I was looking for things to attack with. I was tense. I grew up believing that married couples fought every day. I’d watched my parents wear each other down with constant bickering. In the past I’d imitated them. I’d needle boyfriends with the same perverse pleasure I’d get from popping a particularly ripe zit, becoming calm only after a huge release of tension. But until now I hadn’t done this with Nick. He was the first human things had felt normal with. The inertia of this argument catapulted us into a darker and darker place, bringing long-forgotten tensions to the surface. I’d shifted into a danger zone where sharp words came too easily.
