Passover-Sex Is Everybody's Business
© Rabbi Daniel Lapin

For centuries America has recognized that sex is everybody's business. The community does care about what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms. First Roman law, then English law, and finally American law prohibited polygamy, incest, and, until recently, adultery. These cultures all drew heavily on the Torah which was the first inkling mankind received that regulation of these seemingly private matters helped preserve society. These laws reflected our conviction that we all have a say in what two of our fellow citizens might be doing in the privacy of their bedroom. Even today, on some deep level, we still suspect that sex is everybody's business. That may be why most of us notify our friends of our intention to mate by announcing our engagements well in advance of the wedding night.

Yet during the past four decades or so, we have uncritically embraced the revolutionary idea that sex is nobody else's business. Fortunately, the holiday of Passover reminds us that sex is indeed everybody's business.

The core observance of Passover, or Pesach in Hebrew, is of course the seder. As the twelfth chapter of Exodus informs us, the first seder in Egypt was characterized by the slaughter and consumption of the Paschal, or Pesach lamb. Although the Paschal lamb is no longer sacrificed, most of the symbolism surrounding the modern seder is intended to capture the centrality of that ancient ritual and its significance to sex.

Three rules surrounding that original Biblical seder offer clear direction for our own confused times. These rules were (i) that each family gathered to slaughter and eat its own lamb; (ii) the lamb's blood was painted on to the door of the home; and (iii) males participating in that seder had to be circumcised.

One reason why the Passover seder is still the most popular family religious observance among American Jews may well be its Biblical roots as a family event. After two hundred years of slavery in Egypt, Jewish family life was all but decimated. On the eve of its birth as a new nation, Israel had to reestablish the family as the fundamental element of society. For their very first ritual as a nation, God gathered them, not into political, tribal, or labor groupings but into individual families. This reasserted the bond between husband and wife, the parental home and its children. Hence rule number one.

Painting the blood onto the front door informed the world that behind that door lived a group of people bonded by blood. That bloody door symbolized a separation between the home of one's blood family and the rest of society. It reminds us today that the bonds uniting those in the family are entirely different from the bonds uniting members of a fraternity, a labor union, or a tennis club. Behind that door a man and woman engage in physical intimacy and behind that door they raise the children who, spiritually through adoption or physically through birth, are the fruit of that special union. Behind that door the blood of circumcision is spilt as one generation produces the next. Thus, through rule number two, a great nation is forged.

Finally, being an uncircumcised Jew is incompatible with a traditional Passover because circumcision reaffirms Passover's theme-that sex is everybody's business. When an infant Jewish boy is circumcised, there are two main requirements. The procedure must be conducted during daylight and preferably in the presence of many people. Thus every Jewish male knows that in broad daylight before other members of his community, a sign was placed upon his genital organ to remind him that what he does with it is of communal concern.

Since the arrival of the birth control pill about four decades ago, secularism has been preoccupied with separating sex from life. While obviously not every act of marital intimacy will or should produce life, societies throughout mankind's long history that have strenuously separated the two, have not long endured.

Sexual educational programs for children who cannot even yet read fluently are really indoctrination into the dogma of recreational sex. Venerable matrons who minimize the emotional torment of abortion and encourage its easy availability as an alternative to birth control, have been unwittingly co-opted into the recreational sex campaign whose war cry is that sex is nobody else's business. Colleges that insist on coed dormitories and bathrooms endanger the future by telling our children that sex is casual and insignificant.

Our society flaunts sex publicly while claiming it is private; the truth is that sex is a private act with immensely powerful public impact. Passover and its message that sex and family tie the present to the future remind us of the peril in pretending that sex is nobody's business.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin is a business consultant and hosts a radio show on KSFO in San Francisco. He lives with his wife and seven home schooled children on Mercer Island.