“The mind and the body meet at the word.” – S. Freud
It’s generally acknowledged that Freud’s original dream interpretations were drawn from biblical sources and the Talmud, the traditional Hebrew commentary similar to the Christian Matthew Henry. He didn’t rely just on the symbolism in the manifest content of a dream – the plot, the setting, the players. He recognized the importance of the latent content, the underlying themes that reveal unconscious hopes, dreams, and terrors that can contain classic images. However, the interpretation is strictly person-specific. Less discussed is Freud’s background.
Hasidic Jews honor women
Jakob Freud, Sigmund’s father, was an Ashkenazi Jew, a diaspora population formed in the Holy Roman Empire. Even though he distanced himself from the strict Hasidic tradition, he retained the practice of deep study and was considered a Torah scholar.
He was also involved in Haskalah, an intellectual movement that focused on Jewish enlightenment, especially freedom of thought and encouragement of inquiry. A quote from Barbra Streisand’s movie Yentl offers this poetic interpretation:
- “It’s by their questions that we choose our students, not only by their answers.”
The last verse of Proverbs 31 (the opening verse often translated, “A woman of valor, who can find? Her price is far above rubies”) also celebrates a questioning spirit. Traditional commentary holds that her husband being “honored at the city gates” has nothing to do with what he knows and everything to do with what he asks, especially in the presence of the rebbe (highly revered rabbi).
Kabbalistic straight talk about women, respect, and sex
Freud’s castration and penis envy theories aren’t outlandish after all, not in the light of a bit of scripture, a smidgen of Kabbalah, and something my late husband taught me.
- Song of Songs, aka Song of Solomon, a book of wildly inventive poetry, is viewed as a honeymoon manual by all but the most severely repressed on both sides of the Judao-Christian fence.
- The Kabbalah, the book of Jewish mysticism studied in depth, especially by more conservative Jews, teaches that connubial bliss is contingent upon the man’s facility with pillow talk.*
- Rabbi Mordechai Levison, of blessed memory, taught that it is not women’s inherent inferiority that keeps them out of the synagogue and in the kitchen.
“Real Jewish men know that the female heart is born knowing all, and if they were smart, they’d skip Sabbath oneg with the boys, take her out for a lovely meal, listen intently to what she has to say about the Torah portion, and especially the rabbi’s message.”
*About that Kabalistic “pillow talk”
In the movie A Stranger Among Us, Ariel (Eric Thal) reads this passage from Kabbalah to Emily (Melanie Griffith).
Therefore, engage her in conversation that puts her heart and mind at ease. Speak words which arouse her to passion, union, love, desire, and eroticism.
And just for the record …
The logic behind all the Orthodox prohibitions about segregating the sexes to the point of no physical contact is for scholars to discuss, not me. I do know that the sardonic rumor circled for decades is as false as it gets.
Nobody in the Orthodox Jewish community, certainly no one I know, “does it through a sheet.”
