Saturday at midnight

Publish date 01-04-2022

by Flaminia Morandi

Even in the carnal union? Sure, holiness also passes from there, we read in the Iggeret ha-qodeš, Letter on holiness, a Spanish Hebrew mystical text perhaps from the 14th century. The reasoning is simple: through the law Israel is made similar to the Creator. There is no aspect of life that is not included in the observance of him. Sex? There are five ways to sanctify it. The first: having in mind the essence of carnal union, which has nothing rough or ugly, indeed, when it happens in the right way the Bible calls it "knowledge". If husband and wife are united in holiness, the Šekinah is in their midst, she is in the secret of iš, man and iššah, woman . In their union they become partners of the Saint, Benedict be, in the Work of creation. The second way: the "when" of carnal union. When one can infuse energy into the other without losing one's own, that is, "in the evening of šabbat in the evening of šabbat", because šabbat, on Saturday, is the foundation of world: do we not read in Exodus 31, 17, "on the seventh day he rested and was revived"? Therefore, the time is not in the six “bodily” weekdays, but in the day when all is rest, the world of the higher souls. At what time? In the evening, indeed, in the second half of the night, when the body has calmed down "after the bubbling of the meal ... the purified blood, the enzymes are back in their natural place, the fundamentals of the body are back in their right order". The third way concerns the quality of the food, which must be "clear, clean and pure". No foods such as fat and blood, "which clog the heart and induce arrogance", no impure animals that "block the ways of intelligence". The quantity of food is equally important: small doses, well shredded and digested. The fourth way is intention: the imagination and thoughts during intercourse. The reference is to the story of the poplar, almond and plane tree twigs that Jacob holds in front of the flock in heat to make striated, mottled and spotted lambs conceive. Thoughts of transgression are more serious than transgression, reflects the Castilian mystic. It is better for the husband to make his wife relax, cheer her up, assist her with joyful words, because thought makes the contact impure, introduces a foreign element that drives away Šekinah. The fifth way is l act itself: never out of violence, never against her will, because the foundation of the act in God is mutual agreement, it is the harmony between the two. Never let the man be in a hurry, rather take care to dispose the woman "along the way of love and desire, so that she is the first to fecundate". In fact, it was believed that pleasure coincided with fertilization.

The profound meaning of the advice of Iggeret ha-qodes flourishes in the thought of two orthodox mystics of the twentieth century, one French and the other Greek. Olivier Clement said: man and woman become worthy of the strong language of sex only by discovering and serving the otherness of the other, what the Bible defines as "knowledge". And the patriarch Athenagoras: each couple is like the first couple, Adam and Eve in Paradise, but in the new Adam, Christ, united forever with humanity. Thus love will no longer be a yearning longing for the lost paradise, but a rediscovered paradise that can transfigure the world. It will be a love mixed with the love of Christ and the Church, it will be the wine of joy of the miracle of Cana, it will be the hearth of a house that is a small Church of life and love.


Flaminia Morandi
NP December 2021

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