(This article also appears on National Review Online.)
Even today, on some level we still suspect that sex is a matter of public concern. That may be why we notify our friends of our intention to mate by announcing our engagements well in advance of the wedding night.
Yet over the past four decades, we have embraced the revolutionary idea that what one does in bed should concern nobody but yourself and your partner. Fortunately the ancient holiday of Passover comes along each year to teach otherwise.
The core observance of Passover is of course the seder, occurring this year two nights ago, Saturday night, April 7. This seder was the 3313th anniversary of the original seder during the exodus from Egypt. As the 12th chapter of Exodus notes, that seder was characterized by the slaughter of the Paschal, or Pesach, lamb. Although the Passover 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 of the basic requirements of the original Biblical seder offer clear direction for our own times. These rules were that each family gathered to slaughter and eat its own lamb; the lamb's blood was painted on to the door of the home; and that males participating in the seder had to be circumcised.
One reason the Passover seder is still the most popular family religious observance among American Jews may 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 building block 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.
Painting the blood onto the front door informed the world that behind that door lived a group of people bonded by blood. The 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 are the fruit of that special union. Behind that door the blood of circumcision is spilt as one generation produces the next. Thus is a great nation forged.
Finally, being an uncircumcised Jew is incompatible with Passover because circumcision reaffirms our 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 the daytime, 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 penis to remind him that what he does with it is of communal concern.
Since the birth-control pill was first marketed, and as abortion became increasingly accepted as an alternative form of birth control, American culture has been more and more preoccupied with decoupling sex from the creation of life. Rather, sex is seen merely as an exciting leisure-time activity that need have no enduring consequences. In other words, it's nobody's business but your own.
Sex-educational programs for children who cannot yet even read fluently are really a form of indoctrination into this idea of recreational sex. Venerable matrons who minimize the emotional torment of abortion and encourage its easy availability have been unwittingly co-opted into the recreational-sex campaign. Colleges that insist on coed dormitories and bathrooms also teach young people that sex is casual and insignificant.
While not every act of marital intimacy will or should produce life, those societies that have sought to separate sex from the creation of life have tended not to endure. One thinks of classical Athens, which idealized the erotic relationship between men. Keeping sex and life intimately coupled seems to be an imperative woven into the fabric of human existence.
Modern Americans flaunt sex publicly while claiming it is private. The truth is that sex is a private act with an immensely powerful public impact. Passover reminds us that sex and family link the present to the future. When that link is severed, the future is imperiled.
