My Two Cents on the Discourse: On Sin and Guilt

Yeah, it's Late, so What?

Twitter has been aflutter because of this thread by R. Noah Marlowe, citing R. Jennie Rosenfeld. Well it was a flutter, but the thing about writing longform pieces is that sometimes by the time you’re done with a piece its last week’s news. But pretend!

Noah Marlowe @tzvei_dinim

How do religiously committed single Jews navigate sexual desire and activity? Rabbanit Dr. Jennie Rosenfeld set out to answer this question in her dissertation “Talmudic Rereadings: Toward a Modern Orthodox Sexual Ethic” Today I gave a shiur using her trailblazing work, a 🧵

There has been a strongly negative reaction to it, ranging from the reasonable (“there’s a difference between private advice and publicly pronounced policy”) to the overblown (“This is why Modern Orthodoxy is bad”) to the ridiculous (“this is why women shouldn’t learn Torah”). 

In this piece I will try to make the point that I think R. Marlowe was trying to make in clearer language. If what I say is not what R. Marlowe was saying, then it’s what I’m saying, and he should be absolved from any negative feedback I get. 

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People feel guilty about things they have done that fail to live up to their self-image. For instance, the other day, while defending R. Marlowe from what I thought to unjust criticism, I lapsed into being pretty mean myself, giving myself a very flimsy excuse to do so. I was angry at people who I thought were misrepresenting a piece, it took on a personal component, and I fooled myself into thinking I was righteous. What I should have done was put the phone down the moment I felt that anger rising, or at least the moment that I started feeling defensive enough to make my arguments sloppy. But I didn’t. It felt good. It felt like I was defending the correct position with a rapier wit, like I was playfully but convincingly demonstrating the moral bankruptcy of my opponents. I wasn’t. I was being a dick. 

At long last I put the phone down,  walked out of the room without it, watched a live podcast episode, and returned to my phone hours later, and then read what I wrote. And I saw that my self-image, of someone who is able to discuss issues with nuance but without moral compromise, who is humble and able to take criticism and able to admit when he is in the wrong, was at odds with my behavior. I dipped back into the thread to apologize. I don’t know if that was enough. I contemplated deleting the comments, but felt it better to leave them up for accountability. I don’t know if that apology or this piece changes how my interlocutors view me, and they could justifiably see this as just performative. 

But I do feel bad. I feel like I have failed to live up to the standards I set for myself. I feel like I have hurt people, or disappointed people, or even defrauded people. And I know that I have no excuse for how I acted. What I am feeling is the feeling we call guilt. 

Now, how do I deal with that guilt? Do I use that guilt to motivate me to do better in the future? Do I reevaluate the way in which I use social media? Do I use that guilt in a healthy productive way? That would be ideal. 

But there is another way I could deal with that guilt. I can use that guilt to revise my self-image downward, especially if I keep behaving this way, and the guilt starts snowballing. I can start to see myself as out of control, and slowly that becomes how I think of myself. Soon I’m no longer trying to be the person I once thought of myself as. Soon, I start to feel like even paying lip service to appropriate behavior online would be hypocritical. I start to use social media not as a way to learn, but as a way to wield power against those who have wronged me. Soon it’s not even about those who have wronged me, it’s about feeling powerful, about being able to control other people, because I cannot control myself. I cut out from my life everyone who doesn’t say yes to anything I say, who doesn’t praise me constantly. Guilt over a failure to live up to my self-image has led me down a dark path, spiraling downwards until I’ve become a monster. 

I don’t think I need to explain to people how powerful the desire for sex can be, and how the urge to be mean on the internet is not really an equivalent. But halakha, as it does for any area of human activity, places limitations, to direct that powerful urge towards pro-social ends. Speaking very broadly and generally and within my own understanding of Judaism, sex must be with another person¹ and obviously with their consent, within the confines of some sort of commitment, and is limited further by only allowing sex within certain time frames. The goal is to direct that urge not towards mere fulfillment, but towards a relationship that recognizes The Other as an equal, creating an intimacy in which both people have created space for each other, intertwined but still individual. 

But that creates very high demands on people who have that very human and healthy impulse, who for one reason or another, have no partner, whether it being too young to be able to healthily commit to another person, or having difficulty finding someone who they can feel safe having that sort of intimate relationship with, or even have such a partner and being so overcome that they find it hard to wait until marriage, such people have no halakhically approved outlet for that very human and healthy impulse. We can see the values of this area of halakha as worthwhile and valuable, while still acknowledging the reality of the pressure it places on people. 

The fact that halakha has such lofty goals for such a powerful impulse and important part of life is not without cost. And people who see themselves as halakhically observant often have to deal with the fact that their self image does not match their actions. Which leads to guilt, as we have discussed. Guilt is also a powerful force. It can motivate, it can propel us towards achieving loftier goals, or it can destroy, forcing us to revise our self image downwards. So guilt must be managed and controlled and directed, if only to keep our heads above water. We must find ways to pro-actively get ahead of the temptation that comes after temptation, to revise our self image downwards into a spiral.