Fasting, Celibacy and Modern Society
by Rabbi Allen S Maller
Fasting, Celibacy, and Modern Society
Rabbi Allen S. Maller
Both Islam and Judaism place major emphasis on fasting as a means of religious self discipline and spiritual self control. For Muslims the major fast occurs during the daylight hours of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. For Jews the major fast occurs during the 24 hour fast of Yom Kippur-the Day of Atonement. Both Islam and Judaism include abstaining from sexual activities as part of fasting. Why?
It is not because Islam and Judaism have a negative attitude to sexual activity. Unlike Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism, Islam and Judaism have no religious ideal of celibate monks, nuns or holy men.
For most modern western people today, sexual self-restraint seems archaic, negative and repressive. Western sociologists long ago established a link between having sex and feeling pleased with yourself and the world. In a representative recent study of 1,000 women, for example, the participants ranked sex as No.1 among the activities that made them the happiest.
Thus, even a short temporary restriction of sexual activity seems awful. Is it really that bad? Have the Torah, the oldest monotheistic scripture, and the Qur’an, the latest monotheistic scripture, both got it all wrong?
According to a column in The New York Times Magazine (June 28, 2015) data from 16,000 American adults on incomes, sexual activity and happiness led economists to conclude in a much-discussed 2004 study that increasing the frequency of intercourse from once a month to once a week increased happiness to the same extent as having an additional $50,000 in the bank.
But while these and similar studies, revealed an association between sex and happiness, they did not show that more sex actually causes greater happiness. Perhaps it is the other way around; happier people have more sex. To establish causation, scientists needed to get couples to have sex more often and then see if that made them happier. And it turns out it doesn’t according to a new study in the August 2015 issue of The Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
For this study, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and elsewhere recruited 64 adult married couples, and asked the volunteers how often they had sex, how enjoyable it was and how happy they were in general, based on standard questionnaires that measure mood and energy.
Half the couples, picked randomly, were assigned to go about their lives as usual; the rest were told to double the frequency of their sexual relations. If they had sex once a month (the minimum rate for inclusion in the study), make it twice; couples who had sex three times a week (the maximum rate for participants) were to go to six.
The subjects were also tasked with completing a short daily online questionnaire for the experiment’s duration (90 days) about the amount and quality of their sex the previous day and their subsequent moods. While some couples in the experimental group actually managed to double their rate of intercourse, most did not, and on average there was only a 40 percent increase.
This did not make them happier. In fact, their well-being declined, especially in measures of energy and enthusiasm, as did the quality of the sex. Both men and women reported that the additional intercourse wasn’t much fun.
The results surprised the researchers — but they shouldn’t have. Why would anyone think that more sex is automatically better sex? Only in a society that ranks the importance of individual happiness and sexual activity as number one; can that be the normal expectation.
The pressure to double their sexual activity by itself would cause a decline in pleasure and joy. Yet sexual activities are what our society tells us are the most important source of happiness. Ramadan and Yom Kippur tell us that this is not correct.
Western sociologists and psychologists need to spend a few years engaging in the study of Torah and Qur’an; so they can learn the value and joy of submission to God’s will.
Rabbi Maller’s web site is: rabbimaller.com