For the addicted, harm reduction
is preferable to prohibition.
Those who can’t resist seduction,
when guided towards inhibition
by harm reduction methods, may
retrain, restrain, themselves without
recourse to laws they can’t obey,
demoralized too much by doubt
caused by their inability
to conquer totally addiction.
A step with more humility
than laws and fear of legal friction
is harm-reduction, using measures
that will not stop, but can diminish,
pain caused by addictive pleasures.
Less than perfect is its finish,
coming with a shell-shocked shine
all addicts get once they rebuff
the pleasures for which they would pine
before they learned the word “Enough!”
In Mainz in Ashkenaz around the year 1000 CE Rabbenu Gershom decided to disparage bigamy in a takkanah, decree, in which he chose to forbid
multiplicity of marriages, perhaps inspired by the same verse that Jesus cited when forbidding marriage dissolution by divorce. In both decrees the superego supersedes the Freudian id, and both of them seem serendipitously adaptive
of the Deuteronomic law of the fair captive!
Note that the paradigm for harm-reduction as opposed to total prohibition is the Deuteronomic law of the fair captive (Deut. 21:10-14), concerning which Rashi cites the midrash implying that the Torah negotiates with the evil inclination.
Douglas Quenqua (“Graduating from Lip Smackers,” NYT Styles, 4/30/10) writes:
The choice between prohibition and harm-reduction has long divided parents on prickly issues: forbid alcohol or supervise the inevitable kegger? Preach abstinence or buy condoms?…..
A fascinating article on the Deuteronomic fair captive, “Jesus on Divorce: Another Moral Compromise,” thetorah.com, by Shaye Cohen and Zev Farber, caused me not only to recall this poem but to wonder whether Rabbenu Gershom’s decree against bigamy might have been inspired by the same verse in Genesis that inspired Jesus’ decree against divorce.
In the article Shaye Cohen and Zev Farber write:
The idea that a Torah law may not reflect the divine ideal but instead a human compromise has a close parallel in the gospels. The earliest version is the Gospel of Mark:
Mark 10:2 Some Pharisees came, and to test him (=Jesus) they asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” 10:3 He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” 10:4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her.” 10:5 But Jesus said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. 10:6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ 10:7 ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 10:8 and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 10:9 Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”[16] (NRSV)
In this story, retold in the Gospel of Matthew (19:3–8),[17] Jesus claims that the Torah’s law permitting divorce is actually immoral. The only reason the Torah included it is because it is the lesser of two evils. In other words, men would divorce their wives anyway, so the Torah designed a form of legislation to accommodate this, but really, it would be best if people never divorced. Later in the story, as well as in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus takes this a step further and says that remarriage after divorce is akin to adultery, claiming that the Torah’s concession is no longer valid, at least for those righteous enough to see the truth.
Jesus’s claim that in an ideal world, the Torah would not permit divorce is conceptually similar to the Talmud’s claim that the Torah permitted marrying the captive woman to limit or avoid wartime rape. What the Talmud calls “the evil inclination,” Jesus calls “hardness of heart” (based on Ezekiel 2:4 and 3:7), but the logic is the same: The Torah permits an action which it would have preferred to prohibit.
Gen. 2:24 states:
כד עַל-כֵּן, יַעֲזָב-אִישׁ, אֶת-אָבִיו, וְאֶת-אִמּוֹ; וְדָבַק בְּאִשְׁתּוֹ, וְהָיוּ לְבָשָׂר אֶחָד. 24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.
I wonder whether Jesus’ citation of this verse to justify his disapproval of divorce as a violation of the biblical command that marriage should transform two fleshes into a single flesh might have inspired Rabbenu Gershom to forbid bigamy. a situation in which three fleshes are joined, preventing the union of a marriage from becoming one single flesh.
If my suggestion is legitimate, it would explain why Rabbenu Gershom’s decree only applied to Ashkenazi Jews, who at the time he was alive, inhabited communities whose non-Jewish population followed rules of the New Testament. This also might explain why his decree was not enforced by Sephardim, who inhabited communities whose populations were mainly Muslims whose religious laws allow bigamy.
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
