"Music, I have come to realize, is for me a kind of golden thread running through my life. It has helped maintain my connection with the past that otherwise might have been severed by catastrophe and ...time. I am often asked-indeed, I often wonder myself-why it is that I should always have had such joie de vivre in the face of the losses and dislocations I had to endure in my early years. The answer I always gave was that the warmth and security of my early childhood had a remarkable power and influence. This is certainly true. But now I have realized that there is another part to the answer. And that is music."-from the introduction Who among us does not have a song that triggers vivid memories-of jubilation, of belonging, of sorrow, of love? InMusically Speaking, Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer, one of America's most beloved personalities, has written a warm and contemplative book about the role music has played in her life and the ineradicable traces it has left on her thoughts, emotions, her very being. In this memoir through song, Dr. Ruth invites us to share her story from a uniquely musical perspective. By the time she was thirty, Ruth Westheimer had lived in five countries, each with a distinctive musical culture, each with a different hold on her sensibility. For the first ten years of her life, the comforting melodies of childhood helped drown out the anthems of Nazism to be heard elsewhere in her native Germany; as an adolescent refugee in Switzerland, she came to be aware that, however loudly she sang the patriotic songs of the land that gave her shelter, she could never truly be at home there. Present at the creation of the modern state of Israel, she sang and danced to the new music of a new nation; as a young woman eagerly absorbing all that Paris had to offer in the way of romance and worldliness in the early 1950s, the songs of Edith Piaf, Mouloudji, and Yves Montand were her tutors. An almost accidental emigration to America brought new challenges and new stability, as she became a wife, mother, and professional; tremendous and unforeseen celebrity came later, and with it the giddy opportunity to indulge her love of music as never before. Always, the classical repertoire of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms has drawn Westheimer to a German culture that has belonged-and not belonged-to her throughout her life. And always, the music of the Jewish tradition has given her strength and comfort beyond words. Affording a view of Dr. Ruth from a rare private vantage point,Musically Speakingoffers wondrous testimony to the resilience of the human spirit. This is a book full of color, verve, humor, and wisdom, unfolding gracefully through the beloved music of the Jewish holidays, the lullabies of childhood, the songs that sustained an orphan and roused the courage of a young woman, the melodies that enable a widow grieving for her husband to recall, from deep within the years of love, companionship, and happiness.
Symbolized by a three-hundred-year-old Seder plate, the religious life of Fred Behrend's family had centered largely around Passover and the tale of the Jewish people's exodus from tyranny. When the ...Nazis came to power, the wide-eyed boy and his family found themselves living a twentieth-century version of that exodus, escaping oppression and persecution in Germany for Cuba and ultimately a life of freedom and happiness in the United States. Behrend's childhood came to a crashing end with Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) and his father's harrowing internment at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. But he would not be defined by these harrowing circumstances. Behrend would go on to experience brushes with history involving the defeated Germans. By the age of twenty, he had run a POW camp full of Nazis, been an instructor in a program aimed at denazifying specially selected prisoners, and been assigned by the U.S. Army to watch over Wernher von Braun, the designer of the V-2 rocket that terrorized Europe and later chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that sent Americans to the moon. Behrend went from a sheltered life of wealth in a long-gone, old-world Germany, dwelling in the gilded compound once belonging to the manufacturer of the zeppelin airships, to a poor Jewish immigrant in New York City learning English from Humphrey Bogart films. Upon returning from service in the U.S. Army, he rose out of poverty, built a successful business in Manhattan, and returned to visit Germany a dozen times, giving him unique perspective into Germany's attempts to surmount its Nazi past.
This anthology fills Genesis with meaning, gathering intellectuals and thinkers who use their professional knowledge to illuminate the Biblical text. The writers use insights from psychology, law, ...political science, literature, and other scholarly fields, to create an original constellation of modern Biblical readings, and receptions of Genesis.
Of the numerous books in the Bible, few are more risqué or more revealing about the Bible’s attitude toward sex than the Book of Ruth.
The importance of this particular scroll—one of the five ...scrolls, or megillot, read in the synagogue over the span of a year—is underscored by the fact that the Sages chose Ruth to be read on the exalted holiday of Shavuot, the holiday celebrating Moses’ receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai. The Torah is not mentioned in the Book of Ruth, whereas sex is omnipresent; yet the connections abound.
The story begins in a
Thou Shalt Not Westheimer, Dr. Ruth K; Mark, Jonathan
Heavenly Sex,
09/2020
Book Chapter
A story from the tractate Sanhedrin, told by Rabbi Judah in the name of Rav: A man once developed a powerful sexual obsession for a woman. His heart was so consumed by his burning desire that it was ...thought that his life was endangered. Doctors were consulted. They said the man’s trouble was not his fault; it was genetic, medical, biological, psychological. There was no cure other than the woman submitting to him. At which point the Sages said, “Let him die before she should have to submit.”
The doctors said, “At least let her stand nude before him.” The
Beauty and the Bible Westheimer, Dr. Ruth K; Mark, Jonathan
Heavenly Sex,
09/2020
Book Chapter
There is a Bible in every hotel and motel in the country, and quite rightly—the Bible is the oldest but still the wisest guide to sex ever written. People pick up the Bible for many different reasons ...but rarely, if ever, as a sex manual. That is their mistake.
We are not talking about a Bible that most people who have not read it associate with Puritan chastity but about the Jewish Bible, with its galaxies of commentaries in which sex is not only allowed but ordained. The Bible teaches that God created the world by separation—heaven from
Peace in the Home Westheimer, Dr. Ruth K; Mark, Jonathan
Heavenly Sex,
09/2020
Book Chapter
Long before I became “Dr. Ruth,” when I was still a good little girl named Karola Ruth Siegel growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, I wasn’t used to saying or hearing ...words such as penis, vagina, orgasm, or clitoris. If, through some fluke, I did hear such words, I’d find myself blushing.
Sometimes I still blush. We were European Jews, more European than Jewish, and thoroughly influenced by the prudish Victorian attitudes of that era—attitudes still influencing the way so many of us think, act, and talk about sex. Why, when talking about
Mikvah Westheimer, Dr. Ruth K; Mark, Jonathan
Heavenly Sex,
09/2020
Book Chapter
A woman emerges nude from the ocean. In the moonlight, on the beach, her man embraces her, wraps her in a towel, and makes love to her. The laws of Family Purity decreed that, for all the days of her ...menstruation, they could only look and speak but not touch. Now, passions unleashed, they can satisfy themselves, each other—and God.
God? Yes. The ultimate threesome for great sex, says this tradition. God, who commanded the abstinence and who originated the idea that the woman immerse and emerge from water under the cover of night before the couple could reunite
The Sabbath Westheimer, Dr. Ruth K; Mark, Jonathan
Heavenly Sex,
09/2020
Book Chapter
This chapter will be a romantic guided tour through twenty-five hours of sensual pleasure, based on the Jewish tradition (the Sabbath begins at dusk but ends after dark, thus the twenty-fifth hour). ...As if taking a bite from the Tree of Knowledge, readers will become more aware of their sexiness, the sexiness of religion, and the potential of renewal through the most ancient techniques.
God is the ultimate sex therapist. He/She has created one day a week—the Sabbath (Shabbat or Shabbos)—when God asks, among other things, that we express our love for the Divine by expressing our love
