Kosher Adultery: Seduce and Sin with Your Spouse [Hardcover]

Like David Schnarch's "Passionate Marriage," this book should be required reading before anyone "ties the knot of Holy Vows."

What this book is *not* is an invitation to open marriage, or adultery per se:

"Adultery serves a double wrong; first, because it betrays a marriage and causes terrible pain to one's spouse; and second, because it robs a marriage of the input it needs to survive and prosper. On a more individual level, adultery erodes, if not utterly destroys, the faith and trust that one partner has in the other. Worse, it causes an almost incurable feeling of inadequacy that the partner who has been cheated on cannot shake.... What is particularly unjust about this... is that it is the *victim* who feels responsible."

What Rabbi Boteach advocates is harnessing the inevitable, blind, biological tendency to adultery to supercharge and strengthen traditional, monogamous marriage:

"Just suppose...

*Husbands could never afford to become complacent because they were married to voracious sexual seductresses that constantly need to be re-seduced.

*Wives became the living embodiment of a man's sexual fantasies -- a woman with an insatiable appetite who would do anything for sex.

If this were to occur, would men still need to turn to manufactured porn entertainment when the real thing is in their bedrooms? Would it not lead us to be constantly attracted to our partners?"

Boteach conveys an immense amount of originality in his discussion of what makes marriage work and, conversely, what wrecks it. And what Boteach calls upon as his primary source is the Decalogue, particularly the Tenth Commandment: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor's."

This Commandment, Boteach maintains, implies a husband *is* to LUST after his *own* wife. Similarly, Boteach argues that sex is a most holy gift given by a Benign Creator to enlighten and elevate humanity, and refutes the Darwinian message that men and women are mere mechanical automata -- inevitably behaving like animals -- rather than created in the image of God. The business of being truly human, the Rabbi argues, is to transcend our natures: in this case, to be passionately monogamous for a lifetime.

For Rabbi Boteach, sexuality -- fiery, passionate sexuality -- is the very core of every successful marriage. Just as it is not "compatibility" a spouse seeks in a fling, so it is not "compatibility" that holds a lively and life-affirming marriage together: what holds marriage together *primarily* is steamy, passionate eroticism.

A wonderfully written, and immensely pleasurable read.

Highly recommended.