Once upon a time, a man loved a woman. He was smitten with her beauty and pursued her with a ravenous desire. He wrote her poetry and sang her music, dripping with promises of fidelity and everlasting love.
Yet, once his love had captured her heart, this man slowly began to lose the ability to see her beauty.
And this man slowly stopped being able to see what was right in front of him.
The Orthodox rabbi and counselor Shmuley Biotech works with a lot of marriages in trouble, and in his experience this is the major problem that marriages have.
We grow too familiar with one another. He points to the Old Testament practice of mikveh, in which the woman would separate from her husband during her menstruation cycle (which is not a topic I thought I’d ever be writing about).
To modern readers, this sounds incredibly mysogynistic and repressive. But Boteach says that most Christians reading this have misunderstood the purpose behind the commandment. According to Orthodox Judaism , this is not a practice concerned with a man becoming unclean, but for a different purpose all together.
It was meant to prevent the couple from becoming overly familiar with one another. It increases the mystery that the lovers feel for each other.
You can read the rest.
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