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Union Theological Seminary

Celebrating the Body Judaic: Dancing with the Evil Impulse

In Jewish tradition, the "yetzer hara" -- literally the "evil impulse", but also the force of erotic energy in life -- simultaneously arouses respect and unease, delight and fear. It is necessary to our lives, it presents a danger.

For example, the traditional liturgy to welcome and celebrate Shabbat draws explicitly on human knowledge of erotic experience and pleasure and channels that energy to the worship of God. From one perspective, the basic connection between spirituality and sexuality is frankly acknowledged.

At the same time, however, eroticism is either allegorized in this fashion or restricted to a heteronormative model of marriage. The yetzer hara is given little room to roam.

Over time, gay men have both deliberately and spontaneously developed new styles of erotic communal experience. We have discovered different ways of dancing with the "evil impulse." The Body Electric School has for over two decades created workshops (first for gay men but now for everyone) to explore the spiritual power of embracing our bodies and our erotic energy. This May 11-14, Body Electric offers for the first time a Shabbat retreat for gay Jewish men to bring that communal awareness and sacred experience of eros into traditional forms of Jewish worship, study, and ritual.

Join Rabbi David Dunn Bauer and Michael Cohen, therapist and life coach, in a discussion of the possibilities and challenges involved in creating this new queer Jewish ritual.

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