In reading this NY Times article, I was struck by a passing point in the article about Hilkhot Nidda. Something is off when we think that we need to strive for good sexuality and relationships in spite of Nidda. We are learning Hillhot Nidda this year in The Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies Kollel and the Yeshivat Maale Gilboa kollel and are seeing that the Halakhot and even the classic Halakhic discussions are about the ethics and desire of relationship with the aesthetic (tum'a) serving merely as a merging of limbic psychology with the ethical. This problem of misunderstanding Halakha as abstractions and thus failing to learn them as ways of seeing how to be human is true for all of Halakha, but pots and pans do not generally get in the way of experiencing our human selves as much as does treating certain halakhot as abstractions.
http://www.nytimes.com/…/magazine/the-orthodox-sex-guru.html
http://www.nytimes.com/…/magazine/the-orthodox-sex-guru.html
