(This is part 3 in my series, “What I Want My Teenage Daughters to Know about Sex.” Click here to read it from the beginning.)

Yes, you heard me right: Getting married has nothing to do with getting pregnant, and getting pregnant has only a passing connection to sex.

You might think then that I want you to have wanton intercourse with boys far and wide. And it is true that some people do just that. And some of them say they’re happy with that lifestyle. And I believe them. (Many of them also say that they’re unhappy about the way society demonizes them— but more about that next week.)

But that’s not exactly what I said. What I said was: much of what society has told you about marriage and teen pregnancy is misinformation, and I don’t want you to rely on it.

However, sex does go along with marriage.

(This is part 3 in my series on 1 Corinthians 5. Click here to read from the beginning.)

Most of us probably imagine the first swingers as 1960’s hippies in a free-love commune. But in fact, it started earlier than that, in World War II. Christopher Ryan explains:

It seems that the original modern American swingers were crew-cut World War II air force pilots and their wives. Like elite warriors everywhere, these “top guns” often developed strong bonds with one another, perhaps because they suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the military. According to journalist Terry Gould, “key parties,” like those later dramatized in the 1997 film The Ice Storm, originated on these military bases in the 1940s, where elite pilots and their wives intermingled sexually with one another before the men flew off toward Japanese antiaircraft fire…

Joan and Dwight Dixon explained to Gould that these warriors and their wives “shared each other as a kind of tribal bonding ritual, with a tacit understanding that the two thirds of husbands who survived would look after the widows.”

I’m going to do something silly, anachronistic, and completely improbable. I’m going to retell the Story of the Corinthian Stepmother in these terms.

(This is part 2 in my series on 1 Corinthians 5. Click here to read from the beginning.)

One marvels at the repetition of intentionally tragic stories, like Evergreene’s: After her Christian marriage ended in divorce, and after she slogged through the concomitant depression, she decided she’d be happier living a bisexual, polyamorous lifestyle. She hid her new lifestyle from her Southern Baptist friends and family, but not well enough.

The Passover stuff is already out at the grocery store. At the other end of the store, an even greater selection of pastel-colored candy and related items.

But Pesach is still several weeks away, and first I have another bat mitzvah to think of. My Beloved will finally herself be called to the Torah in an adult bat mitzvah. Better late than never, as they say.

We’re all helping out. Our younger daughter is laining the day’s maftir portion. Our elder daughter is canting as chazzanit. And I am laining the New Testament reading for the day, which is from First Corinthians chapter 5:

Oh, once there was a wicked, wicked man And Haman was his name sir, He would have murdered all the Jews, Though they were not to blame sir

Oh today, we'll merry, merry be Oh today, we'll merry, merry be Oh today, we'll merry, merry be And nosh some hamantashen.

I posted a link to this classic children’s Purim song, earlier this week.

The first challenging thought that forces itself on me: What makes us think that Haman was “wicked”? I’ve written before about Haman’s humanity. There, but the for the grace of God…

Matthew begins his gospel by breaking the rules.

It’s not so much that he includes a boring genealogy that breaks the rules—although from a storytelling perspective, starting with a boring genealogy certainly breaks the storytelling rules. To the ancient Jews, genealogies were very important, and they pop up throughout the Bible.

Rather, it’s the way that Matthew tells his genealogy that’s likely to raise eyebrows.

For one thing, he names several women, which is definitely against the rules. The last was Bath-Sheba; King David murdered Uriah in order to steal her for himself. And in David’s ancestry, he mentions Ruth, who was a Moabite. And before that, Rahab, the whore from Jericho. And before that, Tamar, the mother of Peretz and Zerach, of whom you may never have even heard.

The Most Important Lesson I Learned This Christmas

Give the gift you would most like to have for the Yankee Swap. That way, when you get stuck with it at the end, you won’t be so disappointed.

If You Forgot to Get Holiday Gifts for Your Favorite Authors...

In preparation for my daughters’ bnot mitzvah, I’ve had to order several items from online Judaica stores.

When placing the latest order, I realized—in one of those flashes of the obvious that I had previously been blocking from my cognizance… I realized that I had been using my first name, Jonathan, because it’s a good, Hebrew name, even though I myself am not Jewish.

“Is it okay for me to enter ‘Jonathan’ as my first name?” I asked my Firstborn daughter.

“Jonathan is your first name,” she said.

“Yeah, but I don’t usually use it.”

“You use it on your bank accounts.”

“That’s only because their computer systems are too stupid to grasp the fact that everyone else in the world knows me by my middle name, Tim. I’m only using ‘Jonathan,’ because I don’t want them to know I’m not Jewish.”