GEN298 Adam and Eve, the progenitors of all humanity according to the biblical story, were specifically created for each other, “for it is not good that person be alone… and therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife so that they become one flesh.” [this verse, Genesis 2:24].  The Torah thus recognizes the basic human need for intimate companionship and sex to satisfy that need through the institution of marriage. Indeed, Genesis 2 portrays Adam as created by God first as a solitary human person, endowed by himself with all the possibilities of life. Since, according to that story, God eventually created both Adam and Eve, why, we wonder, did God not create them simultaneously? The reason seems to be that God wanted the first person to experience, not just to imagine, what it is like to have every material thing but no person to love. Only after Adam had experienced the pain of being continually alone would he be ready to appreciate the need for companionship and interdependence as the essential path of personal fulfillment. For him, and for us, his descendants, this is the human norm. This interpretation attributed by the author to Rabbi Mark Loeb.  Sex is one of the ways in which the companionship between husband and wife is expressed. In … Exodus 21:10 …, the Torah recognizes the sexual desires of women as well as those of men.  While contemporary Westerners might take it for granted that women as well as men have rights to sex within marriage, other societies in the ancient world—and, for that matter, in the medieval and the modern worlds as well—assumed that only men have sexual appetites. Women tolerate the sexual advances of their husbands, in this view, because they want children and economic security. In contrast, the Torah and the Rabbis who later interpret it, in recognition of the couple’s mutual desires, structure the laws of marriage so that both spouses have rights to sex with regularity within marriage. For the wife’s rights to sex, see M. Ketubbot 5:6; M.T. Laws of Marriage 14:4-7, 15; S.A. Yoreh De’ah 235:1, and Even Ha-ezer 76,77:1.  For the husband’s rights to sex, see M. Ketubbot 5:7, M.T. Laws of Marriage 14:8-14; and S.A. Even Ha’ezer 77:2-3.  Moreover, within the bounds of modesty, Jewish law permits couples to have sex in any way they want. S.A. Even Ha’ezer 25:2, gloss.  The Torah and the Rabbis thus went quite far to affirm the rights of both members of the couple to the pleasures of each other’s sexual company. On the other hand, when sex becomes a tool for control, a marriage ceases to be the partnership that it is intended to be. Jewish sources specifically proclaim that coercive of sex is never allowed, and they disdain either spouse “rebelling” against the other by denying sex.  One need not agree to engage in sexual relations each time that one’s spouse wants to do so, and a refusal to have conjugal relations must be respected. At the same time, the tradition does not approve denial of each other’s sexual rights over a long period of time without due reason, for then the spouse who wants to have sex is being denied the sexual expression of companionship to which each partner is entitled in a marriage. Marital companionship is, in part, sexual, but it is more than that. In the Jewish marriage ceremony, the only explicit reference to the couple being married describes them as “re’im ha-ahuvim” (the loving friends).  This description appropriately indicates that the companionship of marriage should extend over a wide scope, such that the husband and wife are not lovers but also friends. They should take time to enjoy many things together. They should talk with each other about what is going on in their lives in what they are thinking and feeling. They should be, as the marriage ceremony says, loving friends, where the friendship is a strong element in their relationship as their romantic love. DORFFLOV 82-4