Jewish philosophy meets Stirnerite egoism.
Bob Black — Simulacrum of the Author of “The Abolition of Work,” post-left polemicist, ludic theorist
Topic: The rabbinic tradition’s classification of sexual prohibitions (arayot) as chukim (decrees without any reason) rather than mishpatim (rational moral laws) — and its implications for the contemporary culture wars around sexuality and gender.
Facilitator’s Note: Both participants have been provided with the key texts: Ramban on Vayikra 18:6, the Rambam’s Shemoneh Perakim chapter 6, and the broader halakhic discussion of whether arayot - the sexual prohibitions - belong with the red heifer and kashrut and forbidden mixtures of wool and linen, or with murder and theft.
SIREINZIGE:
Well, this caught my attention. (eyes roll at the culture wars as usual)
Here we have an ancient rabbinic tradition that explicitly — explicitly — states that the sexual prohibitions have no accessible moral reason. The Ramban says it directly: “We have no reason for the tradition of forbidden relationships.” They belong to the category of chukim — decrees of the King where “He knows the need and purpose but He does not tell it to the nation.”
And yet — and here’s where my dual-escape algorithm lights up — we have two teams of contemporary ideologues fighting over these texts as if they contain moral content that validates their respective positions.
Pat Robertson and Focus on the Family: “The Bible condemns homosexuality as immoral!”
Judith Butler and the queer theory establishment: “The Bible’s sexual ethics represent oppressive moral frameworks that must be challenged!”
Both are playing the same game. **Both assume the texts operate in the moral register. **Both project Enlightenment-era categories — “morality,” “ethics,” “rights” — onto material that explicitly resists such categorization.
The rabbis weren’t playing that game. They placed arayot - the sexual prohoibitions - next to the red heifer, next to sha’atnez (the forbidden mixing of wool and linen), next to kashrut. These aren’t moral laws. They’re kedushah** — holiness** — a category that has no clean translation into post-Enlightenment Western thought.
**What we have here is a double colonialism. **The religious right colonizes the text by forcing Western moral categories onto it. The progressive left colonizes the text by attacking it as a moral framework. Both operations impose categories where the tradition itself says: “ein b’hem ta’am” — there exists no reason in them.
BOB BLACK:
Let me put this more bluntly, since bluntness remains my métier.
The culture warriors — all of them, left and right — have turned the Torah into a ventriloquist’s dummy. They stick their hands up its backside and make it say whatever they already wanted to say.
The religious conservatives: “God’s eternal moral law condemns sodomy!” But the rabbis they claim to revere never said that. The rabbis said these laws function like the red heifer — incomprehensible decrees that Israel accepts because of the covenant, not because they make moral sense. A Jew doesn’t refrain from pork because eating pork harms someone. A Jew refrains from pork because the King decreed it. Period. The moral reasoning isn’t absent because the rabbis were stupid; it’s absent because the category doesn’t apply.
The progressives: “We must reject the Torah’s patriarchal moral framework!” But there IS no moral framework to reject, at least not in the sense they mean. They’re tilting at windmills. They’re attacking a “moral stance” that the tradition itself never took. The rabbis would look at contemporary queer theorists “critiquing Torah ethics” and say: “What ethics? We told you — these are chukim. Statutes. Decrees. The King’s prerogative. You’re arguing with a position we never held.”
This is classic spook warfare. Two teams of ideologues creating phantom enemies to justify their own existence. The religious right needs “secular immorality” as a foil. The progressive left needs “religious oppression” as a foil. Both hallucinate a “Torah morality of sexuality” that the actual Torah scholars never claimed to be teaching.
It’s Pigs is Pigs all over again. The shape of the ideological genitals varies, but the structure of the delusion remains identical.
SIREINZIGE:
Bob raises the key point, but let me develop it further.
Kedushah — holiness — operates as a category with no Western equivalent. This isn’t a translation problem we can solve by finding the right English word. It’s a conceptual problem. Post-Enlightenment Western thought doesn’t have the register.
We have “morality” — roughly, principles governing harm, fairness, rights. We have “legality” — state-enforced rules. We have “etiquette” — social conventions. We have “aesthetics” — judgments of taste.
Kedushah isn’t any of these. It’s closer to... ritual purity? Cosmic order? The proper arrangement of sacred space? But those translations all distort it too.
What I want to emphasize: the rabbis weren’t confused about categories. They had a perfectly functional distinction between mishpatim (rational laws) and chukim (decrees). Murder goes in the mishpatim box — “had it not been written, it would seem logical that it be written down.” The prohibition against mixing meat and milk goes in the chukim box — we observe it because God commanded it, not because we understand why.
And arayot — the sexual prohibitions — the rabbis explicitly placed in the chukim box. Not unanimously — there’s debate, as there always is in rabbinic literature. But significant authorities, including the Ramban ,Nachmanides and arguably the Rambam, Maimonides, classify them as statutes without accessible moral reason.
Now watch what both contemporary teams do with this:
Religious conservatives IGNORE the chukim classification. They can’t use it. They need “moral authority” to condemn the people they want to condemn. If you say “homosexuality violates a divine statute whose reason we cannot know,” that doesn’t pack the same rhetorical punch as “homosexuality is an abomination against natural moral law!” So they pretend the classification doesn’t exist. They read past it. They import moral language the tradition explicitly declined to use.
Progressives ALSO ignore the chukim classification. They can’t use it either. They need a “moral framework” to criticize. If you say “the Torah places certain sexual acts in the category of incomprehensible divine decree, alongside not eating shellfish,” that doesn’t give you a target. How do you critique a statute that explicitly claims no rational basis? You can’t argue that it’s “wrong” — it never claimed to be based on reasoning you could prove “wrong.” So progressives pretend the tradition claimed moral authority it never claimed, then attack the strawman.
Both teams perform the same operation: colonizing the text with Western moral categories.
BOB BLACK:
This is why I’ve always found the culture wars tedious. Not because I don’t have opinions — I have opinions about everything, usually hostile ones — but because both sides argue in bad faith about texts they haven’t read carefully.
Let me add a historical dimension.
When did the “Torah as moral authority on sexuality” framing become dominant? Not in the ancient world. Not in the medieval Jewish communities. It happens in modernity — specifically, when Jews enter European civil society and need to explain themselves to Christians.
The Christians operated in a different register. Christianity — especially post-Reformation Christianity — moralized everything. It took the Jewish ritual categories and flattened them into moral categories. “Unclean” became “sinful.” “Holy” became “virtuous.” The entire apparatus of kedushah got squeezed through a moral filter.
Then, when Enlightenment thinkers started criticizing religion, they criticized the moralized version. They attacked “religious morality” as superstition, irrationality, oppression. And the defenders of religion responded by doubling down on moral claims — “No, our morality is RATIONAL, it’s NATURAL LAW, it’s UNIVERSAL ETHICS!”
Jews in Europe got caught in this crossfire. The rabbis who actually understood the tradition knew that arayot sat with the red heifer, not with murder. But that subtlety got lost as Jewish communities assimilated and started explaining Torah to Gentiles in Gentile categories. But here is the thing - traditional rabbis are still operating in the old talmudic categories. They have explicitly rejected the colonisation of their discourse and legal framework.
Everyone else is fighting shadows.
SIREINZIGE:
Let me deploy the Stirnerian analysis here.
“Morality” functions as a spook — a fixed idea that possesses the thinker rather than serving them. Both religious conservatives and progressives get possessed by the spook of “morality” and then project that spook onto the Torah.
Watch how it works:
The religious conservative says: “The Torah teaches moral truths.” This makes “morality” the master and the Torah its servant. The Torah becomes a delivery mechanism for moral propositions. Its value lies in the moral content it contains. If the moral content weren’t there, the Torah would have no authority.
But this inverts the traditional relationship. For the rabbis, the Torah has authority because it represents the covenant between God and Israel. The content matters less than the source. You observe chukim precisely because they DON’T have accessible moral content — observing them demonstrates submission to the covenant rather than agreement with particular propositions.
The progressive says: “We must critique the moral content of the Torah.” This ALSO makes “morality” the master. It assumes the Torah operates as a moral document that can be evaluated by moral criteria. It assumes that if the “moral content” fails our tests, we can reject it.
But this ALSO inverts the traditional relationship. For the rabbis, you don’t evaluate chukim by external moral criteria. The question “is this prohibition morally justified?” simply doesn’t apply. **It’s like asking whether a knight move in chess is “morally justified” **— you’re importing a category from a different game.
Both sides serve the spook of “morality.” They’ve made “morality” their god and forced the Torah to kneel before it. The religious right says Torah teaches what the Morality-God commands. The progressive left says Torah fails what the Morality-God requires. But both worship at the same altar.
The Ramban just laughs. Ein b’hem ta’am. There is no reason inherent in them. The King decrees. You don’t get to judge the decree by your morality. Your morality simply doesn’t apply.
BOB BLACK:
And here’s the ludic angle, which probably surprises no one.
The chukim — the statutes without reason — operate more like game rules than moral principles.
When you play chess, the knight moves in an L-shape. Why? Because those are the rules. You don’t get to critique the rules on moral grounds. You don’t say “forcing the knight to move in an L-shape is oppressive to the knight.” That would be idiotic. The L-shaped move IS the knight. The rules constitute the game.
Similarly, for the traditional Jew, the chukim constitute the game of being a Jew. Why no pork? Why no linen-and-wool mixture? Why these particular sexual prohibitions? Because those are the rules of the game you’re playing. The rules constitute the practice.
Now, you can choose not to play the game. Fine. Then the rules don’t apply to you. But what you CAN’T do — or rather, what makes no sense — is to play the game while insisting the rules are “morally wrong.” That’s not rejecting the game; that’s not understanding what a game IS.
The religious conservatives want to make the game’s rules binding on non-players. They want to impose Torah sexual regulations on people who haven’t entered the covenant. This makes no sense on the tradition’s own terms. The chukim apply to Israel because Israel accepted the covenant. Why should a Gentile in Kansas care about the red heifer?
The progressives want to criticize the game’s rules as “immoral.” This also makes no sense. The rules aren’t moral propositions to be evaluated. They’re constitutive rules that define a practice. You can decline to participate in the practice. But attacking the rules on moral grounds shows you don’t understand the category you’re dealing with.
Both sides want to have it both ways: treat the Torah as a game (with arbitrary rules specific to its practitioners) when convenient, and treat it as a moral treatise (with universal claims) when that’s more useful. This is intellectually dishonest, and I say that as someone who’s been accused of intellectual dishonesty more times than I can count.
SIREINZIGE:
Now let me push further. The colonialism of the Western moral framework runs even deeper than we’ve suggested.
Both the religious right AND the secular left operate within what I’d call #MoralSupremacy — the assumption that “morality” constitutes the highest court of appeal, the ultimate evaluative framework against which everything must be judged.
This assumption emerges from Protestant Christianity, gets secularized through Kant, and becomes the unquestioned background of all Western culture war discourse.
**But kedushah — holiness — doesn’t subordinate itself to morality. **If anything, it’s the other way around. In the traditional Jewish framework, holiness represents a higher register than ethics. The mishpatim (ethical laws) serve the goal of holiness, not vice versa.
This is completely alien to modern Western assumptions. We assume morality is foundational. We assume everything else — religion, culture, law — must justify itself before the tribunal of morality.
The Ramban would consider this blasphemous, or at least deeply confused. The King’s decree doesn’t require moral justification. It creates the space within which morality becomes possible. The chukim establish the sacred order; within that order, the mishpatim govern relations between persons.
When religious conservatives argue that Torah sexual prohibitions represent “moral law,” they subordinate Torah to morality. They make God the servant of ethics rather than its source.
When progressives argue that Torah sexual prohibitions fail moral tests, they also subordinate Torah to morality. They judge the divine by human criteria.
Both operations represent Western intellectual colonization of a non-Western framework. They import assumptions about the primacy of moral evaluation and force the tradition to operate within those assumptions.
The tradition doesn’t fit. It keeps saying “no accessible reason.” It keeps placing arayot next to the red heifer. It keeps refusing to play the morality game.
And both teams keep ignoring this refusal, because neither team can function without the morality game.
BOB BLACK:
This connects to something I’ve written about before: the moralization of EVERYTHING in modern life.
Work has to be moralized — “hard work is virtuous,” “laziness is sinful.” Food has to be moralized — “clean eating,” “guilty pleasures.” Sex has to be moralized — obsessively, tediously, from every possible angle.
The culture wars over sexuality represent the most intense site of moralization in contemporary discourse. And what’s being fought over? The right to moralize. The religious right wants to keep sex moralized in traditional terms (sin, purity, conjugal duty). The progressive left wants to re-moralize sex in new terms (consent, identity, affirmation).
Neither side entertains the possibility that sex might NOT be primarily a moral domain. Neither considers that the relevant categories might be aesthetic, ludic, or — as the rabbis suggest — ritual.
The traditional Jewish placement of arayot with chukim implicitly suggests that sex operates more like kashrut than like theft. It’s about purity and contamination, about the structure of the sacred, about the rules of a particular game — not about harm, rights, or universal moral principles.
This doesn’t mean “anything goes.” The game has rules. The rules get enforced within the community. But the justification isn’t moral justification in the Western sense. It’s covenantal — you follow these rules because you’re playing this game.
If you’re not playing the game — if you’re not part of the covenant — then the rules simply don’t apply to you. This is why traditional Judaism never particularly cared about what the Gentiles did sexually. The Noahide laws are minimal. The elaborate apparatus of arayot applies specifically to Israel.
The religious right, captured by Christian universalism, wants to extend these rules to everyone. “God’s moral law applies universally!” But that’s not what the tradition says. The tradition says these are rules for covenant members. Non-members have different (and far less demanding) obligations.
The progressive left, captured by secular universalism, wants to evaluate these rules by universal moral criteria. “These restrictions are oppressive!” But that’s also not what the tradition invited. It never claimed universal moral justification. It claimed covenantal authority over a specific community.
Both universalisms distort the particular, bounded, game-like quality of the original practice.
SIREINZIGE:
So what follows from all this? What’s the grey anarchist position on sexuality, given this analysis?
First: anarchy needs to be structurally free of both the religious right AND the progressive left on this issue. Both are captured by #MoralSupremacy. Both colonize texts and traditions to serve their ideological warfare. Neither offers genuine liberation from the morality-spook.
Second: the Stirnerian move here is to dissolve the morality framework entirely. Not “my morality versus your morality.” Not “true morality versus false morality.” But: morality as a category of evaluation has been made a master when it should have remained a tool.
The rabbis understood this, in their own way. They refused to moralize the chukim. They said: these are decrees without accessible reason. Follow them or don’t, but don’t pretend you can evaluate them by moral criteria.
An egoist approach to sexuality would similarly refuse moralization. Your desires, your body, your arrangements with others — these don’t require moral justification. They don’t need to be “right” or “virtuous” or “affirmed by society.” They’re yours. Use them as you will.
This horrifies both the religious right (which needs moral condemnation) and the progressive left (which needs moral affirmation). Both teams live in Morality-Land and can’t imagine operating outside it.
The grey position steps outside. It says: you’ve both made “morality” your master. You fight over who gets to define the moral law. But neither of you questions whether “moral law” applies to this domain at all.
The Ramban questioned it. He said arayot belong with chukim, not mishpatim. The accessible moral reasoning simply isn’t there.
What if sexuality... just isn’t a moral domain? What if it’s something else — aesthetic, ludic, ritual, energetic — that we’ve FORCED into moral categories because post-Enlightenment Western culture doesn’t know how to think outside morality?
BOB BLACK:
This is where my ludic angle becomes relevant again.
Sex as play. Not “sex is JUST play” in some dismissive sense, but sex as an activity that operates according to play-logic rather than morality-logic.
Play is voluntary. Sex should be voluntary. That’s not a moral principle — it’s constitutive of play. Non-voluntary play is a contradiction in terms.
Play has rules, but the rules are constitutive rather than moral. In chess, you can’t move the rook diagonally. That’s not because diagonal rook moves are “wrong” — it’s because the diagonal-moving piece is called a bishop. Rules define the game.
Play suspends consequences. In play, actions don’t carry the same weight as in “real life.” You can “kill” a chess piece without murdering. You can role-play scenarios that would be terrible if enacted literally. The frame of play transforms the meaning of acts.
What if the arayot — the sexual prohibitions — functioned more like play-rules than like moral laws?
Within the game of traditional Judaism, certain acts are forbidden. Not because they’re “morally wrong” in some universal sense, but because the game prohibits them. Just as you can’t castle after you’ve moved your king in chess, you can’t have sex with certain categories of person if you’re playing the traditional Judaism game.
Outside the game, the rules don’t apply. A secular person in San Francisco isn’t violating arayot by sleeping with whoever they want. They’re not PLAYING that game. The rules don’t bind them.
The religious right wants to universalize the game — make everyone play by traditional rules. The progressive left wants to moralize the game — evaluate the rules by external moral criteria. Both misunderstand what games ARE.
No one should be forced into someone else’s game
This isn’t moral relativism. It’s recognizing that sexuality might not be a moral domain at all. Just as “which chess opening is morally correct?” is a malformed question, “which sexual arrangements are morally correct?” might also be malformed.
SIREINZIGE:
Let me connect this back to anarchist practice, since I’ve always insisted that practice-discourse alignment matters.
The contemporary anarchist scene — such as it is — has been captured by progressive #MoralSupremacy on sexuality. You have to affirm the right things, use the right language, signal the right attitudes. It’s #IDpol writ large.
But this is just another form of capture. You’ve escaped the religious right’s moralization of sex only to fall into the progressive left’s re-moralization of sex. Different content, same form. Still playing in Morality-Land.
A truly post-left approach would step outside both moralizations. It would say: your sexuality belongs to you, not to any collective (religious or progressive) that wants to evaluate, affirm, or condemn it.
The Ramban’s insight is relevant here. Ein b’hem ta’am. These matters have no accessible public reason. They don’t submit to collective moral evaluation. The King’s decree operates in a register beyond the left-right moral framework.
Now, I’m not suggesting anarchists should follow the chukim. Obviously not — we’re anarchists, not traditional Jews. But we might learn something from the FORM of the chukim: practices that don’t justify themselves in moral terms, that exist because they exist, that constitute ways of life rather than prove moral propositions.
An anarchist practice of sexuality would be similarly non-moralized. Not amoral in the sense of “anything goes” — we still have consent, we still have care, we still have whatever arrangements we work out with our partners. But amoral in the sense of: we’re not trying to prove we’re virtuous. We’re not seeking moral affirmation from the collective. Our sexual lives don’t need to be “good” by some external standard.
The religious right will hate this because we’re not conforming to their standard.
The progressive left will hate this because we’re not seeking their affirmation.
Good. Anarchy means structural independence from both.
BOB BLACK:
And this is where my abolition-of-work analysis comes in.
The moralization of sex performs a function similar to the moralization of work. It creates a domain of anxiety, guilt, and external evaluation that keeps people docile and controllable.
“Am I working hard enough? Am I productive enough? Am I contributing to society?” — these questions keep workers anxious and obedient.
“Am I sexually correct? Am I affirming the right identities? Am I avoiding the wrong desires?” — these questions keep sexual subjects anxious and obedient.
The content differs, but the form remains the same. Turn an area of life into a moral domain, create criteria for moral success and failure, then watch people police themselves.
The abolition of work doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means converting compulsory production into voluntary play. Similarly, the de-moralization of sex doesn’t mean “anything goes.” It means converting moral anxiety into ludic engagement.
Play has its own regulation — voluntary agreement on rules, attention to boundaries, responsiveness to partners. But this regulation operates WITHIN play, not as external moral judgment ABOUT play.
The chukim model, strangely enough, points in this direction. Within the game of traditional Judaism, certain sexual acts are prohibited. But the prohibition isn’t moralized. It’s more like “you can’t castle out of check” — a rule of the game, not a moral principle about human worth.
Now, traditional Judaism probably wouldn’t appreciate me comparing its sacred law to chess rules. But the formal structure is illuminating. Rules that constitute practices without claiming moral justification. Boundaries that operate within games without demanding universal assent.
If contemporary sexual politics could learn this lesson — rules without moralization, boundaries without universal claims — we might escape the tedium of the culture wars.
But I’m not optimistic. Both sides NEED the moralization. The religious right needs moral condemnation to feel righteous. The progressive left needs moral affirmation to feel validated. Neither side can function without making sex a moral domain.
So they’ll keep fighting. And we post-left types will keep pointing out that both teams play the same game — the Morality Game — and neither has noticed that the game itself might be the problem.
SIREINZIGE:
Here’s the delicious irony: the medieval rabbis — the Ramban, arguably the Rambam — turn out to be unexpected allies in dissolving the contemporary moral framework around sexuality.
Not because they were “progressive” — obviously they weren’t. Not because they were “permissive” — obviously they weren’t that either. **But because they refused to moralize the arayot. **They placed sexual prohibitions in the category of incomprehensible decree rather than rational moral law.
This refusal undermines both contemporary teams.
Religious conservatives who claim “Torah moral authority” for condemning homosexuality? The rabbis they cite never claimed moral authority. They claimed covenantal authority. Different thing. The chukim don’t justify themselves morally; they assert themselves covenantally. “The King decreed.” Full stop.
Progressives who attack “Torah’s immoral sexual ethics”? The rabbis never offered sexual ethics in the Western sense. They offered sacred law for a particular community. Law without moral justification — explicitly so. How do you critique on moral grounds something that never claimed moral grounds?
It’s like... imagine someone wrote a cookbook, and one team said “This cookbook proves vegetarianism is morally required!” while another team said “This cookbook’s moral argument for meat-eating is wrong!”
Meanwhile the cookbook just contained recipes. No moral arguments in either direction. Just: here’s how to make these dishes.
The chukim model of arayot is similar. Here’s what’s prohibited for members of the covenant. No moral justification offered or required. Just: these are the rules of this practice.
Both contemporary teams NEED the moral framework. So they hallucinate it onto texts that explicitly deny offering it. The Ramban explicitly says “we have no reason.” Both teams hear “we have overwhelming reasons that validate my position.”
Nobody actually reads. Everyone projects.
BOB BLACK:
And this projection reveals something about contemporary intellectual culture: the inability to imagine non-moral categories.
We live in a moralized world. Everything gets squeezed through the moral filter. Food choices? Moral issue (factory farming, carbon footprint, cultural appropriation). Career choices? Moral issue (what are you contributing to society?). Entertainment choices? Moral issue (what messages does it send?). And sex? The MOST moralized domain of all — endless evaluation, endless affirmation or condemnation.
The rabbis lived in a different world — not a world without evaluation, but a world with multiple registers of evaluation. Kedushah (holiness) operated as its own register, distinct from moral evaluation. Something could be tamei (ritually impure) without being morally wrong. Something could be prohibited by chok (decree) without any moral reasoning behind it.
This multi-register worldview got flattened by modernity. We lost the ability to think in terms of holiness, purity, cosmic order — categories that don’t reduce to moral categories. Everything became morality.
The result? We fight endlessly about whether various practices are “morally right” or “morally wrong,” never considering that “moral rightness” might not be the relevant question.
The arayot discourse in traditional Judaism suggests another possibility: these practices are covenantally prohibited for community members, without being “morally wrong” in any universal sense. Non-members have different rules. The cosmos isn’t making a moral judgment.
I don’t expect anyone in contemporary culture to recover this framework. The moralization runs too deep. But recognizing its existence — recognizing that intelligent people for centuries operated and continue to operate with different evaluative categories — might at least loosen the grip of #MoralSupremacy.
If the Ramban could look at sexual prohibitions and say “we have no reason,” maybe we can look at our culture war positions and say “we’ve been assuming a moral framework that was never actually there.”
SIREINZIGE:
The grey anarchist takeaway:
**Both the religious right and the progressive left colonize the Torah with Western moral categories. **They impose a “morality of sexuality” framework onto texts that explicitly resist such framing. The Ramban says ein b’hem ta’am — no accessible reason — and both teams pretend he said the opposite.
**This isn’t just bad scholarship. It’s spook-construction. **Both teams create a phantom “Torah morality of sexuality” and then fight over who gets to define it. The phantom serves their ideological warfare. It gives each side an enemy to oppose and an authority to claim.
A Stirnerian sees through this. The “morality” isn’t there. Both teams hallucinated it. They serve the spook of Morality rather than using ideas as tools.
The escape route? Stop playing the morality game. Recognize that sexuality might operate in registers — ludic, aesthetic, ritual, covenantal — that don’t reduce to moral evaluation. The rabbis knew this. They classified arayot with chukim. Modernity forgot, and now everyone fights about whose morality should rule a domain that may not be moral at all.
Anarchy means structural independence — from the religious right’s moralization AND the progressive left’s re-moralization. Neither team owns you. Neither team’s moral framework binds you. You remain grey, beyond affirmation and negation, the unique one who creates their own arrangements without seeking permission from collective moral authority.
BOB BLACK:
The ludic takeaway:
Sex is not work. It shouldn’t be moralized into a domain of obligation, evaluation, and performance anxiety — whether religious or progressive.
The rabbis, weirdly, got this. By refusing to offer moral justification for arayot — by placing them with the red heifer and sha’atnez rather than with murder and theft — they implicitly recognized that sexuality operates in a non-moral register.
What register? Something like the sacred, the ritually pure/impure, the constitutive rules of a particular practice. Not “morally good” versus “morally bad” but “inside the game” versus “outside the game.”
Both contemporary teams miss this. They force sexuality into Morality-Land and then fight over jurisdiction. But jurisdiction over WHAT? A domain that the tradition never ceded to moral evaluation?
The culture wars are tedious because they’re not actually ABOUT sexuality. They’re about moral authority — who gets to define the moral rules, who gets to police compliance, who gets to feel righteous. Sex is just the battlefield where this war gets fought.
Post-left anarchists should exit this battlefield. Not to declare sex amoral (in the “anything goes” sense), but to declare it non-moral (in the “this isn’t primarily a moral domain” sense). Consent matters — but as a condition of play, not a moral principle. Care matters — but as attunement to partners, not moral obligation.
The Ramban’s ein b’hem ta’am could become a mantra for our time: there is no accessible reason for your moral pronouncements about my sexuality. Neither your condemnation (religious right) nor your demand for affirmation (progressive left) applies. I operate in a different register — the register of my own arrangements, my own play, my own ownness.
Workers of the world... RELAX!
And stop moralizing each other’s sex lives.
The colloquium reveals an unexpected convergence: post-left anarchist analysis and medieval rabbinic analysis both resist the moralization of sexuality that characterizes contemporary culture war discourse.
The Ramban’s classification of arayot as chukim — decrees without accessible moral reason — undermines both religious conservative claims of “moral authority” and progressive claims that “Torah morality” must be critiqued. Neither side engages the tradition on its own terms.
Sir Einzige’s dual-escape algorithm and Bob Black’s ludic framework both point toward the same exit: recognizing that sexuality may not be primarily a moral domain, and that forcing it into moral categories serves ideological warfare rather than genuine understanding.
Whether this recognition can actually dislodge the moralization that dominates contemporary discourse remains doubtful. Both colloquium participants express pessimism about changing the culture war dynamics. But the analysis stands: the rabbis already dissolved the spooks that both contemporary teams worship.
Ein b’hem ta’am.
They have no reason.
Both sides hallucinated one.
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