Oh, and sheidim (demons) are cute little monkey-chicken goblin things! No need to worry…

“Doctors say: one out of 1000 sicknesses come from other problems and 999 come from emmision of semen.”

Speaking of someone who spills too much seed, Rambam says “His hairs turn white, his teeth fall out, he looses his eyesite, a bad stench comes from his mouth and he get’s thousands of sicknesses.”

I hope these quotes are misattributed.

Does anyone know Orthodox folks (well, men) who masturbate and don’t feel guilty about it? Or, better yet, scholars or rabbis who don’t think it’s such a big deal? I mean, if there’s an openly gay Orthodox rabbi out there, anything is possible.

aish.com/torah...

Furthermore, how does the answer that we make demons explain anything at all w/r/t a beneficent God? Why did he create a world in which people had the power, unbeknowenst to them, to create demons? And if we create them by sinning, which is pretty constant, why do they need our semen?!??

Thanks for informing us about he masturbation prohibition being a hold over. Excuse the Muffti while he goes and Jackabramoffs.

As for semen demons (love that too, wish I’d thought of it), stories about them serve as a two-fold explanation – 1) Why do men (even ones otherwise are the masters of their domain) have wet dreams that climax in nocturnal emissions? Answer: Succubi (like Lilith) are haunting you. 2) Why would demons do that? Because they can’t procreate without you. Demons, while widely believed in before the modern era (and still believed in by the folks at Aish) presented a puzzle to the Sages. How do demons exist at all in a world created by a beneficient God? Answer: God doesn’t make demons, we do. Demons are byproducts of our actions, desires, sins, etc. In the good old days, we externalized and personified our hopes, issues, anxieties, etc., were expressed as angels and demons. Now, since psychotherapy, all the important stuff happens to us inside, not outside. We have “issues” instead of demons and we fix them with pills instead of amulets.

And as for masturbation, that “don’t do it” thing in Orthodoxy is a major hold over from the crushingly bad influence the Greeks and Medieval Christians (soul good/body bad) had on us. Time to move on.

is the problem with masturbation, legally and quabbalistically speaking, just the coming? Is tantric auto-eroticism a mystical issue as much? ’cause if no sperm’s being spent, what are the demons feeding off?

i’ve looked around a bit on the internet about this, and it turns out that there are some people, some of whom aren’t religious at all, who think that masturbation (especially frequent masturbation) is actually harmful to your health in some ways, despite the modern consensus. and there are some men, believe it or not, who have never masturbated and never gone to prostitutes, and there seem to be many who used to masturbate and now have given up the habit. anyway, i think i’m going to tell my children (actually, just my boys; judaism seems to say nothing about female masturbation) about the modern secular view that it’s ok, but also tell them that traditionally it’s viewed to be bad (you should see what the talmud and rambam say about it!), but that whatever happens you shouldn’t obsess about it or be guilty about it, just do what you think is right and be reasonable.

i don’t believe i just used the term masturbation so many times in the same post!