Q&A: Showering Together
Showering Together
Question
Sorry for the intimate question, but I saw on the Otzar HaChochma forum:
And similarly, many instructors—even from the Hasidic sector, but mainly Lithuanian yeshiva circles—advise couples to shower together, and of course they won’t write this explicitly and only say it orally, because this is a very open matter. Personally, until I heard firsthand that this is indeed the case, I didn’t believe it. He added that in recent years there are instructors, especially in the Lithuanian public, who advise this from the outset and not as a solution to a problem, but rather that this is how they should conduct themselves from the outset—even in the first year. And again, I heard this firsthand from a Hasidic groom instructor in Bnei Brak.
What does Jewish law say, and what is the Rabbi’s opinion on this?
Answer
These are matters of advice, not Jewish law. There is no halakhic prohibition here, since what is written about darkening the room applies to intercourse itself. As for advice, each person has his own guidance.
You can look here: https://ph.yhb.org.il/plus/14-02-16/
On that forum, sources were cited, and I checked: in the responsa Be’er Moshe by Rabbi Moshe Stern, head of the religious court of Debrecen and author of Yesodei HaTorah in the U.S., he writes in very sharp language, “Trembling seized me and my belly shook,” and this is also the view of Rabbi Nachmanson in his book He Should Sanctify Himself.
But in the responsa Asher Chanan, by the eminent Rabbi Hanan Aflalo, may he live and be well, he writes about that that, on the contrary, “Trembling seized me” from the fact that he is innovating a new prohibition, and in his opinion there is no prohibition in this at all, nor any lack of modesty.