Answer

I don’t think the semen is created only now. It is already there, and is only now being emitted.
But as for the substance of the issue, I also do not understand all these explanations. After all, when a man has relations with his wife most of the time, in fulfillment of the commandment of marital relations, he is not fertilizing an egg, and yet we do not call him a “murderer.”
——————————————————————————————
Questioner:
Thank you.
 
Indeed. For that reason too, the intent of the Zohar is unclear to me.
 
When the Talmud compared him to one who sheds blood, that does not mean that by losing semen he is considered as one who destroys a life. Rather, just as they compared one who does not engage in being fruitful and multiplying to one who sheds blood, so too when they said this about one who wastes seed, it seems that they meant someone who uses this as a substitute for normal engagement in being fruitful and multiplying.
 
What is interesting is that some tried very hard to bridge the gap and find harmony between the Babylonian Talmud and the Zohar, mainly in the context of the fact that the Babylonian Talmud apparently permits intercourse in an unusual manner. Those are the Haredi author and the Shelah, who copied his words. But in my humble opinion, and this is also the view of the Eliyah Rabbah, they came up empty-handed.
 
P.S. I happened to see that according to the kabbalists, when a person has relations with his wife lawfully, a holy soul is formed, whereas when one wastes seed, a soul is handed over to the “other side.”
——————————————————————————————
Rabbi:
Nu, fine then.
——————————————————————————————
Questioner:
If I may continue…
 
The Torah says:
 
Genesis chapter 38
(6) Judah took a wife for Er, his firstborn, and her name was Tamar.
(7) But Er, Judah’s firstborn, was evil in the eyes of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death.
(8) Then Judah said to Onan, “Go in to your brother’s wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for your brother.”
(9) But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so when he went in to his brother’s wife, he spilled it on the ground, so as not to give offspring to his brother.
(10) What he did was evil in the eyes of the Lord, and He put him to death also.
 
The evil of both of them is, on the plain meaning and according to the words of the Sages, visible and evident. In fact there are two evils:
A. Actively preventing being fruitful and multiplying for unjustified reasons: Er, so that she would not become pregnant and spoil her beauty; Onan, so as not to give offspring to his brother.
B. The Talmud says that they had relations with Tamar in an unusual manner. Elsewhere the Talmud says that such intercourse is affliction for a woman. We know how much Tamar longed to bear children from the house of Judah. If so, she certainly did not consent to this. That means they raped and tormented her. And that is an obvious and well-known evil.
 
So why does the Zohar, and apparently also the passage in Niddah 13a, understand that the great evil in the act of Er and Onan was the loss of semen? An act that harms no one, that is nowhere explicitly stated in the Torah to be a problem at all, and from this passage there seems to be no reason whatsoever to understand it that way?
——————————————————————————————
Rabbi:
I have already joined your puzzlement. But these verses do not completely force a different reading. “Onan spilled it on the ground so as not to give offspring to his brother” describes his motivation. But the question of what was actually wrong with what he did is a different one. Perhaps it was wrong because he spilled his semen onto the ground.
As for Jewish law, a student of mine, Rabbi Yitzhak Rons, already wrote an article in Tzohar: Educational and Halakhic Coping with the Prohibition of Wasting Seed, in Tzohar 21.
——————————————————————————————
Questioner:
The verses prove nothing. My question is why, when it is possible to interpret them in a simple way that anyone can understand, along the two lines I suggested, people interpret them in a novel and strange way.
 
Thank you very much for the article.
 
I am afraid Rabbi Rons is completely overdoing it and utterly mistaken when he writes that an unmarried man has no prohibition here. The words of Ezer MiKodesh also seem puzzling; I have not seen them inside, only in the article.
There are two prohibitions. One is what the Sages prohibited as a fence because of the act of Er and Onan. That prohibition exists only between a man and his wife. The second is what they prohibited and attached to the verse “You shall not commit adultery.” That prohibition is between the person and himself, and it makes no difference whether he is married or unmarried.
 
Rabbi Yehoshua Shapira, in the attached article, attacked Rabbi Rons, but I am afraid that he too did not escape several mistakes.
 
In my humble opinion, the prohibition of wasting seed, both of the two that I mentioned, is rabbinic, and no more severe than the prohibition of eating poultry cooked with milk.
 
Rabbi Shapira writes that there is no dispute here between the Talmud and the Zohar. In my humble opinion, not only is there a dispute, but it is an essential dispute the like of which is found nowhere between Tannaim or Amoraim. It is a dispute that sounds more like a dispute between Judaism and Christianity, or something of that sort.
 
It seems to me that if we accept the Babylonian Talmud, there is no room to accept the Zohar’s words on this matter.
(It is hard for me to write that last line, because I know that great Torah sages, whose dust I am beneath the soles of their feet, from Rabbi Yosef Karo onward, explicitly wrote otherwise. And yet, in my poor opinion, I think this is the truth.)
——————————————————————————————
Rabbi:
The question is not a matter of your opinion versus someone else’s. Your assumption is that the simple reading is your view. But the Zohar assumes that the simple reading is that there is a prohibition here. And it does not seem to me at all an absurd intuition to view this as an ugly and problematic act. So it chooses that option.
 
I no longer remember his article exactly, but I do not think his conclusion is that an unmarried man has no prohibition. On the contrary, as I recall, he writes precisely that this is a rabbinic prohibition, and argues against the mystification of it. But I have not looked at his words now.
 
Your comments about the dispute between the Talmud and the Zohar are also greatly exaggerated. What exactly did you see here that is so dramatic? Is this prohibition the entire Torah? There is a dispute between them about some prohibition, and that is that. Are there not many such disputes? Is there not a dispute regarding sending away the mother bird between the kabbalists and our Talmud—whether one should send her away even when one does not want the chicks or the eggs? There too, in my opinion, the esoteric view runs against the plain meaning of the sources. So what is the difference?
 
Indeed, it seems that the Zohar’s words contradict the plain meaning and the Babylonian Talmud. As for the practical halakhic ruling, do as you understand. There are no fixed rules here. It is true that the Magen Avraham, in the laws of tefillin, wrote that Jewish law follows the revealed sources over the esoteric ones, but he wrote that as a man of the revealed tradition. The kabbalists, of course, do not think so.
 
And as for “great Torah sages,” I do not know who is dust beneath whose feet and why, but everyone is supposed to decide according to his own understanding. As is well known, there are two kinds of followers of the Hazon Ish: those who do whatever the Hazon Ish instructed in his books and orally, and those who do what they think, the way he did what he thought. And as is well known, the latter wording is the main thing.
 
Do you object if I upload this correspondence to the site, of course without your identifying details? It seems to me that there is public interest and benefit in it, and in my opinion it does not fall under the category of “forbidden sexual matters before three.”
——————————————————————————————
Questioner:
I really need to explain myself more.
 
The Zohar (Genesis 219b) writes about this sin that all sinners rise up, apparently from Gehenna, but one who wastes seed does not rise. And if you ask, what about other wicked people who murdered human beings—why do they rise while one who wastes seed does not? The answer given is that they killed other people, whereas one who wastes seed killed his very own children.
 
The Zohar further writes there that there is no sin in the world for which repentance is ineffective except this one.
 
It is clear from the Zohar’s words that it did not see this as merely “an ugly and problematic act,” but as super-duper murder. If for ordinary murder the lawgiver set one life sentence, then for wasting seed one should deserve at least two life sentences, if not the death penalty.
 
What also emerges from the Zohar is that it makes absolutely no difference in what way or under what circumstances the semen was emitted in vain. Murder is murder in every case. That is, the terrible and awesome prohibition is the loss of the semen, not the act of emitting it. And that is why the kabbalists wrote that even one who had a nocturnal emission in his sleep, with no intention whatsoever on his part, is also in a rather bleak state and requires repentance and spiritual rectifications.
 
In the Talmud this is absolutely not the case. Intercourse in an unusual manner, on occasion, is permitted (Nedarim 20b; Sanhedrin 58b), whereas according to the Zohar it would be a capital offense. For the sake of checking fitness to enter the congregation, wasting seed is permitted (Yevamot 76a). Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus—the one who said that whoever holds his organ and urinates is as if he brought a flood upon the world (Niddah 13a)—permits the husband of a nursing woman, where pregnancy would endanger the baby, to “thresh inside and winnow outside” for twenty-four months (Yevamot 34b), even though the Jewish law does not follow his view. [And by the way, this proves that the reason for the prohibition on holding the organ is not because of concern that semen may emerge, but because of concern for erotic thoughts.]
 
So according to the Babylonian Talmud there is nothing at all in the loss of semen itself. The problem is the manner in which the semen is emitted: either in a way similar to the act of Er and Onan, or in a way defined as adultery, and both are rabbinic.
 
This is not at all comparable to the question whether sending away the mother bird has value in itself even when one does not need the chicks. That is just a disagreement like other disagreements. But when someone performs a certain act and the Talmud treats him as someone who transgressed and needs to repent, whereas according to the Zohar he is a thoroughly wicked villain, an arch-murderer, an accursed sinner with no cure for his blow, and the attitude toward him is worse than toward an actual murderer—in my humble opinion these two views cannot live in the same study hall.
 
 
Regarding Rabbi Rons’s article, at the end of page 188 he writes: “And it becomes equally clear that the prohibition does not apply to an unmarried man.”
 
Regarding publishing this on the site: I feel a bit uncomfortable with the idea that my words might be published, lest someone rely on them to be lenient about the prohibition or to belittle the Zohar. In practice, however, the easiest and most severe thing said in this context is what I quoted from Rabbi Rons, and to publish his article you do not need my consent… though perhaps it would really be doing him a kindness not to publicize his words. It would be good to ask him whether he still thinks so today. So regarding our correspondence as well, do as you understand.
——————————————————————————————
Rabbi:
All right, I do not see it that way. To me this is a dispute like any other dispute, even if it is somewhat more extreme. There are other acts that one authority prohibits rabbinically and another prohibits at the Torah level. See, however, the discussion of the “golden city” in the chapter Tolin, where there is no dispute from one extreme to the other; I have already written about this elsewhere. And the same is true regarding liabilities of death and mamzer status, for example the rival wife of one’s daughter.
Moreover, I would guess, though I have not checked, that you will find in the Zohar other similarly sharp expressions about other sins. What would you say, for example, about what the Chafetz Chaim brings regarding evil speech, that it is not atoned for? The Zohar is a kind of midrash, and one must be careful not to take it literally. The medieval authorities already noted even about our own Talmud that when it says “liable to death,” sometimes it is speaking about a rabbinic prohibition and merely expressing its severity.
In sum, this is indeed a different conception, but I am really not alarmed that it appears in the same study hall as our Talmud. Just as Ezer MiKodesh appears in one package together with the Shulchan Arukh, which is so stringent on this matter, and Rons already commented on that.
Forgive me, but you have taken Rabbi Rons’s words completely out of context. He is discussing there only the view of Ezer MiKodesh, and immediately notes that it does not fit with the Shulchan Arukh. That is indeed the conclusion that follows from Ezer MiKodesh. So what is the problem?
——————————————————————————————
Questioner:
This is not comparable to a dispute about whether some prohibition is rabbinic or Torah-level, and not even to whether, according to the view that it is Torah-level, it carries liability for court-imposed death.
 
The Zohar’s and the kabbalists’ attitude to this sin goes far beyond all the proportions spoken of in the Torah. The Zohar cries out and says it is worse than murder! He does not rise from Gehenna, whereas a murderer does rise, and repentance does not help for him—literally against Jewish faith! And the reader stands there astonished, from the roots of his hair to the nails of his toes: why? Why should he be put to death? What did he do?
 
Can this really be called a dispute like any other?
 
True, the Talmud (Niddah 13a) says about wasting seed that one is liable to death at the hands of Heaven, but we have the tools to understand that this is aggadah and not Jewish law, if only from the fact that nowhere in the Torah is it written that there is any death penalty for this. And if someone has trouble understanding this, he can be helped by the fact that Maimonides (Forbidden Intercourse 21:18), who tried to deter people when writing about the prohibition of wasting seed, did not mention a death penalty.
 
Where does the Chafetz Chaim write that evil speech is not atoned for? Why should that be worse than any other sin between one person and another, where one must appease the other person and repent? Perhaps he writes that for one who is habituated to speaking evil speech, repentance is difficult because he does not remember all those from whom he must seek forgiveness.
 
Rons does not immediately note that it does not fit with the Shulchan Arukh, but rather with the words of the Talmud, and then he explains, based on Ezer MiKodesh, that since the decree of Rabbenu Gershom the law changed.
In the end, he leaves the reader with the understanding that an unmarried man has no prohibition. It is true that I have not seen Ezer MiKodesh inside, but I find it very hard to believe he would say such a thing. And in my humble opinion, that is an absolute mistake. The prohibition of wasting seed has no connection to the obligation to be fruitful and multiply.
——————————————————————————————
Rabbi:
I still do not see the great problem here.
As for evil speech, the source is in Maimonides:
 
“The Sages said: for three sins a person is punished in this world and has no share in the world to come—idolatry, forbidden sexual relations, and bloodshed; and evil speech is equal to them all. The Sages also said: whoever speaks evil speech is as though he denied the fundamental principle… And the Sages further said: evil speech kills three—the one who says it, the one who accepts it, and the one about whom it is said.” (Laws of Character Traits 7:3)
So if wasting seed is like murder, then here you have that evil speech is even more severe than that.
 
The Zohar also cannot impose a death penalty where there is no source in Jewish law for such a penalty. So your proof regarding the Talmud applies to the Zohar as well.
 
All right, I think the point has been understood.
 
All the best.