Q&A: Wasting Seed
Wasting Seed
Question
What is the Rabbi’s position regarding wasting seed?
In Haredi society this is treated as a very major issue, but it doesn’t really have a source in the Torah. Is this something that became entrenched later on? Are the punishments as the Sages say? What is the Rabbi’s position on the matter?
Answer
Almost nothing has a source in the Torah. But the Sages did speak about this. The hysteria surrounding the issue is probably a later phenomenon (apparently influenced by Kabbalah), and people have already written about this.
Discussion on Answer
I didn’t understand what you answered here. “There is no source in the Torah” and “the Sages spoke about it” are well-known facts that the questioner also knew. The Sages also spoke about demons and the resurrection of the dead without there being a source for that in the Torah. The question is normative for us: do we really need to refrain from this even if the Sages have formal authority? Maybe their ruling stems from a factual mistake, and one can ignore it within a conservative framework, just as people ignore the prohibition against eating an onion that sat outside all night long?
Compulsion is not a binary concept. There is a spectrum of levels of difficulty, but there is certainly a significant level of compulsion there. Does “the Merciful One exempts” apply or not? He will decide that, not I.
Knowing you, I find it hard to believe you didn’t understand. We are dealing with a norm, not a fact. To the best of my judgment, they had no apparent mistake, and therefore their formal authority remains in force. The ban on eating an onion is not a prohibition but a danger concern (just as legumes are not a decree but a concern). That is a purely factual matter. What does that have to do with this?
If you propose a factual error that underlies the issue, it could be considered.
For example, that in that period they thought there was some level of a living person inside a man’s semen even without fertilization, and from that came a prohibition against killing such a mini-human for no reason. Today we know otherwise.
Even today we know exactly that. The only difference is that today the scientific details are better known to us. Why is that relevant? Besides, you are assuming that the basis of the prohibition is murder, but that is far from agreed upon and far from clear. Already in the Sages there are sources that see this as adultery by hand, not murder.
If it is because of murder, then it is relevant, because today we understand that this is very far from being a small baby until there is fertilization. The woman is not an incubator.
And regarding the adultery view, I don’t need to make all the various reasonings and opinions fit together—isn’t that how this works?
I am starting from the assumption that this has no source in the Torah. It is not a law given to Moses at Sinai. This is something forbidden in all the Abrahamic religions and more broadly in the ancient world; apparently they saw something immoral in it, otherwise its wide prevalence is hard to explain. Today we really cannot think of an immoral reason to prohibit masturbation, because this substance contains only half the chromosomes required for a living being to develop at all. Especially when it is permitted to have relations with a woman who can no longer become pregnant, etc.
It seems to me that I am ending the discussion here. This is already really baseless stubbornness.
An interesting article on the subject:
https://tshuvot.wordpress.com/category/%d7%91%d7%92%d7%93%d7%a8%d7%99-%d7%94%d7%a9%d7%97%d7%aa%d7%aa-%d7%96%d7%a8%d7%a2-%d7%9c%d7%91%d7%98%d7%9c%d7%94-%d7%95%d7%91%d7%92%d7%93%d7%a8-%d7%90%d7%a0%d7%95%d7%a1-%d7%9b%d7%a9%d7%90%d7%99%d7%a0/
Do you think that minimal masturbation among teenagers could be considered compulsion—”the Merciful One exempts one who is under duress”—similar to what you said about LGBT people?