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LOVE AND MARRIAGE

children , Jews have found the greatest personal joy while carrying out the ancient Jewish pledge to endure through history for God ’s sake.”

Contemporary Jewish marriage is ideally an I-Thou relation­ship between the lovers. For Buber , the Eternal Thou(God ) is pre­sent in every I-Thou relationship, and the Rabbis believed that God was present in proper moments of sexual intimacy between wife and husband. Borowitz struggles theologically with an understanding of relationship with God , who is superior and more powerful than humankind, and how the relation to that deity is modeled in the marriage. Borowitz ultimately maintains that human dignity depends on autonomy and freedom.” He writes:

We have an old-new model for such open, unsettled but mutually dignifying relations, namely“covenant,” now less a contract spelled from on high than a loving effort to live in reciprocal respect. As the pain of trying to create egalitarian marriages indicates, we cannot know early on what forms and processes most people will find appropriate to such relationships. We can, however, accept covenantal relationship as a central ethical challenge of our time and pragmatically learn how we might sanctify ourselves by living it.”

Borowitz realizes that marriage is undergoing significant change. Central to the covenant of marriage as Borowitz describes It 1s its egalitarian nature. This, he indicates, represents a substantial shift from the past. The intimacy of the relationship and egali­tarianism are reflected in contemporary readings of Song of Songs . One of the most frequently invoked wedding texts is from Song of Song Ani ledodi vedodi li,“1 am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” The book seen as a whole is a description of an ideal, mutu­al, loving relationship in which both lovers initiate sex. The wo­

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