Open Publication: How an Official Bnei Baruch Text Normalizes the Language of Violence

On August 22, 2008, Michael Laitman’s text “Football - You Are Sex!” appeared on an official Bnei Baruch resource. It was not a marginal comment or private correspondence. It was an official text by the leader, and it remained in public view for almost twenty years. A member of the community asked about football. Laitman answered.

Document

Question: In our time football has become a religion, a way of filling life. What is its appeal? Why do men sit in front of the TV with beer and football, as you often say?

Answer: As an answer, I will offer a couple of thoughts from "The Metaphysics of Football," and you can think up the rest yourselves. All the words and terms come from there!

Football is a game played with the feet. The symbol of the foot is the male sexual organ.
The function of the foot is destruction (as they say: to trample underfoot, feet first).
The foot stands against the head, the ball. In the past they played with severed heads, a symbol of castration.
Football is like sex. The aim is a goal: with the foot (the sexual organ) to score into the goal, into the hole.
The foot is the phallus, the ball is sperm, the goal is the vagina.
The goalkeeper, defender of the goal, is a censor opposing the players' desires.
The referee monitors compliance with the rules, but does not prevent desire, like a Father regulating sexual life, as a social matter, within reasonable bounds.
I am the player, the aim is satisfaction. The ball, libido, the goal, the head of the penis.
The goalkeeper is the superego that interferes with the satisfaction of a goal, but pleasure arises precisely from overcoming the obstacle.
The player thinks about satisfying his desire. The goalkeeper thinks about the team.
The goalkeeper is the guardian, entitled to take the ball in his hands, to restrain sex within reasonable limits.
Football's contagiousness lies in its sublimation.
A man prefers not to play but to watch football (on television), because although he is tired, he still wants to "stick it in," and into "someone else's goal" at that: the sweetness of betrayal, of sin. The basic meaning of the game is the struggle for the woman, for the impossibility of excessive desire (it has built up, burned out!). Therefore watching football is indecent; it is akin to voyeurism (watching how others "stick it in").

Now do you understand what your husband is doing?! (joke).

The record is straightforward: on August 22, 2008, an aggressive sexual metaphor appeared on an official Bnei Baruch resource as a teacher’s answer to a student’s everyday question.

The environment in which this language grew

The audience for this text was passing through night lessons, group discipline, an internal vocabulary and the hierarchy of the teacher. In that environment, the leader’s language is absorbed as part of the norm.

The leader’s public language carries the weight here. When he uses that authority to turn an ordinary question about football into a sexualized scheme of body, desire, penetration, betrayal and “someone else’s goal,” he shows what kind of speech is permitted from above.

The group reinforces the teacher’s word in the article on sadnaot and submission. Here the document itself is enough: an official public text where a humiliating sexual metaphor comes from the leader answering a student.

The text “Football - You Are Sex!” is still available on the organization’s official resource.