 | | Why are there lame children? Because they [their fathers] turn over the tables.
1
|
| | Why are there dumb children? Because they kiss that place.
|
| | Why are there deaf children? Because they talk during intercourse.
|
| | Why are there blind children? Because they look at that place.
|
| | And we challenged [that tradition with the following tradition]:
They asked Imma Shalom [Mother Peace], the wife of Rabbi Eliezer, "Why do you have such beautiful children?" She said to them, "He does not have intercourse with me at the beginning of the night, nor at the end of the night, but at midnight, and when he has intercourse with me, he unveils an inch and veils it again, and appears as if he was driven by a demon." I asked him, "What is the reason [for this strange behavior]?" And he said to me, "In order that I not imagine another woman, and the children will come to be bastards.''
2
|
| | There is no contradiction. One refers to matters of sex, and the other to non-sexual matters
.
|
| | Rabbi Yohanan [a later onenot the same as Yohanan the son of Dabai] said: These are the words of Rabbi Yohanan the son of Dabai, but the sages say, "Anything that a man wishes to do with his wife, he may do, analogously to meat that comes from the shop. If he wishes to eat it with salt, he may; roasted, he may; boiled, he may; braised, he may. And similarly fish from the store of the fisherman."
|
|
|