That word, “sacred” - I don’t think it means what you think it means.

A new Jewish prayer for anonymous gay sex ‘unexpected intimacy’:

“In the dark, in a strange place, our father Jacob encountered a stranger with whom he grappled all night,” the prayer begins, referring to the biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. “He never knew the stranger’s name, yet their encounter was a blessing, which turned Jacob into Israel and made him realize, I have seen God face-to-face.”

The prayer, titled “Kavannah for Unexpected Intimacy,” goes on to ask God — “who created passion and wove it throughout creation” — to permit the encounter to be a blessing “that allows us to both touch and see the Divine.”

Wow.  It just never occurred to me that someone would twist those verses in quite this way.  Here’s the passage the prayer references, where Jacob the liar, the thief, was in terror of meeting his brother Esau again.  He sent some bribes ahead of him to soften Esau up, but he was still (appropriately) terrified.

The same night he arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and everything else that he had. And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the people of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh that is on the hip socket, because he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip on the sinew of the thigh.
(Genesis 32:22-32)

According to Matthew Henry, this was not just a physical wrestling match:

We are told by the prophet (Hosea 12:4) how Jacob wrestled: he wept, and made supplication; prayers and tears were his weapons. It was not only a corporal, but a spiritual, wrestling, by the vigorous actings of faith and holy desire; and thus all the spiritual seed of Jacob, that pray in praying, still wrestle with God.

The author of the prayer explains his rationale -

Andrew Ramer, the longtime Sha’ar Zahav member who authored the prayer, expressed deep respect for Dorff and Greenberg even as he rejected their view that anonymous sex, whether gay or straight, is inherently vile and unholy.

“In the gay community there are people who feel that part of our culture is not just having unexpected or anonymous sex, but at times really finding sacred connection there,” Ramer said. “Is it wrong to hope that in a situation where people often do objectify each other that they stop and think, you know this isn’t feeling kosher to me. I want to do this. I want to be with this other person. The passion is raging out of control, but I want to do this in a sacred way.”

I’ve got nothing against sex, as I’ve posted many times.  The article contains refutations of the concept in this prayer by several rabbis, but the short version is - there is no sacred way to have anonymous sex.  There is no way to purify a random hookup.  Call it an encounter, unexpected intimacy, or as the article asserts, an act that meets the definition of prostitution in the Jewish tradition, but it’s nothing holy or sacred.

h/t Five Feet of Fury