But a year into his marriage, Moishe felt something was wrong. "I knew that girls were supposed to have an orgasm, too." He had read it somewhere. "My wife never complained, but it was driving me crazy." He and his wife tried to figure it out: "I did dis, I did dat," he says in his Yiddish accent, until finally they went to an older Hasidic sex therapist. "The schmuck told us that the problem was that we have a television. He said it interfered with spontaneity."

In Hasidic communities, Moishe explains, televisions are forbidden. "We were looking for tips on technique. He was looking for a way to blame our sexual problems on our religious transgressions." So Moishe and Rachel had to figure it out completely on their own. "And that made us closer in a way."

Moishe's sex therapist apparently was not of the new "Boteach generation." And many older Hasidim do not share the controversial author's liberal and romantic views of Hasidic Jewish life.

Moishe takes me around his workplace to meet several colleagues or "characters," as he puts it, under the pretense that I'm a customer. With a straight face, I ask a few of them -- each in private -- what they think of Boteach's views: "I just read a book," I tell them, "by a Hasidic man who says Hasidim are having the best sex in New York City."

Moishe's 54-year-old friend Mutty, a Hasidic diamond salesman of the Satmar sect, starts shaking in his seat from laughing at the dopey-eyed girl before him. "This is the biggest bunch of bullshit I have ever heard!" He takes a deep breath and coughs. "What I see is a community of miserable, repressed people. This is the sad truth."

In fact, traditional practices in Satmar, the largest and most rigid Hasidic sect, have not always led to romantic marital unions, instead compelling the young, curious and repressed to unexpected places: S/M bars, 42nd Street and topless clubs.

Moishe takes me to meet his "wild" associate, Mendy. "You want to know about sex in the Hasidic community? In the middle of the night, teachers would come and throw the covers off you if you were sleeping on your belly," says Mendy, a 29-year-old married man with a whips-and-chains fetish. "We had to sleep on our sides to ensure that we wouldn't accidentally get aroused." He and others were told that sexual pleasure is only to encourage reproduction, and that any "wasted seed" is a sin.

That night, Mendy tucks his side curls behind his ears as he shows me the S/M clubs that he and his Yiddish friends frequent. They all like to be dominated. I ask him if he enjoys having sex "forced" upon him because it rids him of the guilt of wanting to have sex. "I never thought about it," he says. "But probably." Of course, only a very small percentage of Hasidic Jews venture into these underworlds. As Mendy and I talk quietly Moishe chimes in: "What is S/M, anyway?"

As we discuss these unfamiliar sexual practices, including the implicit infidelity, Moishe's face reddens again.

"When we hear of someone going off the path," Moishe says, "it is such a shock. Because nobody's doing it. Most of us are just focused on trying to figure out how to be happy and holy, and how to make our families happy, on learning about our wives and ourselves."

It's Friday afternoon and Mendy begins closing the shop in preparation for the Sabbath. Moishe looks at the time and packs his things quickly. It has been two weeks since he and his wife made love and Shabbos is a sacred time reserved for them. He smiles at me, nods humbly and hurries home.

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