(RNS) Celebrity Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, spiritual counselor to Michael Jackson, onetime Republican candidate for Congress and author of the best-selling "Kosher Sex" and "Kosher Jesus," has a new book for Jews and non-Jews alike: "Kosher Lust."

Its provocative subtitle: "Love Is Not the Answer."

The answer, Boteach says, is lust, the God-given fuel for a healthy marriage. Love, he argues, cannot sustain marriage, but lust - what he calls the unfairly maligned member of the Seven Deadly Sins - can.

Boteach, an Orthodox rabbi married to his wife for 26 years, writes in the context of heterosexual marriage, rooting lust in the attraction of opposites. Gay spouses, however, may nonetheless find the rabbi's advice relevant.

RNS asked Boteach to explain his lusty theology. Some answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Marriage for women is a profound risk. They take someone else's name. They're the ones having babies. Very often women are saddled with two jobs, one at work and one at home. Why would they do this if they already have love from their parents? There's one thing that their parents cannot give them, and that's what they crave most: to be desired.

Sexuality is the soul of relationship. But our definition of sex is so goal-oriented today that I don't want to answer the question with a number. We treat sex as a scratch that has to be itched, and it's one of the reasons we have really bad sex. The answer to what constitutes a normal healthy sex life comes down to the degree that we really feel desirous of the other person. Is a husband really fixated on his wife? When he fantasizes erotically about a woman, is he fantasizing about his wife?

But the moment you see orgasm as a transcendent experience and one that can lead to mystical union, it's truly transformative. We don't know how to deal with orgasm in American sexuality. For us, it's just something that proves that the sexual encounter is over. The whole experience of sex is a means to an end. It leads to bad sex and short sex.

I don't believe in lust for lust's sake. I believe in lust for the sake of oneness, unity and connection. There's a spiritual dimension to that lust.

If you look at translations of the Song of Solomon, they're often not literal because it's just considered inappropriate. It's a biblical book speaking about women's breasts. But Kabbalah has never shied away from speaking of God in lustful terms. Kabbalah actually utilizes sexual imagery to connote and capture the intensity of the God-man experience. Maybe we have to overcome that uneasiness. But we're not attempting to sexualize the relationship with God. That's ridiculous.