Ostracon with Song of Songs text in Coptic, 400 CE, Thebes Egypt. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art
אָמַר רַבִּי עֲקִיבָא…שֶׁאֵין כָּל הָעוֹלָם כֻּלּוֹ כְדַאי כַּיּוֹם שֶׁנִּתַּן בּוֹ שִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים לְיִשְׂרָאֵל, שֶׁכָּל הַכְּתוּבִים קֹדֶשׁ, וְשִׁיר הַשִּׁירִים קֹדֶשׁ קָדָשִׁים.
[Rabbi Akiba said:] The whole world is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel; for all the writings are holy but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies. (Mishnah Yadayim 3.5)
On Passover we relive the Exodus from Egypt, and on this Shabbat of Passover we will observe the crossing of the Yam Suf, the “Sea of Reeds” (mistakenly called the Red Sea in Western translations). In the Hallel we’ll recite highly stylized verses of praise for the escape through water which we survived and our persecutors did not – although the songs are truncated, to express our regret that others died while we lived.
We’ll also recite Yizkor, the prayers in memory of our dead loved ones whom we especially remember during holidays like Passover. Holidays bring the memories of the missing at our table sharply into focus. Yizkor (“let the memory survive”) is traditionally recited on the last day of the holiday, but at Shir Tikvah we include it in our Shabbat observance of Pesakh, Shavuot and Sukkot.
So much of what we have always done for nearly two thousand years was first created out of pre-existing rituals and remembrances by the Rabbis of the Talmud Bavli, those survivors of the destruction of Israel and Jerusalem who carried the memories and crafted the placeholders for them. Over time, what was meant to be temporary became permanent when enough generations were born who never knew the earlier way of being, since homelessness had become their inheritance.
We can trace the Hallel songs to the Second Temple, and see how they remind us of the Pesakh Festival in Jerusalem; we can understand the development of Yizkor as a natural part of home- and family-centered ritual. But what is the Song of Songs, traditionally chanted on this Shabbat of the intermediate days of Passover, doing here? And why did the famous Rabbi Akiba famously insist that the Song of Songs is the holiest book of the Tanakh?
The Song of Songs, attributed to King Shlomo, is a beautiful collection of love poetry common in the ancient Mediterranean:
“Kiss me…for your love is more delightful than wine.” (Song of Songs 2.2)
“Whenever you are seen in every glance, it is more delightful for me than eating and drinking.” (From an Egyptian love song cited by Fishbane, The Song of Songs: JPS Commentary)
“I have come to my garden, my sister, my bride” (Song of Songs 5.1)
“I went down to the garden of your love.” (Mesopotamian love song cited by Fishbane)
From these examples we can see that a healthy appreciation of lovers for each other’s physical bodies was part of the ancient cultures in which our people appeared and developed. But there is much more hinted at here, because when we look at rabbinic commentary, it is made absolutely clear by the Rabbis that this entire Song is to be understood only in rabbinic terms, which treat the book as an allegory for the love between HaShem and the people of Israel.
The Rabbis absolutely forbid us to see the Song of Songs as a love poem between two people. Why? As we regularly wonder in Talmud study class, when did sex, and physicality, become so problematic for the Jewish people?
We know that some aspects of our religious practice as it naturally developed ended up being ruled out of Judaism not for some internal fault but because of contemporary competing belief systems. The Aseret HaDibrot, the Ten Utterances, were removed from the early siddur because “heretics insisted that only the Ten Utterances were given at Sinai, and the rest is made up.” The near absence of Moshe, nearly deified by ancient Israelites, from Rabbinic practice may be due to the rise of the early Christians, who deified a human being.
Similarly, the Song of Songs may have been interpreted nearly out of existence because it is the Jewish version of the hieros gamos, the “sacred wedding” understood to be a necessary human ritual to bring about fertility throughout ancient Mesopotamia. In this ritual, the goddess was personified by a priestess who, in a highly developed ritual of physical intercourse with the king representing his people demonstrated the bringing together of Heaven and Earth – rain and sun from above for the orchards, fields and vines below. All depended upon the success of the ritual intercourse every year. You can read a famous poem recited during the yearly ritual here: Innana and Dumuzi.
Jewish mystical tradition, which may very well preserve ancient beliefs no longer accepted as normative for the Jewish people by the rabbis, depicts the Jewish version of this sacred intercourse:
The erotic desire spoken by the female persona in the Song is applied by the Zoharic authorship to the divine feminine, Shekhinah, which is identified further as the Community of Israel, the symbolic collective constituted paradigmatically by the fraternity of male mystics. Shekhinah utters words of longing before the masculine potency, for in the state of exile she is separated from him. The hieros gamos [“sacred wedding”] occurs within the spatial confines of the holy of holies, the innermost sanctum of the Temple, but since in the time of exile the latter is not standing, there is no space wherein the union can be fully realized. Hence the feminine expresses her yearning to cohabit with the masculine, to inhabit the same space, nay to be the secret space wherein the phallic foundation is laid. (Elliot Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination)
What can we do with the Songs of Songs in our day, on the cusp of the Third Era of Jewish life, when the rabbinic interpretations are no long our only guide to understanding our past and how we might weave it into our future?
When we note that according to Wolfson, the community of Israel is feminine although its members are only men, we see an irony that is an opening to a different kind of understanding. That makes it our fascinating task to add the latest layer of conversation, of commentary, to our people’s path. We can see the tragedy of the rift between male and female as personal, demonstrating each individual’s desire for wholeness rather than in a restrictive heterosexual-normative way. And we can see it as a social catastrophe, leading to the oppression of women, who have fallen from goddesses to either virgins or whores in much of western religion, including Judaism.
And most personally, here we have the chance to name and seek out the physical healing we need: the holiness expressed by a woman’s body in childbirth is the most precious aspect of humanity. Without it none of us exist. How is it that we have come to a time when a female presenting person or a transgender man is embarrassed by menstrual flow? We should all be singing the highest praises of all to the power that allows for life. That is the holy of holies.
Shabbat Shalom and mo’adim l’simkha, may the Intermediate Days of the Festival bring you joy
Torah for the 21st Century by Rabbi Ariel Stone 