Song of Songs
Congregation Bnai Brith, Santa Barbara CA
April 22, 2011
In my admissions interview for rabbinic school thirty three years ago, I was asked to describe one of my most significant Jewish experiences. After thinking for a moment, I told the committee about an early morning in February when I was fifteen years old, a sophomore in high school. About forty of the teens from our Temple were on a long weekend retreat in the Berkshire mountains in western Massachusetts. The snow was deep outside, and we were staying in an old manor house at Great Barrington….a grand old house with dark wood paneling and huge stone fireplaces…for a weekend experiencing Judaism through the arts: music, poetry, drama, and dance. My friends and I looked forward to it for months. The best parts of the weekend took place after the official programs were over, and the adults had gone to bed, and thirty or forty of us teens stayed up late singing, or talking, or giving each other back rubs. That is not the part I told the admissions committee about.
What came to my mind when they asked me for a most significant Jewish experience was the early morning study session which our rabbi offered to anyone who wanted to get up and learn while everyone else was still asleep. I went downstairs that morning to one of the living rooms in the manor house. Through the windows I saw the snow piled high outside, sparkling in the morning sun, and found our rabbi, Bob Baruch, and one other kid….a girl one year older than me, whom I had admired from afar….but was always too scared to actually talk to. And the three of us read together and discussed the biblical book the Song of Songs.
“Come with me from Lebanon, my bride, from the peak of Senir and Hermon, from the dens of lions, from the mountains of leopards. You have captured my heart, my sister, with a single glance from your eyes….Milk and honey are under your tongue, and the scent of your robes is like the scent of Lebanon. My sister is a locked garden, a fountain locked, a sealed-up spring. I have come into my garden, I have gathered my myrrh and spice, eaten my honey and honeycomb, drunk my wine and my milk. Eat, lovers, and drink. Drink deep of love!”
That morning, the sun sparkling on the snow, the love poetry of the Song of Songs, the sensitive guidance of our rabbi, the eyes and the mouth of that young woman and my own blood and brain chemistry all came together into one of the most powerful religious experiences of my life. I understood for the first time how a text can run like an electric current through my entire body and join me together with another person reading the same text. And that is what I shared with the HUC admissions committee.
Tomorrow, on the Shabbat which falls during Passover, the Song of Songs will be chanted by Jews in synagogues around the world. In some synagogues it is actually read every week on Friday afternoon just before Shabbat, but this Shabbat of Pesach is the day on which everyone reads Shir HaShirim, the Song of Songs.
The connection between Song of Songs and Passover becomes obvious in the middle of the second chapter, in the famous passage: “My beloved called and said to me, ‘Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away. For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth, the time of song has come and the voice of the turtle-dove is heard in our land; the fig tree is ripening its early figs and the vines in blossom give forth their fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one and come away!” I doubt there has ever been a more evocative description of springtime in all of world literature…and so on Passover, festival of spring….our tradition has us read this text which captures the full sensory explosion, the colors and fragrances of all the budding and blossoming, the bees buzzing, the newborn lambs covering the hillsides, and the young men and women going out into the fields hand in hand, hormones raging. “Come my beloved, let us go into the field, let us stay in the villages; let us go early to the vineyards, to see whether the grapevine has budded, whether the vine blossoms have opened, if the pomegranates are in flower. There I will give my love to you.”
Because this text, with all of its earthiness and celebration of sexuality, had played such a huge role in my falling in love with the Bible it came as a terrible let-down when I discovered as a rabbinic student that our sages of the Talmud refused to read it literally. The ancient rabbis read these verses of love-making and arousal, of physical, sensual finding and seeking as being NOT about two human lovers, but rather about God and the Jewish People. “Why?” I wondered. What were our sages afraid of? Why would they want to ignore the spiciness, the juiciness of this text and use it as yet another chance to talk about…God?
A few examples will illustrate. In the very first verse of the book, the woman says “Yishakeini min’shikot pihu…”Oh let him kiss me with the kisses of his lips….!” Mmmm.! But the allegorical translation renders that verse as: “Oh communicate your innermost wisdom to me in loving closeness…!” When she says “He brought me into the house of wine and his banner over me was love!” it becomes “God brought us into the chamber of Torah delights.” When the man says “your two breasts are like twin fawns of a gazelle” it becomes God saying “Moses and Aaron, your two leaders, are like twin fawns of a gazelle.” And when she says “mashcheini acharecha narutza! Pull me after you, let’s run!” the orthodox allegorical reading says “Upon perceiving a mere hint that You wished to draw us near, we rushed with perfect faith after You into the wilderness….”
Oy! When I first encountered this allegorical translation, I thought it was pathetic. How depressingly wimpy to choose a disembodied, de-sexed, spiritualized reading of what is clearly a magnificent celebration of the primal, the erotic impulses which bring together male and female in the sweaty, heart-pounding creation of new life!
As the years went by, I calmed down. I came to see that it did not need to be either/or. A text may bear multiple meanings. The kisses of the lover’s mouth can be both: the physical exchange of human lips and human breath, and at the same time the exchange of mind and heart between God and the Jewish People. The House of Wine can be both a place of physical love-making and of Torah study. In fact, reading both meanings simultaneously makes both the text and me, the reader, me become more and more alive.
The different meanings are like levels of consciousness.
In one single moment, I can be speaking to you, and paying full and complete attention, but subconsciously be thinking of my father or mother. And in that same moment, my nose and ears and skin are all picking up signals, scents and sounds from the people and air around me, and my heart is pumping and my lungs are breathing in and out. Conscious, sub-conscious, unconscious….it’s all happening inside us, all the time.
A text can work the same way, especially a text like the Song of Songs.
“Rise up my love, my fair one and come away, for lo the winter is past” may mean many things to me, all at the same time. The winter is first of all, winter. I was born and raised in Rochester New York, so for me winter must always retain its literal meaning. Intense cold. Driving, freezing rain; days of slate grey skies and weeks without sunshine. But winter is also sadness. And winter is isolation. Winter was also two hundred and ten years of slavery in Egypt. And winter was a time in late childhood, before the intense stirrings of young love began to awaken within me.
Then one morning I was fifteen years old, and my friends were all upstairs sleeping, and the sun was glinting on the snow outside, and my rabbi was showing me an old text, my inheritance from a hundred generations of ancestors. And I was reading the words together with a girl whose smile was like the sunlight, and her eyes sparkled.
Then an electric current passed between me, and my rabbi and that girl…..and I felt the frozen earth thawing within me, and the Exodus alive inside me, and the Jewish people being born again within me. I heard a voice calling…and I have no idea whether it was the voice of my rabbi, or the voice of the text, or the voice of God….declaring “arise, and come away.” That morning I learned what Rabbi Akiva meant when he said, “All of the books of the Bible are holy. But the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.”
Chag sameach and Shabbat shalom.