On the Shabbat in the middle of Pesach there is a custom to read the Song of Songs, a powerful and puzzling biblical book. One of the most profound of the modern commentators on this text was German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosensweig (1886-1929), who was the author of the theological and philosophical masterpiece, The Star of Redemption.
Rosensweig started as a detached and assimilated Jew, but returned to an intense engagement with the Jewish tradition, before his tragically early death. Above all, he turned against the secularism of 19th and early 20th-century Germany, and it was in this spirit that he revisited the Song of Songs for the sceptical and westernised Jews of his age, and I think of ours.
On the surface, the Song of Songs is a poem about human lovers, and the first substantive verse of the book gives us a powerful, dramatic and sensual opening: “Oh, give me of the kisses of your mouth, for your love is more delightful than wine.”
If the simple meaning of those words were the only meaning, we might ask how this book made it into the Bible at all, and even more so, why Rabbi Akiva described it as ‘the Holy of Holies’.
The traditional answer has been to point to a deeper meaning in the text and read it as an analogy to the love between God and the Jewish people. According to this interpretation, two entirely different types of love are at play: romantic love and Divine love, and the first is used as a simile for the second.
By contrast, Rosensweig’s insight was that the description of human love is not just a metaphor, because really there are not two types of love at all, but only one love.
As Rosensweig wrote, “man loves because God loves and as God loves. His human soul is the soul awakened and loved by God.” The religious meaning of the words in the Song is not just to be decoded from their literal meaning, but rests in their literal meaning.
That understanding was lost in the wave of secularism in the 18th and 19th century, when it became sophisticated to read the Song of Songs as love lyrics, no more and no less. Rosensweig argued that not only was this wrong-headed, but that perspective reflected a much deeper and unfortunate shift.
A love poem cannot be about God if God doesn’t love. The rationalists of modernity could not believe that God could love personally and individually, and therefore they could not accept that a poem about personal and individual love could also be talking about God.
Accordingly, the Song was recast as a drama, between a man and a woman; not us, and not God. But that trampled on the text itself. The book is a first-person account, not a detached third-person narrative.
The word “I” appears more often in the Song of Songs than in any other biblical book. It is a record of the experience of love, not an objective report about love. All the passion, the intensity and the meaning was drained from what should be the most intense book in the Bible.
What the modernists missed, as Rosensweig wrote, is that “love is speech, wholly active, wholly personal, wholly living, wholly speaking. All true statements about love must be words from its own mouth.”
Now we can see how this book is about God’s love not just while it is also about human love, but because it is about human love. God’s love is not just revealed through a simile of human love, but makes possible all human love and its power. As Rosensweig writes, “the living soul, loved by God, triumphs over all that is mortal”. Love moves us from the world of creation, of the worldly, mundane, limited and finite, to the world of revelation, of encounter with God, of the transcendent and mystical.
The beginning of this love is in the deeply intimate and personal, but we must move beyond that, from free passion into a settled relationship, sanctified by marriage. As Rosensweig writes: “Marriage is not love. Marriage is infinitely more than love. Marriage is the external fulfilment which love reaches out for.”
God’s love for us gives us to capacity to love beyond God, it turns us outwards, to build in the public realm and create communities. In this world, in the shared space of society, we can enjoy being loved, but what matters is that we show love to others. Ultimately it is the love God has for us, that enables us to do that.
The Song of Songs shows us the source of love, the power of love and most importantly, what we are to do with that love. That is surely why Rabbi Akiva was right to call it “the Holy of Holies”.
Dr Elton is rabbi of the Great Synagogue, Sydney
To get more from judaism, click here to sign up for our free daily newsletter.