the biblical heated rivalry

Sometimes I think of Jewish textual tradition as a series of love letters our ancestors wrote to us, their future descendants and spiritual offspring. As I sit with a text of some kind – Torah, Talmud, midrash, etc – I’ll ask myself: In what way might this be a love letter to future generations? And thinking, puzzling, exploring toward an answer is how I build my own relationship to our tradition. 

This time of year, I don’t have to puzzle quite so hard. We’ve entered the month of Nisan, with Passover right around the corner. This week is Shabbat HaGadol, the great Shabbat that precedes Pesach, marking the final preparations before the holiday. The main text we spend ample time with come Passover is, of course, the Haggadah. But there are other texts special to this time of year as well, including Shir Hashirim, the Song of Songs. 

Shir Hashirim, one of the books of Tanakh, is an epic love poem in two voices, and it’s traditional across the diaspora to recite it on the shabbat of Passover. This text really is a love letter, not in a figurative sense. There is a maiden, a ra’aya, and a beloved, a dod. They long for one another, intensely and sensuously:

Oh, give me of the kisses of your mouth,
For your love is more delightful than wine. (1:1)

Sustain me with raisin cakes,
Refresh me with apples,
For I am faint with love. (2:5)

It’s steamy! And beautiful. This book is a love poem and a series of love songs, both. I adore the lush imagery and lyricism of Shir Hashirim, and I love how the lovers in the text yearn for one another while also yearning for a better world. All this eros and desire… it's basically the biblical version of Heated Rivalry ;)

So why do we read this epic love letter during Passover? What does this text have to do with z’man ḥeiruteinu, the season of our freedom? Commentators over the centuries have posited: there’s allusions to the Exodus story in Shir Hashirim; it’s a springtime text just like the holiday; the whole arc of the love song is like the 4 stages of redemption for the Israelites in their journey to freedom. And I wonder if there’s something more. 

In her book All About Love, feminist scholar bell hooks describes love as a verb rather than a feeling, a series of actions compelled by care, commitment, trust, and responsibility. “There can be no love without justice,” hooks wrote. “Love has the power to transform us, giving us the strength to oppose domination.”

In these aching times, abundant with war, violence, inequity and injustice, so many of our problems seem to stem from a breakdown of the belief that all human beings are beloved, sacred, made in the image of Gd, and that each and every life is as worthy of safety, dignity, and wholeness as one’s own. All too often we end up like Pharaoh— heart-hardened, closed off to one another’s humanity, guarded from the pain of the world. Passover comes to shake us out of it. 

Perhaps we read Shir Hashirim in this season of our freedom in order to, as hooks says, cultivate the strength to oppose domination. To remember what it feels like to love another, as wildly and unreservedly as in the Song of Songs, and to expand from there, opening and widening the heart toward an ethic of love whose inevitable outcome mustbe justice: If we are beloved to the Divine, then all people are beloved to the Divine. If we are worthy of freedom, then all people are worthy of freedom. If, as Cornell West taught, “justice is what love looks like in public,” then this season is both our season of freedom, and our season of love. Two sides of the same coin. 

What would it mean to read the haggadah as a love letter this year? Or to bring the text of Shir Hashirim into your Passover observance? To cultivate love as action, love as a verb?

As we gather around our seder tables to reflect on freedom and recommit to liberation, may the crocus of the heart bloom and open to let in all life, to know our interconnection and our responsibility to each other as an ahavah rabbah, an abundance of love that expands our capacity to do care and seek justice. 

אִכְלוּ רֵעִים שְׁתוּ וְשִׁכְרוּ דּוֹדִים

Eat, lovers, and drink:
Drink deep of love!   (Shir Hashirim 5:1)

I so look forward to singing songs of love and liberation with you all in the days to come. ​