Song of Songs: There is a Different Sex

“I believe you are making a mistake by rewriting the Song of Songs. It is the most nonsexist, nonpatriarchal text in the Bible, expressing mutuality between males and females. Your changes obliterate this important aspect of the song…”

This criticism arrived by email, from an American-Jewish theologian, whose work I love and deeply admire for many years, and who usually responds to the work of Toratah with enthusiasm. What is it about Song of Songs, which we have just finished regendering, with the help of friends who have started to work along with us on the Toratah project, which so grieved her, and seemed to her unforgivable? Does Toratah really obliterate the mutuality of woman and man expressed in the Song? And has that mutuality really been there in Torato all along?

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Song of Songs in Torato is a clutch of sensual love-poems, bursting with images of the sheer beauty of the lovers’ bodily limbs, and their longings for one another. These are very ancient poems, love songs pastoral and urban, some of them ascribed to King Solomon and the woman he is to marry, a country girl, or maybe the Princess of Egypt, singing their love to one another. Others are ascribed to the love of a shepherd and the daughter, it seems, of a family of vintners. The love swells with life, in the urban landscapes of Jerusalem and its royal palace, the guards patrolling the city and it’s walls, to all of which the daughters of the city bear witness; and in the fields, the gardens, the vineyards and the flowing springs of the Land of Israel, at springtime.

The Song has no ordered plot. It chiefly described the courtings, the longings, the difficulty of meeting and the difficulty of separation. The lovers send each other away, time and again, rise up for yourself, my friend, my fair one, and go, for yourself (Song of Songs 2,10) and yet demand faithfulness Set me as a seal upon your heart (Ibid 8,6),and testify that they are sick with love (Ibid 2,5). In short, a drama of overwhelming human love at its very zenith.

The Rabbinic Sages had a hard time finding a place for the Song in the sacred canon, as they were deciding which texts would be included and thus made sacred in the Holy Bible. The Mishah, in Tractate Yadayim (literally, “hands”), designates a Holy Book as one which, “renders the hands impure.” This designation was meant to keep readers from eating while reading, and dropping crumbs onto the scrolls. A book not designated as one that “renders the hands impure” is unlikely to endure for long, as the mice will likely be no less interested in it than the readers…

When Rabbi Akiva, in Tractate Yadayim (3:5) establishes that the Song of Songs is to be regarded as Holy Scripture he rules “Heaven forbid! No one in Israel ever disputed that the Song of Songs renders the hands impure,” and passionately declares “since nothing in the entire world is worthy but for that day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel; for all the Scriptures are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies!”.

Rabbi Akiva, who knew what love is, love for a woman (see Talmud Bavli Ketubot 62-63), and love for God (see Talmud Bavli Menachot 29b) helped the inclusion of Song of Songs in the sacred canon, but at a steep price: From then on, the Rabbis, the Kabbalists, the Philosophers and the Commentators through the generations, understood the Song as an allegory for the love between God and the people of Israel, and no longer human or sensual love at all.

The different bodily limbs the lovers describe, the Rabbis and their successors took to be different figures in Jewish history or different facets of the Divine; the dramatic scenes between the lovers they read as descriptions of historical events in the life of the Jewish People, or even of the cosmos.

Even as allegory, the Song was deeply beloved by Jewish communities all over, who chose to read it regularly, some on the eve of every Shabbat, some on Passover and the Shabbatot of springtime.

With the revival of Hebrew as a spoken, living language and the Zionist return to the Land of Israel, the Song returned to the vineyards of Eyn Gedi, to Mount Carmel, to the local shrubs and scents, yet in many ways the allegorical reading remained: as a love story between the Hebrew Nation and its Land. But not for long.

As Hebrew-Israeli culture developed, the Song was finally freed from the allegorical reins that the Rabbis had tied to it, and so released could return to its original meaning – a drama of human love. Various expressions from the Song found their way into everyday speech (gan na’ul “a locked garden,” shoshanah bein ha-khokhim “a lily among the thorns,” kholat ahavah “sick with love”, and more) and in the Mizrahi music festivals, the Songs’ verses played a starring role as lovesongs. (1)

Strikingly, Hebrew poets turned to the Song for means of giving voice to the unbearable horrors inflicted on their bodies, and on those of others, during the Holocaust. (2)

As Yael and I work on the regendering of Song of Songs, we wonder what new turn in the story of the Song this will open. We are curious how the depictions of different bodily limbs’ beauty will sound when attributed to the body of the opposite gender; how will the brief dramatic scenes sound when experienced by the “other,” gender-wise. We also wonder - if we choose to examine the regendered Song as an allegory to relations between the Divinity and the nation, what theology will emerge, when the Divinity is the woman and the nation is the man.

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Yael and I experience the Song very differently from one another. Yael grew up in a secular Israeli family, went to secular schools, and she is, above all, an artist. Her reading of the Scroll reflects the specific Kabbalistic traditions that she has studied, whose interpretive methods reveal pnimiyut ha-Torah, literally, “the interiority of the Torah,” as the description of the dynamic structure of the human will. Yael finds in the veses’ young love, full of desire, a prism through which one can explore the ties between humanity and divinity, between the Daughters of Tisraelah and Toratah, between Toratah and Torato, between Toratah and its writers, between herself and reality and more.

I come to the Song with a weighty load of traditional interpretation, and traditional gender constructions. From here on, I will be sharing my own experience of reading. You can find Yael’s experience and insights at the recording of a study session we held on March 26, 2023 for Kehillat Bnai Jeshurun in Manhattan, at this link.

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The thoughts that arose in me while studying Toratah’s Song of Songs can be divided into three: What is the sexy body? What is virginity? How does lovemaking work?

The Sexy Body

Toratah, seemingly, challenges heterosexual notions of sexual attraction.

For instance, the beloved woman is drawn to the beauty of the beloved man’s bodily limbs, which in Torato are those of a woman.

Song of Songs 4

1 You are handsome, my friend; You are handsome; your eyes are doves through your braid: your hair is like a flock of goats, that cascaded down from Mount Giliad. (3)
2 Your teeth are like a flock of rams, which came up from the washing; all of them match, and none lost.
3 Your lips are like a thread of scarlet, and your speech is beautiful: Your temple is like a slice of a pomegranate through your braid.
4 Your neck is like the tower of Dvida built in rows, a thousand bucklers hang on it, all shields of heroines.
5 Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a hart, grazing among the lilies.

שיר השירים ד׳

א הִנְּךָ֨ יָפֶ֤ה רֵעִי֙ הִנְּ֣ךָ יָפֶ֔ה עֵינֶ֣יךָ יוֹנִ֔ים מִבַּ֖עַד לְצַמָּתֶ֑ךָ שְׂעָֽרְךָ֙ כְּעֵ֣דֶר הָֽעִזִּ֔ים שֶׁגָּֽלְשׁ֖וּ מֵהַ֥ר גִּלִיעָֽד׃
ב שִׁנֶּ֙יךָ֙ כְּעֵ֣דֶר הַקְּצוּבִ֔ים שֶׁעָל֖וּ מִן־הָֽרַחְצָ֑ה שֶׁכֻּלָּם֙ מַתְאִימִ֔ים וְשַׁכּ֖וּל אֵ֥ין בָּהֶֽם׃
ג כְּח֤וּט הַשָּׁנִי֙ שִׂפְתֹתֶ֔יךָ וּמִדְבָּֽרְךָ֖ נָאוֶ֑ה כְּפֶ֤לַח הָֽרִמּוֹן֙ רַקָּֽתְךָ֔ מִבַּ֖עַד לְצַמָּתֶֽךָ׃
ד כְּמִגְדַּ֤ל דְּוִידָה֙ צַוָּֽארְךָ֔ בָּנ֖וּי לְתַלְפִּיּ֑וֹת אֶ֤לֶף הַמָּגֵן֙ תָּל֣וּי עָלָ֔יו כֹּ֖ל שִׁלְטֵ֥י הַגִּבֹּרֽוֹת׃
ה שְׁנֵ֥י שָׁדֶ֛יךָ כִּשְׁתֵּ֥י עֳפָר֖וֹת תְּאוֹמֹ֣ת צְבִ֑י הָֽרוֹעֹ֖ת בַּשּׁוֹשַׁנִּֽים׃

Similarly, in Toratah the beloved man, in parallel, is attracted to the beloved woman’s bodily limbs, which, in Torato, are those of a man.

Song of Songs 5

11 Her head is fine gold, her locks are black curls as a raven.
12 Her eyes are like doves by the water channels, bathing in milk, sitting on a basin.
13 Her cheeks are like a bed of perfume, like a gardening nursery of concoctions: her lips like lilies, dripping flowing myrrh.
14 Her hands are coils of gold filled with topaz: her gut is bright ivory inlaid with sapphires.
15 Her thighs are pillars of marble, set upon pedestals of gold: her appearance is like the Levanona, chosen as the cedars.

שיר השירים ה׳

יא רֹאשָׁ֖הּ כֶּ֣תֶם פָּ֑ז קְוֻצּוֹתֶ֙יהָ֙ תַּלְתַּלִּ֔ים שְׁחֹר֖וֹת כָּעוֹרָֽבֶת׃
יב עֵינֶ֕יהָ כְּיוֹנִ֖ים עַל־אֲפִ֣יקֵי מָ֑יִם רֹֽחֲצֹת֙ בֶּֽחָלָ֔ב יֹשְׁבֹ֖ת עַל־מִלֵּֽאת׃
יג לְחָיֶ֙הָ֙ כַּֽעֲרוּגַ֣ת הַבֹּ֔שֶׂם מִגְדְּל֖וֹת מֶרְקָחִ֑ים שִׂפְתוֹתֶ֙יהָ֙ שֽׁוֹשַׁנִּ֔ים נֹטְפ֖וֹת מ֥וֹר עֹבֵֽר׃
יד יָדֶ֙יהָ֙ גְּלִילֵ֣י זָהָ֔ב מְמֻלָּאִ֖ים בַּתַּרְשִׁ֑ישׁ מֵעֶ֙יהָ֙ עֶ֣שֶׁת שֵׁ֔ן מְעֻלֶּ֖פֶת סַפִּירִֽים׃
יה שׁוֹקֶ֙יהָ֙ עַמּ֣וּדֵי שֵׁ֔שׁ מְיֻסָּדִ֖ים עַל־אַדְנֵי־פָ֑ז מַרְאֵ֙הָ֙ כַּלְּבָנ֔וֹנָה בְּחוּרָ֖ה כָּֽאֲרָזִֽים׃

Reading the regendered Song, I found, to my surprise, the depictions of sexual attraction much less challenging, and in fact much less interesting than I had anticipated. Most of the depictions throughout the Song of the beauty of bodily limbs, are not directed to the sexual organs. The depictions of hair, face, eyes, teeth, arms and legs etc.and are in the end pretty similar in both men and women.

The only sexual organs mentioned in the Song time and again, are the man’s breasts, a seemingly discordant note.

But Yael and I have long discovered that Toratah’s discordant notes are doors to wondrous lessons about our bodies, and our human possibilities. They generally reveal just how much our usual experiences of our bodies’ and of others’ are limited, partial and not at all inevitable. The discordances invite us to experience the world differently.

And so, the reference to the man’s breasts is a great find. The man’s breasts are a gift that Toratah gives us as we dare to rethink our familiar sexual body images.

Already in the Chumash of Toratah (The Five Books of Moshah), nursing is something attributed to men only and after two or three mentions, the meaning of nursing begins to shift, from feeding via the breast to feeding small children in general, and caring for their physical well-being. Attributing “nursing” to a man opens a whole world of relationships between fathers and their little children which doesn’t come to light in the patriarchal world, but does match the existential experience of many young fathers in our day, and that opening can help them. Above all it can provide an example of fathers nurturing their young children and push forward the idea that this is what (good enough) fathers do.

The idea of the man’s breasts invites us also to reexamine the construction of the sexual attractiveness of the male body. (Alongside the fact that in Toratah’s Song of Songs there is no reference to women’s breasts.)

When I think about male breasts the first thing that comes to mind are my daughters’ repeated questions during the summers when we would go to the neighborhood swimming pool: “Why can the boys swim and we see their chests. and girls not?” And when they would see men jogging shirtless in the street, the question: “If a woman went jogging like that would the police really arrest her? Why?”

The mens’ breasts of Toratah, experienced as objects of desire, invite questioning: “Who throughout human history has been deciding which organs are sexy, and decided in the past that men’s breasts are much less, and so do not at all threaten social order? Who does this determination serve? And how has it influenced the sexuality of those who weren’t involved in making these decisions?”

Toratah’s invitation to restore to mens’ breasts their sexual potential also invites other thoughts about human sexuality: Is there really a link between sexual attraction and bodily covering and uncovering? Can one experience sexual arousal from any part of the body, or just specific ones? Is heterosexual womans’ attraction to a man’s breasts the same as that of a homosexual man?

Virginity

In Torato a girl’s virginity is a weighty matter; a condition to her being taken as a wife. In Torato’s Song of Songs, virginity is part of the attraction of the beloved to the woman and also meaningful for her social status. In Toratah’s Chumash it is the virginity of the lad which is a weighty matter and in the Song of Songs, ascribed to the beloved male.

Yael and I gave much thought to male virginity when we were working on Toratah’s laws regarding the case of a woman who takes a lad in marriage and suspects he was not a virgin (Deut. 22:13-21). Even then we asked, what could be the meaning of virginity for a male? How can you prove a lad is a virgin?

Because Toratah is being written in the 21st century, we know that even a woman’s virginity as a clear physical category does not exist, and can’t be proven either.

Until modern times, people thought women had a vaginal membrane that would, at the first sexual encounter, rip and bleed. But this “biological fact” has long been disproved, such that it’s as nonsensical as physical proof of a male’s virginity.

If we want to give virginity some reasonable meaning it is nothing other than lack of prior sexual experience, and that is how I understand the virginity of the beloved lad of the Song of Songs. The mention of the lad’s virginity reflects the vulnerability of people whose sexuality is controlled by those stronger than them.

In Song of Songs 4:12 the lad’s virginity is compared to a garden and a fountain: A locked garden is my brother, my groom; a locked well, a sealed spring. This image, the reverse of the familiar image in Torato of a woman whose hymen locks the entrance to her garden and her fountain, summons us now to seek out other “locked” elements in women and men who are not yet sexually experienced.

In Chapter 8 we find another image of the lad’s virginity, in a passage dealing with the role of the family, and the sisters in particular, in guarding their younger brother’s virginity:

We have a little brother, and he has no breasts: What shall we do for our brother on the day when he shall be spoken for? If he be a wall, we will build a fortress of silver upon him; and if he be a door, we will barricade him with a board of cedar. (Song of Songs, 8:8-9)

The sisters worry about their little brother’s status when it’s time for him to be spoken of in matrimony. They describe two possibilities for their little brother’s sexuality, put in two images, and decide what they will do whatever the case may be: If he’s as virginal as “a wall,” they will decorate him with silver jewelry as part of his betrothal to a woman. But if he’s sexually, like “a door” that opens and closes, they will seal him up in a board of cedar, which is to say, firmly encase him somehow. Here, too, the images are drawn from the mistaken conception of a feminine virginity in Torato. But now we are invited to ask ourselves, what, in our day, ought to be a family’s relationship to the sexuality of the individuals within it? What are the pluses and minuses of this kind of involvement? How, if at all, should it take place? Can there be involvement without abusing power relations?

Lovemaking

As in Toratah’s Five Books of Moshah, so in its Song of Songs the active sexual partner is the woman. She is the one who makes things happen, taking or receiving something from the man. Along the Song, their lovemaking is shown at times from her point of view, at times from his.

In chapter 2 verse 6, the beloved lad describes how his loved one holds him:

Her left is under my hand, and her right embraces me. In that same chapter (verse 15) there’s testimony to the women’s sexual activity in springtime: Hold for us the vixens, young vixens conceive from vineyards; for our vineyards have nascent fruit. The women are compared to she-foxes who are mechablot kramim; traditional translators have understood this as damaging or vandalizing the vineyards, but we understand it as conceiving from vineyards, as the men are compared to vineyards, whose fruits are just starting to bud. We arrive at this from the appearance elsewhere in the Song (8:5) of the identical root KH.B.L clearly meaning conceiving or giving birth. In other words, the women in the vineyards are getting themselves pregnant from the men, or their sexual organs, that bloom at last.

In Song 5:1, the woman declares: I came to my garden, my brother, my groom, I gathered my myrrh with my perfume; I ate my honeycomb with my honey; I drank my wine with my milk. Eat, girlfriends, drink and get drunk, loved ones. In this series of images she describes how she sexually acted upon the beloved male and invites her girlfriends to do the same (I hope, with beloved men of their own).

Throughout the Song, the desire, open and clear, is attributed chiefly to the female lover. The beloved male attests. in chapter 7, I am my beloved’s, and her desire is for me.

And he invites her to enjoy his fruit once they have both checked to see if he is ripe.

Go, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages. We will get up early to the vineyards; we will see if the vine has blossomed, if the nascent fruit show, if the pomegranates budded: there I will give you my lovings. (7:11-13)

Toratah offers a different moral judgment on women’s sexuality than that of Torato. In the Chumash of Toratah we have encountered women who have several husbands (for instance, Ta’akov has four men: Par, Ayil, Zilef and Ba’hel; the women in Deuteronomy 21, 10-14 who return from battle with a beautiful male captive, whom they have to let mourn his family before they take him for themselves; and more). The standards for women’s sexuality differ from those of the male, whose sexuality is passed from his mother’s domain to his wife’s. The Song of Songs of Toratah affirms the legitimacy of multiple men being available for one woman’s sexual pleasure; in describing the palanquin that Queen Shlomah prepared it seems for precisely that purpose: A palanquin queen Shloma made for herself, of the timbers of the Levanona. Its pillars, she made silver, its padding gold, its cushion crimson, the midst is inlaid with love, by the sons of Terushlema. (Song 3:9-10)

Toratah’s Song of Songs does indeed grant legitimacy to women’s celebrating their sexuality in broader ways than accustomed, but what I find interesting here isn’t necessarily adopting the standards of male sexuality, but the possibility of examining human sexual experience anew.

The poet Yonah Wallach, writes in her poem Shir Kedem Shnati (The Poem Before My Sleep)

They hint to us that there is a different kind of sex.
It’s good that somebody knows about it.
If there is a different kind of sex
Bring it here
And we will know it we’ll openly speak,
Is there, or isn’t.

Toratah’s Song of Songs is an opportunity to contemplate anew the human mating dance, the experience of activity and passivity in lovemaking, the lovers’ bodily limbs and what they awaken in us. The Song reopens the issue of social status of those who are sexually experienced and those who aren’t, the question of responsibility and involvement of family members in the sexuality of the individuals with it, and maybe in general, the place of sexuality in our lives.

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In Toratah’s Song of Songs, the beloved woman is drawn to her lover’s voice. She asks him again and again to sound his voice. In the next to last verse of the Song, that stays with us after we are done reading, she encourages him: The dweller in the garden, girlfriends are listening to your voice, let me hear you. (Song 8:13) But not all of us can hear, or sound out.

In 2010, at Beit Midrash Elul in Jerusalem, I studied the Song of Songs for a whole year. This was a magical year of precious Torah study. My Havruta was Ruchelah Dangour, of blessed memory, who was also the Director of Teatron Ch”am (The Deaf Performers’ Theatre), all of whose cast members were hearing-impaired, or deaf, aside from her.

For the presentation that all participants in the Elul Bait Midrash gave at the end of the year, Ruchaleh translated the entire Song of Songs into Israeli Sign Language. She, along with Eliyahu Gruman, a young actor from her theatrical troupe, presented the courtings of the Song of Songs, signing and mouthing them at the same time, so that we, the audience, would understand both languages. They wove into the Song of Songs contemporary Israeli Hebrew love songs, which they signed too, so the Song was presented as the story of the development of the role of love in the female lover’s life over time.

The idea was to return the Song of Songs to the body, to the original scene of events. I thought we would see a kind of closure to Jewish commentary on the Song over the centuries, taking leave of its allegorical dimensions. But what happened at the performance surprised me to the very bottom of my heart.

The Song was “read” through the body with the sensuality and aesthetics seemingly at the center. But at the very same time, the human emotion, and spirituality, were revealed with no less power. Human love, the love between humanity and the divine (whatever It may be), the beauty, the dedication, the seeking, were all present all at once in every level, without stepping on or blurring one another.

The language that Ruchaleh and Eliyahu spoke through their bodies was a different interpretive tool than the ones we know. The abstract concepts revealed themselves to be there in the body, and not in competition with it. Immanence and Transcendence didn’t exist in opposition to one another but as two sides, or expressions, of the same being, simultaneously alive. This was a true revelation. Expressing the Song in sign language uncovered the nuclear reactor of the connection between body and soul, (if using that kind of language that separates the two of them, is even worth it.)

“Holy of Holies” is how Rabbi Akiva called the Song of songs. That performance indeed made present a Holy of Holies rising above all the ideas of Holiness that I had known till then, that distinguished between Holy and Mundane, Spirit and Matter, Divinity and the World, etc. The model we were privileged to be exposed to, that day, laid down a different order of things, a sort of glimpse “behind the curtain” to the way in which existence really works.

May Ruchaleh’s memory be blessed.

(1)  For example, Ofra Haza, “Shir Ha-Shirim be-Sha’a’shuim” and Shimi Tavori, “Shechorah ve-Na’avah,” both at the 8th Mizrahi Song Festival, Hanukkah, 1977. 

(2) For example, Liova Almi, who cites the lovers’ examining the limbs before them in increasingly unbearable terms, as each limb one seeks in the other is maimed or missing; “Who is she rising from the desert like pillars of smoke? That is my sister, flesh-burned, rising from the oven.”

(3)  Giliad - a feminized form of the masculine order, or pray, Gil’ad - ‘be joyous forever!’ (traditionally translated as Gilead).

ADDENDUM

Ruchaleh’s family has kindly agreed to share with me this brief clip of her and Eliyahu’s rendering of Song of Songs.

If you would like to see more, please be in touch with me.