Shir Hashirim, Song, Pesach and Religious Zionism

At no time in the Jewish calendar do we read as many songs as we do on Passover, especially on the 7th day of Passover. We read Shirat Hayam – the song Bnei Yisrael sang when they emerged from the Red Sea, which had split for them. We read in the Haftorah about the song King David sang when he established himself on his throne, no longer threatened by King Saul or anyone else; David sang a song to God. We read Hallel, which is referred to as Birkat Hashir, the “blessing of the song,” and the book of Shir Hashirim – The Song of Songs.

If you ask people what the definition of a song is, different people will give different answers. If you ask Bach or Mozart what a song is, you will get a very different answer than if you ask Edgar Allan Poe, Emma Lazarus, Naomi Shemer, or another great poet. If you speak to Mozart, he will speak to you of a beautiful tune, while speaking to Naomi Shemer might yield a beautifully worded poem.

So, which is a song? Is it the words or the music? What is it when the Torah speaks of song?

To answer this, we must turn to the beginning of Shirat Hayam, the song Moses and the children of Israel sang when they emerged from the Red Sea: “Then Moses and the children of Israel sang this song to the Lord, and they spoke, saying, I will sing to the Lord, for very exalted is He; a horse and its rider He cast into the sea.” (Shemot 15:1)

Commenting on this verse, Rashi explains the following: “Then…sang. Heb. אָז יָשִׁיר. [The future tense presents a problem. Therefore, Rashi explains:] Then, when he [Moses] saw the miracle, it occurred to him to recite a song… This is to explain its simple meaning, but the midrashic interpretation is [as follows]: Our Rabbis of blessed memory stated: From here is an allusion from the Torah to the resurrection of the dead (Sanh. 91b, Mechilta).” (text from Chabad.org)

Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, addresses the difficulty of why Shirat Hayam starts off with such mixed tenses – mixing past and future. The Maharal explains that a song is the product of a jolt to a person’s innermost part. A song is born when our soul is struck in a powerful way. When Moses saw the splitting of the Red Sea, his soul was struck. He and Bnei Yisrael were bound to sing at the moment they saw the sea split. Even if that song had not emerged yet, it was already destined to happen. The Torah says that “it was then that Moses would sing” in both past and future tenses, because seeing what Moses saw was the unstoppable spark to his upcoming song.

That is the definition of song. If you are a Mozart, it comes out in the form of music; if you are Naomi Shemer or Emma Lazarus, it might come out in the form of words; either way, it is an expression of the depths of our soul being struck.

This song can emerge when something as miraculous as the splitting of the sea happens, or something as powerful as King David emerging victorious against all of his enemies. Yet there is another song that emerges from the soul – one that is not sparked by a once-in-a-lifetime miracle. This song is the Song of Songs – Shir Hashirim. On Passover, we read about the love between God and the Jewish people in a metaphor of a loving couple. The song is one of love and longing, but also of turbulence and difficulty.

“On my bed at night, I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him but I did not find him.” (Shir Hashirim 3:1)

“I opened for my beloved, but my beloved had hidden and was gone; my soul went out when he spoke; I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he did not answer me. The watchmen who patrol the city found me; they smote me and wounded me; the watchmen of the walls took my jewelry off me. I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, what will you tell him? That I am lovesick. What is your beloved more than another beloved, O fairest of women? What is your beloved more than another beloved, that you have so adjured us?” (Shir Hashirim 5)

While song can emerge from the depths of our soul at the crux of the most elevating moments, when it comes to love and romance, song is there through every part of the process. Shir Hashirim is not just a song about the good times of love; it is also about the difficulties, the internal and the external challenges, the passion, and the disappointments.

The Jewish people in our personal and national life also see these different types of song. There are moments that we feel are as miraculous as the splitting of the sea or the victories of David, after which we would want to sing a song of praise to God. Yet mostly what we experience throughout our lifetimes are moments of Shir Hashirim – love, yearning, challenges, disappointments, missing one another, external challengers, and everything else described in Shir Hashirim.

The Mishna in Tractate Yadayim (3:5) deals with the question of what Jewish texts are included in the Jewish Biblical canon. To preserve the sanctity of scripture, the rabbis made a rule that anyone who touches one of the books of the Holy Scripture must wash their hands because they are considered “defiled” until one washes their hands. The debate goes as follows:

“All the Holy Scriptures defile the hands. The Song of Songs and Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) defile the hands. Rabbi Judah says: the Song of Songs defiles the hands, but there is a dispute about Kohelet. Rabbi Yose says: Kohelet does not defile the hands, but there is a dispute about the Song of Songs. Rabbi Shimon says: [the ruling about] Kohelet is one of the leniencies of Beit Shammai and one of the stringencies of Beit Hillel. Rabbi Shimon ben Azzai said: I have received a tradition from the seventy-two elders on the day when they appointed Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah head of the academy that the Song of Songs and Kohelet defile the hands. Rabbi Akiva said: Far be it! No man in Israel disputed the Song of Songs [saying] that it does not defile the hands. For 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. If they had a dispute, they had a dispute only about Kohelet.”

The same Rabbi Akiva who endured the worst possible Roman persecution was the one who understood that our relationship with God is a song that is not always like the song of the splitting of the sea, or David’s victory over all of his enemies. Rabbi Akiva understood that our ongoing relationship with God is one that resembles a passionate yet complicated relationship with ups and downs and challenges from within and from outside the relationship.

In 1956, Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik first delivered a lecture, and then wrote it up as a famous essay called Kol Dodi Dofek, which means “my beloved one is knocking,” inspired by the verse in Shir Hashirim (5:2):
“I sleep, but my heart is awake. Hark! My beloved is knocking: Open for me, my sister, my beloved, my dove, my perfect one, for my head is full of dew, my locks with the drops of the night.”

Rabbi Soloveitchik explains his theological journey away from the less Zionist Agudath Israel to the more Zionist Mizrachi movement. He explains the covenant of faith and covenant of fate Jews share with one another, what a proper theological response to the Holocaust might be, and how we must see God in the miracle of the birth of the State of Israel.

Rabbi Soloveitchik and his generation had seen the worst horror in Jewish history – the Holocaust. Yet there was something else that his generation and the next generation had seen and lived through – the miracle of the State of Israel. They saw the State of Israel born, the gathering of the Diaspora with millions of Jews moving to our sacred ancestral homeland. They saw the 1956 victory in Sinai, the miracles of 1967, and even in 1973 Israel successfully simultaneously repelled the Egyptian and Syrian armies. They saw that Kol Dodi Dofek, “my beloved one knocking.”

Today, a new generation has not seen the same highs that our parents saw. We do not sing the song of the splitting of the sea, or the song of David emerging victorious from all of his enemies.

Today’s generation sings the song of Shir Hashirim often, but it does not live the life of singing the song of the splitting of the sea or David’s victory. Today’s Jews live a life that embodies the complexity of Shir Hashirim, with the challenges of relationships, internal and external foes, and much more. Does that mean there are no miracles? Does that mean there is no love? Not at all. It means the relationship is not simple.

Sadly, we are seeing today many rabbis and leaders from the Religious Zionist world moving in the opposite direction of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s journey. Looking at the hardships and isolation that Israel has endured in the past year or two, they conclude there is no song to be sung, no great miracle to be celebrated, and they retreat to a pessimistic view that has a hard time celebrating the miracle called Israel.

Yet while current events are very different than the miracles surrounding the establishment of the State of Israel, Kibbutz Galuyot with millions of Jews moving to Israel, and the Six-Day War, that does not mean there is no song to be sung. The reason Rabbi Akiva says that all Songs are holy but Shir Hashirim is “Holy of Holies” is because the ultimate song between God and the Jewish people is not the song of unprecedented miracles; the ultimate song between us and God is the song of an ongoing relationship that has its euphorias, and its heartbreaks, its blissfulness, and its difficulties, moments of joy, and moments of pain. Regardless of what happens, the song is about the relationship that continues despite it all, because that is the greatest miracle of all.

While the miracle of Israel is no longer the establishment of Israel and the miracles that came with its birth, the miracle is Israel’s ongoing existence and its ability to thrive despite the many challenges that face it. Israel is able to be a home to over seven million Jews, an unprecedented number of synagogues, day schools, and institutions of Torah study, and proudly stand against its enemies.

Passover is a time of song; we sing of miracles, but we also sing about our ongoing relationship with God. There are times we celebrate the song of great miracles, while the essence of our relationship with God depends on the day-to-day nature of the Shir Hashirim kind of relationship – one that knows ups and downs, yet always retains its strong commitment.