Seeking and Finding: Song of Songs and Physical Intimacy in the Modern Long Term Marriage

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Friday, April 25, 2008

We live in a world where sexually explicit material is hard to avoid. Magazine advertisements are often sexually charged and sit-coms operate at the edge of innuendo. Yet despite the charged atmosphere in our society, one very popular topic of television talk shows and newspaper articles is the lack of physical intimacy in today’s long term marriages. This is variously attributed to people being too busy, too stressed, too involved in child rearing or just too tired. As work consumes more and more of people’s time and energy, it is suggested, there’s no energy left even for this very basic human activity.

A colleague of mine, with whom I worked in New York, suggests that these explanations don’t tell the whole story and that another dynamic is at work in the modern marriage. Her name is Esther Perel, and her recent book is Mating in Captivity. I met her when she was working as a therapist for Jewish Family Services in New York City in the area of inter-racial and intercultural marriage. For several years we lead groups together for intermarried couples and when I left New York, she went on to do programs for the 92nd street Y. Born and raised in Europe to parents she calls not survivors, but revivers, she was a very skilled group leader, who gently and quietly helped deepen our conversations. Part of what she talks about in her book is the conflict between the desire for security and the need to maintain some separateness in healthy relationships. Some of what she suggests in the book about mystery in marriage seemed very European to me, but some of it brought to mind the poetry of Song of Songs, the section of the Bible which is traditionally read on Passover.

Song of Songs is a very controversial book, both because it seems to celebrate sensuality and the pleasures of nature, and because there is no real agreement about what the book is about. Some read it as a love poem between King Solomon and a country bride, others see King Solomon as an outsider observing two country lovers, and still others believe that it is meant as entertainment for an ancient wedding feast or perhaps even more radically, an ancient fertility rite. One contemporary scholarly view is that it is a collection of unrelated lyric poems, though of course theologians beginning with Rabbi Akivah and including many Christian notables, have argued that the essence of the poem is an allegory about the love of God.

Martin Buber and Franz Rosensweig began a Jewish translation of the book into German in 1925, but unfortunately the war intervened, and by the time Buber finished in 1961, there was little German Jewish readership to respond to his work. In the non-hierarchical relations between the sexes in this text, Buber found examples of his I-Thou.

Everyone agrees that a major theme of the poems is seeking and finding, both the female of the male and the male of the female. As Marica Falk points out, the tension of being separated heightens the excitement of the anticipated reunion; the conflict between the lovers seems to intensify their feelings for each other; their love, which binds them together, also allows them also to stand alone. The poems reflects three stances- beckoning the beloved, banishing the beloved and searching for the beloved and also struggles to express what is so difficult to explain, love itself. Perhaps the religious allegories are not so completely off base, as surely one aspect of religious life is the sense of God’s presence and absence, and the challenge of expressing the ineffable.

Some scholars feel certain by the rhythms of the words that these poems were indeed songs, and though we no longer have records of their ancient melodies, they have invited new compositions in every generation. This evening the cantor and choir will share with us the settings of several texts from the Song of Songs, by contemporary American and Israeli composers.