{"id":10376,"date":"2006-12-04T14:29:41","date_gmt":"2006-12-04T19:29:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2006\/12\/04\/10376.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:55:41","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:55:41","slug":"song-of-songs-some-general-tho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2006\/12\/04\/song-of-songs-some-general-tho\/","title":{"rendered":"Song of Songs: some general thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Well, and at Temple Beth Bolshoy today we finished our discussion of the Song of Songs. We’re going through it rather faster than I am here, which is a Good Thing. Anyway, I’ve made it through two chapters, reading closely, and I found myself wondering if I should continue. It’s clearly a topic that does not generate a lot of comments, and as the calendar year draws to a close, I find myself in one of my periodic crises of confidence about this Tohu Bohu, specifically, how to generate comments. Not that I want a hundred comments a note, far from that, but the thing that I have enjoyed the most about blogging these past three nearly four years is the occasional comment thread that really tugs at disagreements over basic ideas and their corollaries. We haven’t had one in a while (the thread started off an October 25th note Watch Your Language<\/a>, and before that the thread started off an August 22nd note Understanding, validating, disagreeing<\/a> were good examples), so I’ve been all cranky and self-pitying. So, (a) this is a plea for people to tell me how much they love me and how stale, flat and unprofitable the world would be if I stopped writing about the Song of Songs, or my Book Reports for that matter, and (2) this is an attempt to start a discussion with a few framing questions.\n

The framing questions: First, does the imposition of the analogy (either the Jewish Gd-and-Israel or the Catholic Christ-and-Church or the Protestant Christ-and-You) enhance or detract from a close reading? Given that the analogy is imposed after the fact (and if you don’t think they are, that’s interesting as well), can it help us read the text as Scripture<\/I>, or even if not, can it help us in our lives, to make ethical and spiritual choices? Or is it a distraction, and does the necessary eisegesis blind the reader to what is there? Can the text help us in our lives if we do reject the analogy, or does that reduce it to poetry, enjoyable perhaps in itself and a perhaps fruitful ground for literary analysis but not speaking to us with the voice of the Divine?\n

OK, another one: given that the text itself lacks a narrative, what narrative can you support imposing on the text in order to make sense of it? Do you see (as my Senior Rabbi sees) a triangle, where She rejects the King to cleave to her Shepherd? Or do you see only the Shepherd and the Lass, and no King, other than through the use of metaphoric images of royalty?\n

Third, then: Given the central figures of Bride and Groom, do you see this as an endorsement of passionate love? Are these just crazy kids with ants in their pants, or is there enough in the text to justify a sense that they will be happy together? In other words, if you put 6:3<\/a> on your ketubah<\/I>, or engrave it on your wedding ring, are you affirming that the love described in the Song of Songs is, in fact, a lasting love of the kind you are aiming at? Or, in other other words, do you think that the Bride and Groom, twenty years later, are still happy—and what do you find in the text to support that?\n

I’m asking these questions, not entirely because I want answers to them now, as comments to this note (where, to be clear, I do<\/I> want the sort of fulsome encouragement I discuss above), but because I think they are good framing questions for talking about the text itself, as I go through verse by verse. Those are some of the issues that we disagreed on around the table over the last several weeks; I would like to be, even temporarily, persuaded of another new view on them.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, and at Temple Beth Bolshoy today we finished our discussion of the Song of Songs. We\u2019re going through it rather faster than I am here, which is a Good Thing. Anyway, I\u2019ve made it through two chapters, reading closely,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10376"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17907,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10376\/revisions\/17907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}