Shir haShirim - Finding and Keeping Love

Last week my husband and I went to spend a day with a psychologist who has made a career of helping men and women have more loving and lasting relationships. The room was filled with hundreds of people—some single, some young marrieds, some who had been married for twenty or thirty years. All had come because they found it hard, if not impossible, to sustain the intense feelings of romance that had pulled them together in the first place.

David Daida, our teacher, has written many books, recorded tapes, and developed workshops ranging from a few hours to many days in length. One of his basic ideas is that to feel romantic love, there must be one partner in masculine mode and one in feminine. Not necessarily a man and a woman, it could be two women or two men, but at any given moment the partners must be in opposite energetic poles. This is because we need a positive charge and a negative charge to attract: either two negatives or two positives will repel each other. People can change energies back and forth, but at any given moment, for a loving connection, one must be in masculine and one in feminine.

Our tradition of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, has taught this for thousands of years. In Kabbalah, masculine represents the energy of giving, and feminine the energy of receiving. This Shabbat, the one in the middle of the festival of Passover, is the time we focus on the beauties and challenges of finding and keeping love. To focus our attention on this theme, we read the most beautiful love poetry in the Biblical tradition—Shir HaShirim, the Song of Songs.

On the surface, these poems are love ballads, attributed to King Solomon.

Here are a few well known verses:

“Upon my couch at night I sought the one I love—I sought but found him not.” 3:1

“I was asleep, but my heart was awake. Hark, my beloved knocks.” 5:2

“I am my beloved’s (ani l’dodi) and my beloved is mine (v’dodi li).” 6:3

Because of the erotic nature of the poetry, and the fact that God’s name is never mentioned, Shir HaShirim nearly didn’t make it into the Hebrew Bible. What made it holy it in the eyes of our sages was an allegorical interpretation that saw the love relationship as a story of God, the lover, and Israel, the beloved. They saw it in an account of how God delivered her from Egypt, chose her to be His very own people, and gave her the precious gift of Torah. They saw in it the saga of Israel being close to God, drifting away, and being taken back.

In this allegory God is the masculine energy and we, Israel, are the feminine. When we are in this position of receiving we can feel God’s love. However, when God gave Torah, God gave us mitzvot to do—for God, and for other people. In this way, we can have the balance of being the active, masculine, giving energy, and God and the world can be the receivers.

To be balanced in love, we must give AND receive.

Beginning with the second Seder, and ending 50 days later with the festival of Shavuot, we have the mitzvah of counting the Omer. The omer was originally a measure of grain, but now counting the Omer by saying a blessing is a way of counting the days of spiritual preparation for receiving the Torah. This Shabbat is the fourth day of counting the omer. And so we say, Baruch Atah Adonai, Elohenu Melech HaOlam, Blessed are You, Our God, Ruler of the Universe, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav, Who has made us holy through Your commandments, vitzivanu al sefirat ha-omer, and commanded us to count the Omer. Hayom arba’ah yamim la’omer. This day is the fourth day of the Omer.

Counting the Omer teaches us that it is not enough to fall in love, to find love. We must be steady in our giving, to keep love.

May we be so blessed.