Sex and sensuality in a scriptural tradition?
If asked to give an example of an ancient spiritual literature that vividly explores and richly celebrates eros and intimacy, most Westerners today probably would point to the Kama Sutra of Hinduism or perhaps the Tantric teachings of Buddhism--often without knowing much at all about the substance of those traditions.
The idea of sexual experience as something discussed frankly and embraced deliciously in a religious legacy is an exotic notion to many Jews and Christians. If such an attitude exists anywhere at all in the realm of religion, many in the West suppose, it must be elsewhere, in distant lands and obscure writings, not close to home, not in our own Bible.
It is not quite right to say that the Judeo-Christian world has overlooked a treasure of exquisite sensuality in the Song of Songs. After all, the book can be found in every printing of the Bible, in every synagogue and church, in every library and school, not to mention most North American hotel rooms. Moreover, the Song of Songs has found a vibrant life at the heart of vivid and poignant, even passionate mystical teachings, Jewish and Christian.
Yet it is true to say that the Western world has for centuries swept the overt meaning and the essential power of the Song of Songs under a thick carpet of allegorical and often even puritanical interpretations. If it is true that thoughts of religion are far more likely to make Jews and Christians feel that there is something shameful or bad about their bodies than to bring to mind the words, "All of you is beautiful, my love, there is no flaw in you," then we have all but lost the Song of Songs.
It is well past time to reclaim this treasure.
In the West, we tend not to teach about physical connection when we try to cultivate spiritual wisdom--or we teach about it only in negations. This is a truly dangerous omission and a hazard, because it means that we forget to teach our children and ourselves the most essential spiritual truth about sexual intimacy: that it is an awesome and ultimately revelatory gift, which can only truly be given in freedom, in courage and in trust, and can only truly be received in love.
The lovers of the Song of Songs knew this truth--and they knew all too well the consequences of its being forgotten. Their society, like our own, mistook intimacy for a commodity to be bought and sold, even taken forcibly. Their society, like our own, responded to the wild and disarming power of sex with fear and with suspicion. In their world as in our own, the voices of social and religious authority had forgotten how to speak the revelations of intimacy. It was at those stakes, and amid very real dangers, that the Song of Songs dared to articulate sexual strength, female and male, and vulnerability, male and female--the truths of the physical aspect in love.
Now, as then, we are more at risk than we are safe when physicality is stigmatized and demonized. When the sexual is silenced and driven to the margins and the shadows then violence and abuse become more and not less likely. Privacy is one thing--with the shared freedom it affords for intimacy--but a society in which sex is treated as though it were in and of itself illicit is not a safe place.
The female lover who speaks in the verses of the Song of Songs knows this danger in her own life, and she needs her male partner to understand her experience. She needs him to know how it is for her in the public places of the world his male society has shaped, what is at risk for her in sensuality and in love.
For his part, the male lover of the Song of Songs dares to tell his female partner a truth that sexual violence in their world as in our own times, aims to mask: that as a sexual being she is a force unto herself, awesome, autonomous, even sometimes frightening to him.
The Song of Songs is a miracle in writing. It is nothing less than a wonder that the Bible bequeaths to us a book of such astounding truthfulness and daring. Allegorical interpretation secured for the Song of Songs a place in the biblical canon--but I can only believe that a divine wisdom knew that we would need this book, in all its truth, to recognize fully the blaze of God in our own lives.
--Jonah Steinberg
Rabbi Jonah Steinberg is Associate Dean and Director of Academic Development and Advising at the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College.