Rabbi Akiva, one of the greatest sages of the Talmud, made a statement about the Song of Songs that is worth sitting with. He said: “All the writings are holy. But the Song of Songs is the holy of holies.” The entire Hebrew Bible is holy. The Ten Commandments are holy. The creation of the world is holy. The prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah are holy. And yet Rabbi Akiva looks at this slim, strange, breathtakingly intimate book of love poetry and says: this one. This is the holiest of all. Most people who encounter the Song of Songs for the first time do not know what to do with it. It is sensuous, it is mysterious, and on the surface it reads like exactly what it appears to be: two young lovers, longing for each other, searching for each other, finding and losing each other. Some rabbis wanted to leave it out of the Bible entirely. Rabbi Akiva fought to keep it in. And he won. He won because he understood something that is easy to miss: the most important relationship in existence looks, from the outside, like a love story.
In today’s Bible Month conversation, Rabbi Mark Fishman unpacks what lies beneath the surface of this misunderstood book. The beloved in the poem is God. The maiden searching for him is Israel. This is not a modern interpretation. It is the classical Jewish understanding, rooted in the Talmud, in Rashi, in the Zohar. The love described here is covenantal love, the eternal bond between God and His people.
Not a legal contract. Not a transactional arrangement. A relationship of mutual belonging, the way two people who truly love each other belong to one another completely.
But the Song of Songs does not stay in the easy moments.
To walk with God is to walk in a relationship of searching for Him. The spiritual search is not only for those who have not yet found God. It is the constant experience of those who have. And then the book goes further still.
The sages teach that God withdraws so that we will seek Him more deeply. Distance is not abandonment. It is an invitation. As the Zohar teaches, divine love is fueled by longing. The absence intensifies the love.
I want to offer one more thought. In 1956, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, known as the Rav, one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the modern era, wrote a landmark essay and titled it with a phrase straight out of the Song of Songs: Kol Dodi Dofek, the voice of my beloved knocks. The verse appears in chapter 5
The Rav took that image and applied it to the Jewish people in his own time. His argument was this: the founding of the State of Israel, the miraculous return of the Jewish people to their homeland after two thousand years of exile and persecution, was not a political accident or a historical coincidence. It was God knocking on the door of history. The same beloved who seemed hidden through centuries of darkness was now making Himself unmistakably heard. The question the Rav posed to his generation, and to every generation since, is not whether God is there. It is whether we are paying attention.
Kol dodi dofek. The voice of my beloved knocks.
This Father’s Day, that question is worth sitting with. A father’s love is one of the closest human parallels to the love described in the Song of Songs: constant, enduring, present even through distance and silence. Dads, do you know this book? Do you know the God whose love for His children makes your own feel like a reflection of something much larger?
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