For over a month, Iranian missiles have been falling on Israel. Schools have been closed. My kids have been home, day after day, the walls of the house closing in a little more each week. When my in-laws offered to take us away for Shabbat — a hotel by the Mediterranean, a change of scenery — we didn’t think twice.
Friday afternoon, we went down to the beach. The kids ran to the water. We stood at the edge, waves breaking around our feet, and for a few minutes, the war felt far away. Then my phone buzzed: a warning of a potential incoming missile launch. We gathered the kids and moved inside.
That Shabbat, as every Shabbat of Passover, we read the Song of Songs.
Most people know the book as a love poem — the most celebrated love poem in the Bible, a dialogue between a man and a woman aching for each other across distance and longing. The Sages, of course, understood it as something more: an allegory for the love between God and Israel, written in the register of human longing because no other language could hold what it was trying to say. Rabbi Akiva, who fought to include it in the canon, called it the holiest of all writings.
Standing at the Mediterranean on Passover, I thought about one verse in particular.
Near the end of the book, after all the longing and searching and reunion, the beloved makes a declaration:
It is one of the most striking lines in the entire Bible. Love, the poem insists, is not fragile. It does not drown. The waters rise, and it remains.
The Sages explain what those waters are. They are the waters of the Yam Suf — the Red Sea. When Israel stood at the shore with Egypt bearing down from behind, the sea itself resisted. It did not want to split. And yet it had no choice, because love cannot be quenched by water. The sea could hold back everything except that.
The Sages elsewhere teach that when God created the sea, He made a condition with it: that one day, it would part for Israel. The splitting of the sea was not an emergency measure, a last-minute miracle improvised under pressure. It was written into creation from the beginning, encoded into the water before a single Israelite had been born, before the slavery had started, before anyone knew there would be an Exodus at all.
“Many waters cannot quench love.” The waters didn’t simply fail to extinguish love when Israel stood at the shore — they were never going to succeed. The outcome was settled at creation. Love came first.
We read Song of Songs on Passover not as a change of subject but as a deeper look at the same one. The holiday is about freedom, yes — but freedom was never the point in itself. It was the precondition for love. God did not redeem Israel to make them free. He redeemed them to make them His.
When my phone buzzed with that missile warning, I was standing in the sea of the same God who encoded the Exodus into the waters at creation. The missiles, the sirens, the month of closed schools — none of it is outside His attention. Many waters cannot quench love. That was true at the Yam Suf, and it is still true now, on this shoreline, in this war.
No siren came. We walked back to the water’s edge, and that evening we read the Song of Songs.
