I'm with you as you're with me

Song of Songs 6:3

“The love celebrated in the Song of Songs may be understood as simultaneously natural and spiritual. It is no accident that every mystical tradition on earth speaks of God as the Beloved, and that everyone in love sees the beloved’s face and form as holy. If elsewhere we must divide the ‘sacred’ from the ‘secular’, this division is annihilated in the Song of Songs.”

Alicia Ostreiker, writing in “A feminist Companion to the Bible” names what’s at the heart of this song and why it resonates for so many on so many levels.

This fusion of ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ is perhaps found in its most essential form in one of the verses of today’s chapter that begins in the garden, fragrant with senses and sounds.

Where has your beloved gone? She is asked by friends who offer to help her find him. He’s in the garden, she replies, and he is picking roses.

Or lilies. It depends again on how translators make sense of biblical botany and the metaphor meaning of every word and wink in this verse, and the one that follow, of sizable fame:

אֲנִי לְדוֹדִי וְדוֹדִי לִי הָרֹעֶה בַּשּׁוֹשַׁנִּים׃

I am my beloved’s

And my beloved is mine;

A shepard, there among the roses.

Song of Songs 6:3

The symmetry in the first two lines of the verse speak of lovers’ mutuality, and it’s therefore not surprising that these words are popular at weddings -- shared by couples during their Jewish wedding vows, enhancing Ketubahs - Jewish wedding covenant, and with a few dance hits that quote these ancient lyrics.

It’s so popular in fact that even soccer super star David Beckham and his wife Victoria - also of Posh Spice fame - both got this verse tattooed on their bodies in 2005.

Jewish mystical tradition took this love-line in a slightly different though similar direction.

The four Hebrew words Ani L’Dodi V’Dodi Li are read as an acronym for ELUL - the final and sacred month of the Jewish year, during which one prepares for the new year rituals of atonement with extra spiritual care, return to center, and super-size love of all that matters most. The month of Elul has become its own sort of love duet - between each person and the sacred source - a divine-human dialogue.

Maimonides, in Laws of Repentance gets quite poetic on this question - reflecting on what it means to be as love-sick for God as one obsessed with another human:

“And what is the proper love? One shall love God with an exceeding great and very strong love so that his soul be tied to the love of God, finding oneself in a constant tremor, as if one were suffering of lovesickness, when one’s mind is free because of love for that beloved, as if for a woman, being continuously agitated about her, whether one is sitting down, or whether one is standing up, even when one is eating and drinking. More than this should the love for God be in the heart of those who love God, meditating therein constantly, even as God commanded us: "With all you heart and with all your soul" (Ibid.). This is what Solomon allegorically said: "For I am love-sick" (Songs 2.5). And, the whole book, Song of Songs, is an allegory on this subject.”

Whether erotic or mystical, embodied or imagined - this longing for love in its fullest sense of relational presence is at the core of every sacred path and spiritual tradition. Even if belief in God is not one’s choice - the choice to live with and for love is one of the enduring and important ways for us to not lose sight of what is sacred and worth living for.

In his monumental memoir and psycho-spiritual manifesto, “Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl wrote on a massive moment during his time in the camps in which he deeply understood love - right inside the heart of hate:

“A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth —that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honourable way— in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.”

Spiritual, sexual, erotic, emotional, mystical and magical - the yearning for the field of flowers in which love lives is the ongoing search, the endless song, perpetual presence, a dance that keeps on dancing us with all our complex longings, all the way home.

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