by Eugene Korn
Special To The Jewish Week

Because Eros saturates so much of modern culture, many religious Jews have pushed sexuality, the body and love into the dark background of Jewish life. Orthodox men don black as a hallmark of their identity and Orthodox women embrace austerely modest dress as indicators of their piety. Haredi men and women commonly approach their wedding halls from separate entrances and it would seem that mingling between the sexes is forbidden even after death, since some groups have separate cemetery areas for the graves of husbands and wives. Love has disappeared from religious discourse and even innocuous expressions of affection between men and women are public taboo. The body and its pleasures have become things to be hidden and feared, or at best ignored.

These trends easily foster a belief that physical love and spiritual striving are natural enemies and convey a suspicious attitude toward love. Rabbi Dr. Naftali Rothenberg of the Van Leer Institute of Jerusalem explores another religious approach to these issues in “The Wisdom of Love: Man, Woman and God in Jewish Canonical Literature” (Academic Studies Press, 2009). He finds that the Bible, Talmud, Midrash and halacha (Jewish law) devote considerable attention to love and that much of rabbinic tradition treats love’s spiritual and physical aspects without inhibition. His study exposes a cognitive dissonance between what the Jewish canon says and what we expect our holy texts to say. The book celebrates love as a classical rabbinic ideal, and it is as rare as it is refreshing: scholarly, yet eminently readable; spiritual, yet sober.

Rothenberg believes that the rabbis concluded that love is the source of wisdom and the driving life force that animates the world God created for us. Through the exclusive and disciplined love between a man and a woman we can begin to achieve spiritual wholeness, understand how to love God and how to approach our neighbor with empathy and responsibility. It is no accident that Jewish tradition repeatedly invokes the carnal passion between men and women as the most powerful metaphor for a Jew’s love of God. It also uses the model of intensely loving spouses to convey the intimacy between God and the Jewish people. Rather than blush at the eroticism of Solomon’s Song of Songs, the rabbis made it a holy text and told Jews to study it carefully.

Rothenberg cogently documents how the Bible and Jewish commentators rejected the Greek philosophical tradition of denigrating sexual coupling and how Jewish law parted ways with Augustine and much of Christian theology when halacha rejected the idea that the spirit and the body are locked in permanent warfare for mastery over our personalities. For the rabbis, it is the harmonious unification — not irreconcilable dualism — of body and spirit, of male and female, of God and humanity that forms the religious ideal.

Rothenberg is not afraid to admit that some Midrashim and rabbinic commentary borrowed from Greek and Roman culture. But the rabbis often deftly transformed these texts to shape a unique Jewish truth. They read the Greek androgyne myth (that humans were originally created with male and female sexual characteristics combined in one body) into the biblical story of human creation found in chapters 1, 2 and 5 of Genesis. Clearly they were responding to Greek mythology about sexuality and Plato’s musings on love found in his “Symposium.” According to Plato, the gods split the androgyne into separate male and female persons to punish human rebellion and arrogance. Hence the desire for sexual (re)unification assumed a negative cast, and adultery, lust and sin became the inevitable results of human coupling.
For ancient rabbis, medieval kabbalists and Renaissance writers like Judah Abarbanel, however, God split androgynous Adam and created Eve to relieve Adam’s loneliness and to allow satisfying physical contact between the sexes who could now reunite through their love and desire. Loving is repair, and it is constructive and God-like: It is the source of new life that extends divine creation and keeps God’s Image in the world. This is why the rabbis taught that “One who does not engage in procreation diminishes the Divine Presence,” and kabbalists believed that when done properly the unification of man and woman through sexual intercourse is a holy act that mirrors the unification of God.

Rothenberg paints a fascinating extended portrait of Rabbi Akiva, the most influential personality in Talmudic literature. Akiva is “the sage of love” who became a Torah giant out of his tender passion for the beautiful young Rachel (poignantly described in the Talmud). He ruled on many occasions that acts encouraging love between husband and wife overruled rabbinic ritual prohibitions, and his understanding of love shaped his halachic decisions on marriage and divorce. It was Akiva who rescued The Song of Songs from oblivion: “If the other biblical books are holy, The Song of Songs is The Holy of Holies.” Such was Akiva’s greatness that his rabbinic colleagues and subsequent Jewish tradition have followed him ever since on these issues.

Rothenberg’s love is not one of lust or permissiveness but of deep commitment to the personhood of those we love. On traditional grounds he argues for marriage being essential to spiritual development (for the rabbis, “a man without a woman is but a half-person”), for monogamy as the biblical and Talmudic ideal, for the positive value of sexual satisfaction and for balance between the hedonistic and ascetic life. Though no feminist, Rothenberg perceptively sees in full reciprocal love the ideal of the end to male exclusivity and superiority.

At first blush it is tempting to take Rothenberg’s paean to love lightly — perhaps as some tendentious new-age interpretation of Judaism and its rabbis. Yet Rothenberg presents his arguments and robust scholarship much too carefully for this assumption to stand. In the face of Rothenberg’s analysis it is clear that our skepticism is more a function of our cognitive dissonance than of knowing Jewish tradition adequately. Both Jews and Judaism deserve better than skepticism, and we have Rothenberg to thank for pointing us back to a healthy understanding of romantic love and the positive role it should play in our lives.

Eugene Korn is editor of Meorot-A Forum for Modern Orthodox Discourse and American director of the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation in Efrat, Israel.