Seeking Ferret

A continuing series, as I look at the subtle ways Artscroll has of positioning itself theologically on issues related to Orthodox feminism. See the previous parts here:Part 1 and Part 2

Shir Hashirim, the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon, is a famously challenging book for conventional Orthodox Judaism. Its inclusion in the canon was debated at length in the Talmud. This is partly because it verges on pornographic, but honestly that's not too huge a concern. There's lots of adult content in the Bible. The real concern is that it's not explicitly about God, it's about the relationship between a man and a woman. It's a love poem, demonstrably part of a long tradition of such poetry in the region, but it's not clear what its theological significance is. This is a big problem and traditional Judaism has generally solved it by claiming that the love described in the poem is that between Israel and God. Traditionally, Shir HaShirim and Shemos (Exodus) are the two major statements of God's special relationship with his Chosen Nation. Of course, this is yet another reason Shir HaShirim is challenging- Chosenness is not an easy thing to understand. Chosenness is really inexplicable and difficult, one of the great knots of struggle at the heart of Judaism. Why would an omnipotent, omniscient deity with a plan for all humanity single out one small nation for a special relationship of love and shared suffering?

Of course, Jews grow up with it. Both Shir HaShirim and Chosenness. It can be easy to take it for granted, to incorporate our relationship with Chosenness into our general sense of the Mesorah that constantly surrounds us and offers inspiration. But I've found that for me, becoming a Grown Up Jew involves a lot of internal struggle with those concepts, and I'm nowhere near comfortable with my answers yet. But Artscroll? Artscroll is no help at all.

Their translation of Shir HaShirim in the Stone Chumash is terrible. They made the decision that they weren't going to present the text to you. Instead, they were going to translate it according to the Jewish traditional interpretation, no matter how much they had to distort the plain meaning of the words. This is... I made that comment about becoming a Grown Up Jew mostly facetiously, but this is clearly whatever the opposite of Grown Up Judaism is. This is spoonfed Judaism at its worst. And no place is it more glaring than in Chapter 7, Verse 4. King James gives us "Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins." Artscroll gives us "Your twin sustainers, the Tablets of the Law, are like two fawns, twins of the gazelle." The verse speaks of, in the Hebrew, "Shnei Shadayich." - Your two breasts. We traditionally read it metaphorically as a reference to the Two Tablets of the Law, but we read it metaphorically that way. We look at a verse about her breasts, interpret it according to our tradition, and then ask the question: What does it mean to compare breasts to the Tablets of Law? What kind of relationship are we expected to have with the Sh'nei Luchot and how does it compare to the relationship we have with the Shnei Shadayim of a lover? We can't ask those intelligent, theologically essential questions from Artscroll's translation. We're handed an answer pre-made and pre-interpreted and it comes to us devoid of all meaning.

And of course it's only in Shir HaShirim where we see that, to bring this back to "Adventures in Artscroll Feminism". They wouldn't dream of translating Ezekiel metaphorically, would they? No, Ezekiel's message is transmitted word for word, no matter how ludicrous it would be to take it at its face value. Obviously Ezekiel too is all metaphor about God's promise of salvation. But Shir HaShirim has a lot to teach about a woman's power, and translating it according to its metaphoric meaning is a powerfully effective way of denying femininity its place in Judaism.

I'm cynical about a lot of the contemporary justifications for the traditional role of women in Judaism, which typically involves running the household and raising the children while males are responsible for leading the family and providing for the family. I'm skeptical about the notion that women don't need to pray as often because they are naturally at a higher spiritual plane. It's clear that the exemption is a practical one. The traditional prayer times would be inconvenient for a woman with household responsibilities, and so the Rabbis decided that they should prioritize those household tasks over prayer. And in modern society, many observant women have decided that just as they overcome the inconvenience of managing (or ideally sharing) household responsibilities to hold jobs outside the home as well, they can also overcome the inconvenience to attend prayer services even though the exemption still holds. This remains laudable and it remains constrained by Judaism's traditional gender roles, which are unavoidable and deserve confrontation. Judaism offers many reasons for its traditional gender role system, from some contrived punishment for Eve's sin to contemporary biological explanations about the evolutionary mandates for the survival of the species. None of these should be taken as the exclusive explanation, and I don't believe any of them should be taken as entirely unproblematic. On the other hand, I know many, many women who have found happiness, comfort, and power within the constraints of the system. Constraints are not always bad. In fact, if someone asked me to stand on one foot and recite the whole Torah, I think I could do worse than to just say "Constraints are not always bad."

But my point is that though I'm leery of a lot of the way we understand traditional gender roles for women in contemporary Orthodox society, I like the way we understand Shir HaShirim. Shir HaShirim, despite its oddities, makes a huge amount of sense to me as part of the canon. It's something I look forward to reading on Passover. It's something I have found ways of incorporating into several of my stories. One of my Jessicas eagerly anticipates Passover as a time when she can read love poetry and dream of Lorenzo without rousing her Shylock's suspicions. The words of the song find their way onto Malca Palache's tongue as she follows her husband into a dangerous melee. Because the secret? The secret is that just as we can learn a lot about our intended relationship with God by considering the relationship of a husband and wife, so too can we learn a lot about the relationship between a husband and wife by considering our relationship with God. Shir Hashirim teaches us to pursue ecstasy in our personal lives, not merely in our religious lives. It teaches us that we are of the world, imperfect, flawed, and all the more beautiful because of it. It teaches us that earning the love of a woman, or the love of a man, is a sacred task. It teaches us that the relationship between a man and a woman is a partnership, built on love and admiration, that requires both parties to share in the work.

And Artscroll didn't take Shir Hashirim and spoonfeed a particular interpretation of it because it was worried about the sexual content. It did it because it wanted to keep that tradition out of the hands of its readers. It wanted to keep all that subverts the patriarchy in Shir Hashirim and hide it away from its readers, because it doesn't trust them with the wisdom of King Solomon. But the joke's on them. Artscroll renders Deuteronomy 29:28 as "The hidden [sins] are for Hashem, our God, but the revealed [sins] are for us and our children forever, to carry out all the words of the Torah." And much as they try to shift the meaning of the verse with their parenthetical additions, sin has no place in that sentence. The verse is one of the rare ones that isn't about our deeds, but rather about our thoughts. We don't know which interpretation of Shir Hashirim is correct, but the nistarot, the hidden truths, belong to Hashem, our God. Eventually the day will come when he will reveal to us what we need to know. In the meantime, we must open ourselves to all interpretations, not shelter ourselves in the one that makes us feel safest because it limits us.