The book of the Song of Songs is read in the synagogue during the Passover and on Friday evenings. The absence of any overt religious references in it, together with its erotic imagery, has led many modern readers and scholars to regard the Song as a collection of secular love poems. At the end of the 1st century, during the debates around the canonization of the Bible, there were also rabbis who saw no reason for including these poems. It was Rabbi Akiba’s influence that carried the verdict. Not only was it a Holy Book, he argued, but the holiest, for it was an expression of the love binding the Community of Israel to God. The Church has similarly claimed that the poem is an allegory of love. But the following commentary from Rav Kuk brings out what seems to me to be the uniquely Jewish approach to the Song. The Church tends to disallow the meaning of the poem on any but a religious level. Rabbi Akiba, according to Rav Kuk’s interpretation, readily accepts the poem as an expression of secular love, but holds that this is only part of its meaning. For Akiba and for Judaism, implies Rav Kuk, love is one flame expressing itself on many different levels. To diminish the flame on any one level is to weaken the capacity of love on all levels. Rav Kuk calls upon the many-faceted life of Rabbi Akiba as proof of his argument—the Akiba whose experience ranged from a tradition-breaking romance with his employer’s daughter, to torture and death by the Romans for his political and religious activities.

The greatness of Abraham Isaac Kuk, former Chief Rabbi of Palestine, was his own ability to function effectively on many levels, political, legalistic, mystical, etc.; as a consequence, his religious responses took on a deeper resonance, which seems to me especially evident in this excerpt taken from Rav Kuk’s commentary to the Sabbath Prayer Book. The translation from the Hebrew is my own.—Herbert Weiner

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Rabbi Akiba said, “All the world is not worth as much as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all the Scriptures are holy but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies.”

So, too, he whose heart is uncircumcised because he has not yet known the high reaches of holy thoughts, nor tasted the sweetness of love for the Rock of All the Worlds, such an ignorant and unwise man cannot conceive that the throng of yearnings which fill the Song of Songs comes out of a treasure stored up in the soul of the entire people that was chosen by God for His sake and His witness, for he does not feel the absence of what he has not known.

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But he who has not been forgotten by God in His wisdom will recognize, and will sense, that it would have been impossible for the treasure of the Holy Writings of the holy people whose saga is permeated with the soul’s love for its Rock and Fortress, expressed, in the days of the people’s greatness, in deeds of grace and glory, and in the days of its poverty and afflictions, in rivers of blood, all quickening love, strengthening it, making it visible and felt—

It would have been unthinkable that these yearnings of love toward God should remain unrecorded in the Book, the great compilation of all our holy meditations.

True, only he who at the moment when they were tearing his flesh with iron combs called out, “All my life I was troubled about the commandment to love God with my whole soul, asking, when shall I be able to fulfill it?” [by dying for the sanctification of His name]—

Only he could say, “All the world is not worth as much as the day on which the Song of Songs was given, for all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies.”

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As a drop of water from the ocean, as a spark from the flame of fire reaching to the heart of heaven, as one letter of a thick and mighty book, so are man’s expressions of earthly love esteemed also by this lofty soul. For him, Rabbi Akiba, a personal pure love, the love of his people, and the divine and holy love, were intertwined like “the tower of David, layer upon layer.”

But how low are the pygmies, crawling about the lowest levels of the mist-wrapped tower, who measure its height, which reaches into the clouds, by the puny reach of their own hands, and who look up with their weak eyes; and if from the top of the tower a star is spied, glorious and beautiful, the pygmies scorn it, seeing nothing there.

They who cannot see more in Rabbi Akiba than the passionate shepherd-lover of the daughter of Calba Shvua—they could never understand the impulse to that wondrous decision, that the Song of Songs is the holy of holies among all the other Writings.

They who are pure of heart will see Rabbi Akiba in his full stature—

He who laughed when he saw a fox walking out of the Holy of Holies of the destroyed Temple, because to his gigantic soul the distant future was as visible as the present—

He who laughed when he heard the great noise of the Roman crowds, for by the divine love which welled up from the depths of his soul’s wisdom, it was revealed to him, as in a living image, that Rome and its idols would completely vanish, but the light of Zion shine forever.

The joy of visualizing the certain future so filled his pure heart that it left no room for sighs about the awful present, which he saw only as a passing cloud on the surface of the bright heavenly sun.

Only from the well of such a soul, who was able to surrender his life as he uttered the “One,” could the verdict come that “all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies.”

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