Jean-Luc Godard, father of the French New Wave Cinema of the 1960's, once said that the history of film is simply men taking pictures of women. Watch any Hollywood movie from the last 80 years, or just sit through 10 minutes of previews these days, and you'll notice, even in the shortest and most intermittent blips and frames, that the lighting, camera angles, costuming, makeup, and gestural repertoire afforded to female characters (not to mention their character roles, dialogue and relationships to male characters) almost without fail accentuate, with fetishistic concern for detail, the sensual potential of their femininity, as if femininity itself was defined by a woman's potential for sensuality.
The Gemara Megilla tells us that the evil king Achashverosh maintained just this sort of sensibility about the women in his kingdom. As we read in Megillat Esther, on the final night of his 187-night spree of drunken revelry, Achashverosh gets the bright idea to display his "beautiful" wife, Queen Vashti, before all the members of his royal court, adorned with nothing more than the royal crown on her head. The Gemara tells us that this idea originated from an argument that the king undertook with his royal flunkies concerning which type of woman from among the countries of his rulership was the most "beautiful." One flunky said, "The women of Media are the most beautiful!" Another said, "No, the women of Persia!" The King said after them, "Pffff -- I'll show you one to dispel all controversy -- my wife, Vashti, from Casdea! Shall I prove this to you? Shall I bring her forth?!?" The congregated flunkies cried, "Yes, yes!!! But, Lord -- you do realize that in order to prove your words, you must bring her forth without any clothes; that is, elsewise, how shall we truly know that she is the 'most beautiful?'" As we learn, Achashverosh was only too overjoyed to ask this of his wife… and as the Gemara reveals later, Vashti herself would have ordinarily been more than eager to comply with the king's request to appear au naturel before the congregated flunkies had she not suddenly been stricken by leprosy (or, alternatively, had she not suddenly sprouted a tail!). So, as with the Hollywood prototype, our Persian female in question not only identifies with but complicitly embraces her role as both a sexual object and spectacle, whereas Achashverosh's primary relationship to her involves objectification, manipulation, and making her into a commodity fetish.
Rav Kook, in his short but extraordinary essay about the Song of Songs, says that just as any literary canon would be considered deficient or lacking if the subject of romantic passion were never breached within its volumes, however-the-more-so would the Book of Books, the Torah, be considered lacking if its holy pages never addressed that ever-coveted subject! The Song of Songs, he says, completes this task admirably, and notes that the Jewish preoccupation with the sort of intimate love enumerated in the Song of Songs stems from our own preoccupation with the source of that love, G-d Himself! He tells us about the chamor l'ahava (lit. "the donkey for love"), someone who values only the chomer, the materiality of human love relationships, who debases the physical longings ennatured within his flesh from their highest potentials of sublimity to the depths of grossness; Rav Kook says that this person has an "uncircumcised heart," because he has never tasted the "sweet light of the love of the Rock of the universe!" In other words, this person doesn't understand that physical love between humans is deeply connected-to and is a fundamental expression-of Divine love, and this lack of understanding renders him incapable of grasping the sublimity of the depths of love's root-source. Thus, this "donkey for love" would never notice if the Song of Songs went missing from the Torah; its intimations about the sublime root-source of all love would be completely lost on him, so he'd never notice if it vanished.
Our own historical relationship with G-d as individuals and as a nation abounds with instances of intimacy, passion, intense desire, sweeping melodrama, dark tragedy and despair, all of which signify that this dramatic love relationship with Him must be catalogued somehow. No one took the passion of this relationship more seriously than Rebbe Akiva. The Gemara Brachos tells us that when the Romans were torturing Rebbe Akiva to death by flaying his skin from his body with hot iron combs, he joyfully said to his tormentors: "All my life, I've been worried that perhaps G-d would not provide for me the opportunity to uphold the commandment of 'You shall love the Lord your G-d with all of your soul' -- and now that He is taking my soul from me in this way, I need worry no longer -- the opportunity has come!" And with that, he cried out the Shema Yisrael, ending his life with the words, Hashem Echad (G-d is One). As Rav Kook says, only Rebbe Akiva, whose passionate desire for intimacy with G-d was so intensely ecstatic, could afford to say what he said about the Song of Songs, that it was the holiest book in the whole Torah. Likewise, only someone who emulates Rebbe Akiva's infatuation with being close to G-d could fully understand the true nature of conjugal love, which Rav Kook likens to a tiny drop in a vast ocean, a tiny spark in a blazing inferno and a single letter in an enormous book of the love that flows between humans and the Divine One.
Jerry Silverman
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Jerry Silverman is a former student of Yeshivat Bat Ayin. He is working in new media, designing and managing media projects. He lives in Riverdale, NY with his wife Sarah and their two children. |