Chapter 7:5-7
Your neck is a tower of ivory,
Your eyes are pools in Heshbon,
By the gates of Bat-Rabbim,
Your nose, like a tower of Lebanon
That turns towards Damascus,
Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel,
And the hair of your head is like royal purple,
A king is held captive in its tresses,
How beautiful and how sweet is Love
In all its pleasures!
How demanding and how rigorous is Love In all its requirements!
Love asks Everything of me,
Scouring my heart for whatever I might be withholding;
She calls me into power and commands my full attention,
She crowns me with my own royal purple potential,
Her music shapes this dance with meticulous grace.Here is the challenge I face:
Unless I give myself to You — my flesh becomes stiff, numb, inert, un-responsive and closed…
Your Great Love pours through this world through muscle, bone, sinew and fat.
Your Great Love is written in the smiling wrinkles of my face just as my Life is engraved on the palm of Your Hand.This Love calls me to embodiment.
In the Fever of Love ©2008 Shefa Gold. All rights reserved.
Practice
Chant: Pleasure as a Doorway
Commentary
In a Birkat HaMazon I composed many years ago, I wrote, “Pleasure is a doorway to expanded reality.” Allowing pleasure to be a doorway means that we must commit to walking through… which is very different than the usual patterns of grabbing on to pleasure and pushing away pain. The Songs of Songs knows love as the highest and most profound pleasure. Its profundity is rooted in the fact that it is indeed a doorway and a force of beckoning. We are called through that doorway of pleasure into an expanded reality, where we can know ourselves as part of the greater whole. Called by beauty, we walk through, tasting each sensation, and letting go, opening into the greater mystery.
Bridge to Torah
The Torah of Eikev gives us the commandment, “You shall eat and you shall bless, and you shall be satisfied.” From this we derive the mitzvah of Birkat HaMazon, the blessing after the meal. The Song of Songs helps us refine our relationship with what we consume, whether it be beauty, nourishment or sexual fulfillment.
The magnificent shapes, colors, flavors and textures of the garden, become the landscape of Love in all its pleasures. In that garden, we eat with awareness and gratefulness, we bless with lavish appreciation and generous expression, and we lean back into the satisfaction of each moment. Every pleasure is opened to us through God’s love, and truly it is that love that we are receiving through the sweetness and beauty of BEING.
Click to see Deuteronomy 7:12-11:25 in Hebrew and English (JPS 1985) or the associated Torah Journeys page.
Questions for Contemplation
Can I open to the simple pleasures? Can I experience those pleasures as doorways, without grasping or holding on, but rather being touched by pleasure and letting it send me to the root pleasure of BEING itself?
Resources
View Love at the Center Resources.
Click to see Song of Songs Chapter 7:5-7 in Hebrew with the English JPS (1985) translation.