The advice I'm giving people today is to run away from the ArtScroll translation/elucidation of Shir HaShirim. It sucks, managing to reduce a top-shelf love poem (or collection of love poems, if you prefer) into a pointless babel. In the ArtScroll treatment, lines of great poetry are stripped of their meaning and context and presented, reformulated, as the words of God, or Israel, or any of a succession of oppressors creating what is quite literally a confusion of voices. Though this elucidation may, in some ways, be true to the intention of the Sages who canonized the book, it is a corruption of the book itself, and by corrupting the book ArtScroll denies the Sages their true achievement.
The genius of the Sages is that they took the Song of Songs, a secular poem about a secular subject written (most likely) by comparatively irreligious men for a secular purpose, and transformed it into something holy. As anyone familiar with the origins of the Seder or Hasidic nigunim will agree this trick is one at which Jewish sages once excelled: They often took ordinary and popular elements from the surrounding culture and infused them with religious significance (or holiness, if you prefer.) If we pretend, as ArtScroll does, that the book was written (by Solomon!) as a deliberate parable we not only raise serious historical questions, but the Sages who canonized it become clerks with rubber stamps, rather than men of vision, strength and insight.
The Sages who converted the Symposium into the Seder, like the Sages who made a poem about a lovesick shepherd into the Holy of Holies, didn't deny or ignore their surrounding culture. They co-opted it, and by co-opting it they conquered it.
The genius of the Sages is that they took the Song of Songs, a secular poem about a secular subject written (most likely) by comparatively irreligious men for a secular purpose, and transformed it into something holy. As anyone familiar with the origins of the Seder or Hasidic nigunim will agree this trick is one at which Jewish sages once excelled: They often took ordinary and popular elements from the surrounding culture and infused them with religious significance (or holiness, if you prefer.) If we pretend, as ArtScroll does, that the book was written (by Solomon!) as a deliberate parable we not only raise serious historical questions, but the Sages who canonized it become clerks with rubber stamps, rather than men of vision, strength and insight.
The Sages who converted the Symposium into the Seder, like the Sages who made a poem about a lovesick shepherd into the Holy of Holies, didn't deny or ignore their surrounding culture. They co-opted it, and by co-opting it they conquered it.
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