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I Want Your Sex: Haftarat Nitzavim, Isaiah 61:10-63:9

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September 15, 2014

What does it mean to make love with God? Perhaps a strange question, but one that is demanded by this week’s Haftarah:

I greatly rejoice in the Lord,
My whole being exults in my God,
For He has clothed me with garments of triumph,
Wrapped me in a robe of victor,
Like a bridegroom adorned with a turban,
Like a bride bedecked with her finery.
For as the earth brings forth her growth
And a garden makes the seed shoot up,
So the Lord God will make
Victory and renown shoot up
In the presence of all the nations.

In case you didn’t get all the stuff about seed shooting into a garden, a few verses later, we read

[Y]ou shall be called, ‘I delight in her.’
And your land ‘Espoused.’
For the Lord takes delight in you,
And you land is espoused.
As a youth espouses a maiden,
Your sons shall espouse you;
And as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride,
So will your God rejoice over you.

Why do betrothal and sexuality serve as potent images of the relationship of humanity and God? It isn’t just here, of course: Rabbi Akiva famously argued that the very erotic Song of Songs comprises a metaphor of the love between God and Israel, and a large portion of the Zohar takes him up on it, extending and deepening the metaphor into something not exactly metaphorical.

But why? Even if we accept that God and Israel love each other, it’s not obvious that erotic love forms the best metaphor. Eros is a Greek word, but Christians use the Greek word agape to describe the love of God for humanity, and agape implies a sort of selfless, completely giving love, far from eros. Alternatively, one could use the notion of brotherly love, or philia, as the metaphor. God-as-brother or sister seems more plausible than God-as-bride or bridegroom. If anything does not seem to be sexual, it is the love between God and Israel.

One could just say that the Haftarah’s erotic symbolism simply reflects the prophet sublimating his own sexual desires. But that hardly serves as a good reference for the prophet or his prophecy.

Instead, recall the subjective experience of a bride or bridegroom. It is not simply love: it is being in love.  It is a heightened state; one’s “whole being exults.” Being in love most closely resembles not the mature love of long-time partners, but rather infatuation. As Thomas J. Tyrrell, the author of “>The Lonely Man of Faith, recognized the problem:

Companionship and friendship do not alleviate the passional experience of loneliness which trails me constantly. I am lonely because at times I feel rejected and thrust away by everybody, not excluding my most intimate friends, and the words of the Psalmist, ‘My father and my mother have forsaken me,’ ring quite often in my ears like the plaintive cooing of the turtledove. It is a strange, alas, absurd experience engendering sharp, enervating pain as well as a stimulating cathartic feeling.

Most fundamentally, eros subsumes sex because eros includes a feeling of ontological connection, a sense that here is some entity that truly understands me and I truly understand him or her. Our consciousnesses as well as our bodies mix: we can touch and communicate with each other in some sort of basic, unspoken inarticulate way that cannot be shared with anyone else.  When someone is in love with a requited lover, she is not thrust away.

Being in love carries with it something that “loving” someone does not, and also goes to mitigate ontological loneliness: a sense of possibility and a vision of a wondrous future.  Someone in love “exults” as he or she dreams of an extraordinary future existence, inchoate and ambiguous to be sure, but within the realm of possibility. Is it sexual? Of course. But it is more than that. Being in love means in being in hope.

Hope undermines loneliness because it holds the promise of participating in something bigger than ourselves. Participation with others in such a project means, in Soloveitchik’s words, finding “one’s place and role within the scheme of events and things willed and approved by God, when He ordered finitude to emerge out of infinity and the Universe, including man, to unfold itself.”

If that sounds vague and unclear, it should. What precisely happens there, what makes it a delight, what even is the feeling or consciousness of delight, what is the substantive content of this joy, remains Godot. That is what so much of falling in love is: a waiting and anticipation and joy feeling and envisioning a boundless future but not knowing precisely what it is.

The problem is that the human experience of falling in love and being in love cannot last. It fades, even if – especially if – the lover is united with his beloved. Erich Fromm, a well-known critic of eroticism, argues in “>Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice, by Shunryu Suzuki, who brought Zen practice to the United States.  What did he mean by beginner’s mind? Zen practice, Suzuki explained,

is to have a simple, pure mind, open to possibilities. Our normal mind congratulates itself for achieving certain things, but such self-centered thoughts prevent us from really learning and seeing. The beginner's mind goes beyond 'me' to the realization that it is just an expression of the larger universal Mind, and this naturally produces compassion.

The appearance of a new lover gives us a sort of Beginner’s Mind, open to the possibilities of, well, anything. With a new lover, we can explore the universal Mind, with another with Whom we can be infinitely, intimately close. Can we do this with a longtime lover? Of course. But wouldn’t it be extraordinary if we could have a Lover who is always there, who knows us so intimately, and yet is always new, for Whom we are always a beginner?

In sum, then, Haftarat Nitzavim and other Jewish sources eroticizing the Divine are not sublimating sexual desire; rather, they express erotic love’s most fundamental goal: an intimate connection with the Universal, a conviction that our lives have meaning, and that no matter where we find ourselves, we are never alone.

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