Sex im Judentum: Make Love, Not War

“He cover me with kisses of his mouth. / Your love is sweeter than wine,” quotes Ilana Pardes from the Song of Solomon, the “Song of Songs.” The director of the Center for Literary Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem is convinced that nowhere else is sexual desire expressed with as much fervor as here. “And yet sexuality is never obviously present in the song.” It is largely an intimate dialogue between two lovers, a whisper and longing, requests and desires. The namesake of this ancient love poem is actually undesirable. King Solomon has forced the beautiful Shulammite into his harem, woos her passionately and yet cannot prevent her from running away to her lover, a shepherd.

The Song of Songs is the starting point and framework of the new special exhibition in the Jewish Museum Berlin with the ambiguous title “Sex. Jewish positions«. Consequently, the first accompanying event was dedicated to this. Ilana Pardes, who joined digitally on Tuesday evening in the W. Michael Blumental Academy, which is opposite the Jewish Museum and was also designed by US star architect Daniel Libeskind, sheds light on the reception history of the “Song of the Songs,” which begins with a riddle: “Why was a daring, sensual love poem that has no connection to God included in the Bible?”

Rabbi Akiba ben Josef, murdered under the Roman Emperor Hadrian, declared: “But the song of songs is most sacred.” For centuries, explains Ilana Pardes, the prevailing opinion in Jewish exegesis was that it was an allegorical poem, primarily the divine should celebrate love. The debate about whether it should be interpreted as sacred or secular did not only concern Judaism. In the wake of the Enlightenment, scholars in the 18th century, especially Johann Gottfried Herder, favored a literal reading. The Weimar theologian and song collector turned against traditional interpretations: »What does the book say from beginning to end? … Love, love … It is what it is and says in every word: a song of love.” To prove this, Herder dissected each verse and added a commentary. “I read the book and found not the slightest hint in it, not the slightest trace, that a different meaning would have been the purpose of the book.” He was followed by none other than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Herder also found epigones among scholars of the Jewish Enlightenment such as Salomo Löwisohn, a Judaizer and poet who lived in the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Half a century later, however, the German-Jewish religious philosopher Franz Rosenzweig affirmed: “Not despite, but because the Song of Songs was a ‘real’, that is to say, a ‘secular’ love song, and that is precisely why it was a genuine ‘spiritual’ song of love God to man. Man loves because and how God loves. His human soul is the soul awakened and loved by God. The dispute is not over, as the collegial-academic dispute between Ilana Pardes and the German scholar Galili Shahar from Tel Aviv University in Berlin testified.

The “Song of Songs”, a key text in Israelite and Israeli culture, remains an indispensable part of Jewish wedding ceremonies and constantly offers new inspiration for visual artists and even pop and rock musicians. In addition to historical artifacts from two millennia, the exhibition offers 150 works of art from the collection of the Jewish Museum as well as from private collections in Europe, Israel, the USA and the cooperation partner, the Joods Museum in Amsterdam. The oil painting by the Berlin painter Lesser Ury from 1896: “Adam and Eve with their firstborn” is touching, extremely earthly and human. He sits a little to the side, perhaps still unhappy about having been expelled from paradise, and yet looks curiously and probably a little proudly at his companion and son. She is the loving, concerned mother who tenderly hugs the child. A distribution of roles that is common in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is expressed here.

“Be fruitful and multiply,” Yahweh encouraged his creatures Adam and Eve. The rabbinic writings treated sexuality only in the context of the husband’s duties to his wife, who in turn was reduced to the woman giving birth. She should not seduce the man, it says in the first book of Moses and the first mitzvah of the Torah. However, all life turns out to be more colorful, bolder, freer, and does not allow itself to be tied down by commandments and prohibitions. Not so in Judaism either. The unconventional equality between lovers that appears in the “Song of Songs” was and is lived out.

In the chapters “Duty and Pleasure,” “Control and Desire,” “Sexuality and Power,” and “Eroticism and the Divine,” the entire spectrum between orthodoxy and liberality in everyday Jewish life is discussed. Modest clothing is required of Orthodox Jews as well as of devout believers in the other two world religions, as an ultimate request seen in the show attests.

There is nothing obscene, vulgar or vulgar here. Just as the lovers in Solomon’s Song of Songs subtly and fervently woo each other in metaphors, praising each other with parables (rose, lily, wine, oil, gazelle, dove, moon, sun, gold, gemstone), so varied and yet clear is the articulation of Lust, desire and obsession in the art revealed here, including a pleasing number of works by women. Judy Chicago is prominently represented with her “Voices from the Song of Songs” (2000). The American artist of Jewish origin approaches the subject from a refreshingly feminist perspective. Two of her works were probably presented as examples by Ilana Pardes during her lecture.

Gabriella Boros caricatured the now seemingly shameful description of female and male sexual organs by the scholars of the Talmud – for example the vulva as “the other world”, “her other face”, “breath” or “grave” – ​​with her work, which can be admired in the special exhibition Series “Judaica” (2023), small wooden figures. A photo by Benyamin Reich (2005), which shows a half-naked young man, turns a spiritual ritual, the putting on of leather phylacteries (tefillin), into a sex game of bondage. The show also addresses the question: How does Judaism feel about LGBTIQ? Well, like all communities, whether religious or atheist. The Tumtum Tower by the Israeli artist Gil Yefman in the atrium is an eye-catcher; Tumtum means a person whose sexual organs are hidden or covered.

One may ask: Why, of all things, a sex exhibition while a bloody war is raging “down there” in the Middle East? The exhibition was conceived long before October 7th last year. And you can definitely read it as an invitation: Make Love, Not War.

“Sex. Jewish Positions”, Jewish Museum Berlin, Lindenstraße 9, until October 6th, daily 10 a.m. – 6 p.m., catalog of the same name (Hirmer) available in the exhibition, accompanying program see www.jmberlin.de