The Love of Their Youth

It’s a curious thing, hearing men read the Song of Songs—and in Orthodox communities it is almost invariably men who read it. Even in the most egalitarian Orthodox synagogues, where women may read from the Torah, it is usually the Torah they read from; you seldom hear an old woman, let alone a young one, singing the Song of Songs on Friday nights or at the Sabbath during Passover—even though half of the poem is made up of a girl speaking to her beloved.

No, it is men who mainly recite or sing this poem, particularly old men. The first time I heard it, in Jerusalem, was in the courtyard of a small synagogue on a side street not far from Abu Tor, the Jewish neighborhood where we lived. In that courtyard on the afternoon of the Sabbath of Passover, an old man stood—not a Yemenite, or anyone else from those eastern communities whose renditions, to my Israeli ear, lend an authentic specificity to the Hebrew phrasings, but just a plain, old, white Ashkenazi Jew whose youngest son had just gone off to the army and had his beautiful long hair buzzed off, just a man singing with a cracked voice from the back of his throat. Singing, as Lorca said in his essay on Spanish deep song, without caring for the external beauty of the performance but for the sake of the song itself. Singing for love.

If he’d only give me one kiss from his mouth
for a touch from you is sweeter than Champagne.