On January 30, 2024, Third Act Faith hosted a conversation with Rabbi Ellen Bernstein about her most recent book, “Toward a Holy Ecology: Reading the Song of Songs in the Age of Climate Crisis.” Sadly, Ellen died just a few weeks later after a short illness. We featured a translation of her talk in our Substack newsletter, and we offer an abbreviated version here of her interview with TAF Coordinating Committee member Trisha Tull. You can read the full interview on Substack.
How has the Song of Songs traditionally been interpreted?
The Song has traditionally been read either as a love song between God and the Israelites or, in Christianity I guess, between God and the church—or as a love story between a man and a woman.
But the allegorical reading—that it’s a love story between God and the people—has really taken up a lot of the psychic space for the last 2,000 years. Many say the reason it was read that way is because it’s so incredibly sensual, that it would have freaked out the early interpreters to read it in a more literal way.
There are two lovers: a male and a female. But the text doesn’t tell you who is speaking—you have to interpret it by the grammar. It’s not always clear what’s going on because the words he and it [in Hebrew] would be the same word. So you can’t always tell if the poet is talking about a human character or the tree or the garden.
In Judaism, the Song of Songs is traditionally read on Passover, and it’s also read in some Sephardic synagogues every Friday night. Trisha: So lovely. But what does this have to do with the environment and our ecological sensibilities? The premise of your book “Toward a Holy Ecology” is that the Song of Songs can be read as a love song between the earth and humans. By reading it this way, we pay attention to the really rich presence of the natural world all through the poetry, as you’ve just illustrated: the garden and all its scents, the seasons, the analogies between the two lovers and the creatures of the earth, especially the gazelles and the fruit trees.
What gave you the idea to do an ecological reading?
Many years ago I was in Israel—probably 30 years ago now—and someone handed me a Song of Songs commentary by Yehuda Feliks. He was an Israeli biologist, a zoologist, and his whole career was dedicated to reading the Hebrew Bible from a biological perspective. He was interested in illuminating the natural history aspects of the Bible.
On each page of his Song of Songs translation, he included the allegorical interpretation, the human lovers’ interpretation—and he had this idea that the Song was also a love story between two gazelles. In the passage that I read, the male gazelle was coming to arouse the female to go with him on the spring migration.
And I thought, “Oh my God! Here’s a highly regarded Jewish biologist who was religious, saying very clearly that there is this whole natural history dimension that’s just as important as the other interpretations.” With this, I felt him give me permission to take my own intuition about the Song seriously, and to look at the text in a much more ecological way.
That was very early in my career working in Judaism and ecology.
Describe the book for us
There are five essays in this book, followed by my own translation of the Song and a line-by-line commentary from an ecological perspective. The five essays are “Ecological Identity,” “Cycles of Time,” “Beauty,” “Justice” and “Wholiness.”
Ecological Identity
I’ve been working in the field of Bible and ecology for 30 years and I’ve been thinking about the way that other scholars work with the Bible around ecological matters and the kinds of questions that they ask of the text. I’ve felt that many folks have understood “environment” in a kind of human-centered and reductive way. We can open up and expand the ecological conversation by asking different questions of the text and seeing what is in the text that wants to come forward …
It’s important—if we are going to embrace our role as Earth citizens—to start identifying more with the natural world. In the Song of Songs, the natural world is foregrounded over and over. It may appear to be in the background, but if you just change the way you look at the Song, if you interpret the word he as a gazelle instead of the man, then the whole natural world comes into focus. That’s really remarkable. You don’t find that very much in biblical literature. Usually the human story is foregrounded. Period.
Cycles of Time
The second essay is “Cycles in Nature.” It’s important if we want to understand the ecology of text, to understand what is going on in time, in the seasons, in the cycles of nature as we read the text. Is the author paying attention to these things? The way we live in time has the potential to be just as ecologically healthy as the way that we live in a place. In the Song, the story follows an arc of time… [only after the seasons have passed] do the two lovers reveal themselves totally and give themselves to each other. The couple reveals themselves to each other just as Nature reveals herself through the flowering of the plants and just as God reveals the Torah to the people. So the human story, the divine story and the story of nature all coincide at that moment.
On the other hand, you have many scholars and regular folk who are very interested in ascertaining how many times love is being consummated in the text. You find discussions arguing about the exact number of trysts. So these readers would likely say that my reading is prudish. But I am taking seriously the cycles of nature, which these other readings are not curious about. The ecological beauty of the text is that the lovers’ love cycles in tune with the cycles of nature. If you focus too much on the sexual dimension of the text, it may be hard to see the ecological….
Justice
In the Song, justice begins really with the elevation of the woman’s voice, and what’s interesting is her values are values of simplicity. You see in Chapter 1:15-17 that what she wanted with her lover was a simple green nest in the woods. Her life is as simple as possible. She’s contrasted with the daughters of Jerusalem (2:7), who prefer a life of luxury and wealth. She’s also contrasted with Solomon, who in both the Bible generally as well as the Song of Songs, is presented as kind of a grandiose, extravagant figure with lots of wealth and servants and excess. There’s a critique of him. Now, a lot of people don’t read Solomon that way. They read him as this grandiose and very positive figure, but I see him being criticized in the Song….
Beauty
The word “beauty” is used more in the Song of Songs than anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible. And this speaks to your question, Trisha. The beauty of nature isn’t something that we necessarily encourage people to pay attention to. For many historical and political reasons, we have learned to not take beauty so seriously.
And yet the beauty of the natural world is something that most people across political divides can really relate to, and it seems to me that one of the most important things we need to do is reach across those divides and speak to people who may not be interested in our political orientation. The beauty of the natural world can capture the imagination, and can awaken our hearts and teach us to care.
And the Song helps us understand what beauty actually is: The two characters define each other as beautiful in terms of the many and varied creatures of the natural world. It’s as if they only know what beauty is because they have seen the gazelles on the hillside and the sheep coming up from the washing hole.
So that’s one thing. And then the other thing I feel is really important is that God language is not used at all in the Song of Songs.
Wholiness
That’s what my section on “Wholiness” is about. God language isn’t used in the Song, and yet, in Jewish tradition, Rabbi Akiva, a really important ancient rabbi, called the Song of Songs the “Holy of Holies”—to him, it was the most important book of all of the biblical books.
So, what is that all about? You know, where is God then?
God is in the wholeness, the interconnectivity of nature. That’s where most people actually feel the presence of God. And again, this is a whole question of, like, how do we reach people? How do we engage people as Earth citizens? Many people find the divine in the natural world—whether or not they use God language. It’s a universal experience. So, again, for me, it’s all about reaching audiences that we may not be used to engaging. The Song of Songs can help us have conversations with more conservative Christians or more conservative Jews who don’t necessarily speak the language of climate or environment. I think most people would agree that preserving life on Earth must be a priority.
About Ellen Bernstein
Rabbi Ellen Bernstein was a pioneer in the field of religion and ecology. She founded Shomrei Adamah, Keepers of the Earth, the nation’s first Jewish environmental organization in 1988. A former member of the Third Act Faith leadership team, she was a prolific writer with a speaking and consulting schedule that took her across the nation. Her book, Toward A Holy Ecology, is available online and in bookstores. Visit her website for information about her work and her books.