Our Daily Kavanot during Passover will feature pieces from our Wise Passover Haggadah Supplement. Each day, our clergy will focus on a different element of the Passover holiday.
The Song of Solomon
By Rabbi Sari Laufer
Just a few weeks ago, my 9-year-old asked me the question which every musical theater-loving parent awaits: “Mommy,” he said from the back seat, “how many minutes are there in a year?” Having prepared for this moment since the premiere of “Rent” in 1996, I loudly responded in song: “525,600 minutes,” while immediately hitting play on the original cast recording.
In the anthemic song, a paean to a departed friend, Jonathan Larson asks:
In five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes
How do you measure a year in a life?
And while this might, perhaps, seem more appropriate as a Rosh Hashanah teaching, I want to offer it today, during Passover, during these days known as chol hamoed—the ordinary within the festival. Because in the cycle and circle of Jewish time, the Passover table, liturgy, and traditions are markers, a yearly yardstick by which we might measure—or better, reflect—on a year in the life. I do not think I have ever sat around a seder table without reflecting on who is sitting with me, and who is not. Year after year, we watch as our constellation of family and friends and community shifts, growth and losses marked by a circle of chairs. Haggadot—with wine spills, matzah crumbs, and notations from seders past—tell the story not only of our people’s liberation, but of our family journeys as well. Opening the pages each new year, we can trace the worries and the concerns of the past—another measure of a year, or a decade, or a life.
Jonathan Larson continues:
How about love?
Measuring love
Seasons of love
Seasons of love
Perhaps our tradition agrees, setting Passover to the backdrop—traditionally—of the Song of Songs. Shir HaShirim, or the Song of Solomon, is either an ancient expression of eros—the story of young love—or the sweeping love affair between God and the Jewish people, depending on who and how you read it. But, my teacher, Dr. Tamara Eskenazi, taught me years ago that each of our megillot—each of the scrolls associated with a holiday—is also a seasonal book, tied to the seasons of the year and teaching a lesson for the seasons of our lives. And so, on Passover, we read a springtime book—young lovers frolicking beneath the burgeoning buds, a life and a dream just beginning. On Passover, we enter a season of love.
Traditionally chanted in synagogues in the intermediate days of Passover and on its Shabbat, most non-Orthodox siddurim also include some verses from the scroll. Most often, it is these verses from the second chapter of Song of Songs:
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, The rain is over and gone; The flowers appear on the earth; The time of singing is come …
Studying this book—and Dr. Eskenazi’s teaching—in my early 20s offered a certain perspective, of looking for love and imagining a life ahead. Decades later, the view is a little different, and so is my understanding of the text.
Certainly, after this winter here in Los Angeles, we can appreciate the expected return to clear skies and SoCal sunshine, even as we deeply appreciate the rains falling in their season. As we literally watch the flowers bloom and the vibrant greens spread across our hillside, we cannot help but be reminded of the themes of rebirth and renewal.
There is also, in the allegorical reading, the promise of liberation. We celebrate the freedom of springtime after the winter of slavery in Egypt; our song is the Song of the Sea, triumphant on the edge of the wilderness, traditionally sung on this, the seventh day. This is our moment of national birth; we become am Yisrael, the People of Israel as we cross the sea. And so, year after year, the celebration is one of rebirth. At this time of deep political upheaval in Israel, perhaps it is also a moment of recommitment to the Jewish people.
I cannot help but feel that, three years after the world shut down, we are—or at least I am—grateful to be gathered again with friends and family, singing together the songs of the seder and the season. While tiring, I have been inspired and excited to have traveled across the country—and to Israel—to reconnect with colleagues at conferences that have not been held since before March 2020. Perhaps, finally, now that winter is past, we can regrow and renew relationships.
Spring is a season of rebirth and regrowth, a time of renewal and possibility, in our texts, in our world, and—I hope—in our lives. And, however you seek it, I hope that this spring—this Passover—is a season of love. For the next 525,600 minutes and more.