Naftali Rothenberg, senior research fellow and Jewish Culture and Identity Chair at Jerusalem’s Van Leer Institute and town rabbi of Har Adar, explores the concept of love in all its manifestations, both spiritual and physical, in an extensive survey of Jewish sources. He shows that, contrary to what many may expect, interpersonal love, spiritual development, and holiness are completely compatible within Judaism.
One section of this thoughtprovoking book focuses on Rabbi Akiva, who believed that all expressions of love, including love of one’s fellow, love of wisdom, and love of God, ultimately flow from a single source—the love between man and woman. In this context Rothenberg examines the story of Akiva and his wife Rachel, which many of us find difficult because Akiva seems to have callously abandoned his wife, and argues that Rachel’s love was the driving force in the story. Rothenberg analyzes Akiva’s assertion that “Love your fellow as yourself” is the greatest principle in the Torah, and describes how Akiva defended the place of Shir HaShirim in the biblical canon not by interpreting it allegorically but by emphasizing the holiness of the love between men and women. In another section, Rothenberg, who stresses that we must be honest and see canonical sources as “a body of literature written by men for men, from which women are wholly excluded,” explores the extent to which we can nevertheless ascribe feminist innovations to these texts. At the beginning of the book, the author draws freely on Greek and Christian as well as Jewish sources in the Midrash, Talmud, and Zohar to discuss androgyny and the legend of the androgyne—an ancient bisexual creature, incorporating male and female in a single body.