Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [30]
It is here that monotheism makes a crucial difference. The one God is, as we have noted, all alone. This means that God has no one with whom to be a partner, until He creates and allows Himself to love humans. The old pagan chief deities all had divine consorts. Marriages, love affairs, and romantic intrigues were common among the gods and goddesses of the Near East, as they were among those of Greece and Rome. Monotheism means an essential change to what may be called the erotic situation of God, who is left without a partner. God has no one to love except you. This means you, faithful servant or beloved child; you, Israel, or, in the Christian adaptation, you, the church or the Christian. At the Exodus God takes Israel to be His spouse (Jer. 2:2), and the history of Western religion is changed forever.
While textual “evidence” of God's spousal love for Israel may be found in a number of other biblical sources (especially Hosea's account of God's outcry as a husband wounded by Israel's unfaithfulness), those texts were all but sidelined by Israel's great love poem, the Song of Songs. The Song—attributed to Solomon, whose name Shelomo was later read as “King of Peace,” making it “God's song” — was saved for Scripture by Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph (d. c. 135 CE), who described it as the “holy of holies” among the sacred books.27 The allegorization of this Song is the heart of the erotic metaphor in the Western canon. The beloved people — the Community of Israel, the church, or the soul — is seen as God's chosen bride. It is God who knocks on the door of the beloved's heart, who stands behind the wall or peers through the latticework to catch a glimpse of her, and all the rest.
This reading of the Song of Songs as the hymn to God's passionate love for humans becomes linked to the God of Genesis, who followed each work of Creation by saying “Good! Good! Good!” He then looks at Adam and says, for the first time: “It is not good for man to be alone; I will make him a help-meet to be before him” (Gen. 2:18). Everything created in the opening chapter of Genesis comes forth as a member of a pair: day and night, light and darkness, upper waters and lower waters, land and sea, sun and moon, fish and birds, man and woman. Creation is thus a tale of the emergence of duality. Everything is paired — except God. To say it in the language of Jewish imagination, we would suggest that this is why the Torah begins with the letter bet, indicating the number 2. The aleph is reserved for the single and singular Self of God, revealed only at Sinai in the first letter of the opening word anokhi, “I am.”
At Sinai there is a new pairing, that of God and Israel as Lover and Beloved. The erotic metaphor is then applied by the early rabbis to the old sacred narrative of Israel in Egypt, at the Sea of Reeds, and wandering in the wilderness. The biblical narrative is transformed by being “washed over”28 with quotations from the Song, as evidenced both in Midrashic homilies and in the synagogue's earliest liturgical poetry, the sixth- or seventh-century piyyut. One might say that the “Passion” of Christianity has its parallel here, in the now eros-charged reframing of the Exodus/Sinai narrative. The account of Exodus and Sinai, reinvigorated by this Midrash, now becomes a collective or national “passion play,” focused on