When poems about falling in love appeared in a GCSE English exam this year , a number of Orthodox schools were unhappy. They felt their students were at a disadvantage because the subject was outside their cultural and social experience.
When I was a student at a strictly Orthodox, male-only grammar school in North Manchester, literature was censored by the headmaster's wife; she read books ahead of time for both our school and the girls' school. I am very grateful to her, as I doubt that the book we studied for A-level English Literature by Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List, would
pass muster in the same school 25 years later; it contains a rather vivid description of Oskar Schindler sharing a bathtub with a female SS officer.
I recall the effect this had on us as religiously observant teenagers. Suddenly we were able to appreciate that righteous gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews in Nazi Europe had a carnal and hedonistic side to them. Oskar Schindler, immortalised in Steven Spielberg's three-hour epic film, first came to life for us between the leaves of a paperback, and symbolises the struggle of human saviours, not unlike the biblical Queen Esther who slept with the enemy to save her people.
Last week the controversial GCSEs sparked a Facebook exchange on how the religious sector shelters young members of its communities from all talk of love between the sexes. Although I grew up in a very religious community, my teachers and mentors did not refrain from addressing these topics. My father is well-known among his many students for never dropping a single Rashi from the school syllabus.
This means that from primary school age my contemporaries knew that Torah was relevant to every topic in life, without exception. By contrast, students who are told to skip verses because they are inappropriate will imagine Holy Scripture to be as crude as magazines stored on the top shelves at the newsagent.
'I teach the songs of songs as a guide to the search for a healthy relationship'
There is a long tradition of romantic verse in Judaism. Inspired by prophetic verse, the 15th-century Spanish-Jewish poet and rabbi Israel Najara paralleled themes found in contemporary Islamic Sufi tradition that combined the language of romance and erotic love with piety and devotion. Najara , a student of the kabbalist Isaac Luria, was not without formidable opposition; he was blacklisted for excommunication by a colleague, Rabbi Chayim Vital. Nonetheless, the 21st century Shabbat table is incomplete without the singing of the universal Yah Ribon, composed by a religious poet who also penned many love songs especially favoured by Sephardi Jews.
In sharp contrast to the Sephardi-Kabbalistic tradition of emulating Solomon's romances, the Ashkenazi tradition appears to have suffered a reaction to many long centuries in the shadow of Roman and medieval Christendom, which eschewed sex as original sin and mortal love as its unholy agent.
Consequently, attraction between the sexes was not something to sing about. Even the multifaceted biblical commentary of Rashi stopped short of providing the plain meaning of the verse on the Song of Songs, opting instead for the midrashic view that only God, and not humans, was the subject of Solomon's amorous narrative.
A well-known Charedi American translation of Solomon's song has taken Rashi's view to the extreme, bastardising the plain meaning and mauling its raw beauty beyond all sensible recognition. In the name of holiness, self-appointed puritans have sterilised the biblical text; by de-romanticising it, they have also dehumanised it and made it irrelevant to the human condition.
Abraham Ibn Ezra had the freedom to treat the text holistically and, in following his approach, I teach my adolescent students the Song of Songs as a religious guide to the search for a healthy and correct relationship between the sexes. An educational approach based on engaging with our rich heritage for positive guidance in the areas of love and relationships is a sorely needed alternative to sweeping the issue under the carpet and pretending that these matters will take care of themselves.
In the synagogue of my childhood we recited Shir Hashirim in unison on Friday afternoons. Any participant with a healthy appreciation of the Hebrew language was exposed to the innuendo of love and desire. This lofty introduction to love and the sanctified references to sexual aspects of the body taught us to regard such matters with reverence and awareness of the sexual precisely because we were religious.
To live a life of purity and holiness, our children must not be hidden away in a life of denial of the very existence of the feelings with which God has blessed us. We must not shelter adolescents from life itself, but equip them to deal with reality. If only the approach of Ibn Ezra, the compositions of Najara and the uncensored version of the Hebrew Bible itself were on the syllabuses of religious schools in Britain, Jewish students would be well-prepared for anything GCSE English throws at them.
