The Song of Songs: The Love Story of God and Israel (VI)

“Sustain me with grape cakes, feed me with apples, for I am sick with love.” (2:5)

God's creation comes out of His love, and it is sustained by His love. In such awareness, Israel recognizes this fundamental principle, hence God's chosen constantly asks for His love as the source of her existence and sustenance.

The allegory of grape cakes and apples represents spiritual and material sustenance, for both are needed by Israel to fulfill its mission in the world. Israel asks God for these, out of her love for Him.

These are requests motivated by a profound and intense love. It's like she says, “Because I yearn deeply (passionately) for Your love, I ask You to love me by giving me the proper sustenance I need to be who You want me to love You (by doing what You want me to do in the material world)”.

“His left hand is under my head, and His right one embraces me.” (2:6)

This is one of the most beautiful verses in the Song of Songs. Beautiful as loving! Indeed it summarizes the relationship between God and Israel in all its dimensions!

In Jewish tradition, God's right arm represents loving kindness, and the left one His power to give order to loving kindness. Order, direction, and purpose as truth, for in God's goodness there is an order and a purpose aimed to make loving kindness prevail as the sustaining source of God's creation.

Order and purpose as God's truth are established in His Torah for Israel and the nations, and Israel leading in this order and purpose. In this context, God's left hand is the Torah that supports Israel's cognitive abilities, for the Torah is the foundation for Israel's reason to exist. It defines Israel's essence and identity in the material world. Thus we understand that God's left hand is under Israel's head.

The Torah is the material expression of God's will as His plan for His creation. We are alive by this will that is like the air we breathe. We learn about the spirit of God's will through Torah study, and will be able to fully grasp His ways and attributes as the spirit that sustains all that is. All that exists contains an essence with a purpose, even if our understanding does not fully assimilate this.

This essence include our own individual actions and creations, as part of the universal principle of cause and effect, set by the creating expression of God that contains ethical and moral imperatives by the fact that all actions have consequences.

Thus we are aware of the potentials to build and destroy, and adopt the moral imperative to create goodness to nurture life for the sake of goodness. Our works speak for what we are, and if done with the goodness of love's ways and attributes, we can rejoice for emulating God's ways and attributes.

We see God's right hand as His infinite loving kindness that embraces Israel with eternal love, for she is His chosen to fully reveal His loving kindness and truth in the world.

There are an unequivocal ethical content and a purpose in this verse, for love is not simply an emotion or passion between two lovers. The kind of love we see in this embracing image goes further beyond, because there is a purpose, an order and a destiny to be fulfilled, that follow God's will for the world. These are about making goodness reign, rule and prevail in all aspects, facets and dimensions of life.

God's regency is His will realized in the material world as we live it. Regency is the revealed will of God's goodness in His creation. Hence it is the reigning and ruling principle in His creation, as a “fact doing” that implies the establishment of a functioning order for a concrete decreed purpose or end.

In this sense, regency is a line or style of making things happen or being done, instead of a set of circumstances ruled by a “king”.

Regency as kinship contains and encompass ways and means that themselves are the purpose and the goal to be achieved. The revelation of the kingdom of God means that all He wants to be and to happen in the material world will be manifest in full.

This is the entire principle behind Israel's final redemption and the Messianic era, as announced by God through the prophets in our Jewish tradition. Regency integrates all potential expressions of goodness as the ways and means with which humankind will conduct in every aspect and dimension of life.