GEN1296 Our tradition gives us no reason to turn the love we are ordered to have for God into some bloodless spiritual abstraction. When the Bible talks of love, it is describing the same extraordinary emotion that we thrill at today. Thus we read in Genesis: Though Jacob served seven years for Rachel, they seemed to him but a few days because he loved her [this verse].   Biblical love takes the many forms that fill fortunate lives: Jacob’s love for Joseph, Ruth’s devotion to her mother-in-law Naomi, and the classic story of David and Jonathan, a love threatened by King Saul’s enmity for David. But Jonathan’s “soul became bound to the soul of David; Jonathan loved David as himself” 1 Samuel 18:1.   And then there is that whole book devoted to love, the rapturously named Song of Songs. On the surface, it seems like a passionate series of exchanges between two lovers. But then, how did it become part of Sacred Scripture? Something about human love must have indicated a similar relationship between God and people. Still in rabbinic times, when the final canonization of Scriptures was taking place, there were those who thought Song of Songs too earthly to have been God – Inspired. Yet not only did the rabbis insist that Song of Songs be included, but they began reading it as the love-talk between God and the people of Israel. They would not deprive love of its full libidinous nature, even as they understood it as modeling the most sublime divine-human intimacy. In medieval mysticism, these erotic connotations came into full play. The Zohar, the most important Kabbalistic text, relates in one of its less overtly sexual metaphors: “The angels in the hall of love introduce love between Israel below and the Holy One above. And they all arouse love and remain in a state of love. And when love is aroused from the lower to the upper realms, and from the upper to the lower realms, this hall becomes filled with many good things… and the love of the lower world penetrates the love of the upper world and they are united together” Zohar II, 253b. BOROJMV 316-7