Religious love poetry in Judaism consists of love poems in which the lovers are—explicitly or obliquely—God, Israel, the messiah, the soul, the universe, or similar figures of religious significance. Because “love” denotes the yearning of the lovers for one another, not the consummation of their union, the poetry’s mood is typically frustrated yet confident: frustrated on account of the current lack of union, yet confident that union, being a primordial state, will eventually be regained. The liturgical function of much of this poetry heightens its immediacy as a direct encounter with the sacred.
The progenitor of Jewish love poetry is the Song of Songs, the biblical topic on love. Although this earthy, erotic topic about the mutual yearnings of two youths is not explicitly religious, already in antiquity these lovers were allegorically identified as God and Israel—in the spirit of other biblical passages, where this allegory is made explicit. Subsequent poets, seeking a vocabulary for religious love, drew prominently on images of human love taken from the Song of Songs.
Most postbiblical Jewish religious love poetry is piyyut—liturgical poetry. This genre, which originated in the Second Temple period, is still employed today. The liturgy’s core consists of the shema’, including Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your abundance,” followed by tefillah (prayer), in which one stands before God. This core is framed by blessings describing God’s love for, and redemption of, Israel. The poets adorn these blessings with descriptions of the mutual love between God and Israel and the fluctuations in their relationship through sacred history, and with pleas for the messianic redemption— love’s consummation.
Piyyut from medieval Jewish Spain embodies that culture’s synthesis of Greco-Arabic philosophy and Semitic philology—including secular Arabic love poetry—with the Bible and Rabbinics. Reflecting Arabic love poetry, this school of piyyut describes the intimate, personal qualities of love, and even adopts Arabic metrics. Most importantly, however, Spanish piyyut intertwines Jewish notions of love and redemption as collective and historical, and of God as a transcendent persona, with philosophical notions of love and redemption as the ascent of the individual soul to its divine source, and of God as Prime Mover and Necessary Being.
The twelfth-century German Pietistic “Hymn of Glory” boldly employs anthropo morphisms from the Song of Songs in adoring God’s glory, and in “Precious One of My Soul” the sixteenth-century kabbalist Eliezer Azikri pleads with God to reveal that glory.
Azikri’s kabbalistic colleagues developed a ritual in which the community of Israel participates in the Sabbath eve “sacred marriage” between God’s transcendence and immanence: Solomon Alkabetz composed the liturgical love hymn “Come, My Beloved,” and Isaac Luria composed an amatory hymn for the Sabbath eve repast, invoking the union of sacred bride and groom.
Although the folk-poetry of the eighteenth-century Hasidic master Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev is suffused with the intimacy of divine immanence, the verse of twentieth-century Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook is replete with yearning to transcend the glimmer of divine knowledge available to creatures, preferring bedazzlement by the absolute, ineffable divine light.
The early twentieth-century poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik, torn between mystical faith and skepticism, evinces pathos and lovingly embraces the injured Divine Presence in her exile.
