Lovers: A Midrash

Teya Rosenberg teaches children’s literature at the University of
Alberta.

The Song of Songs provides the scriptural starting point for Edeet
Ravel’s Lovers: A Midrash. Midrash is both an early Jewish method of
interpreting scriptures and the resulting interpretation. While the Song
of Songs is often interpreted as allegory, it does depict romantic and
sexual love, as well as sibling, filial, and parental love and the dark
side of love, jealousy. Lovers: A Midrash explores these different
elements of human love and, in doing so, provides an interpretation of
the Song of Songs.

Three of the book’s sections (“Departure,” “Absence,” and
“Return”) have a Middle-Eastern and biblical ambience; they follow
the musings, discussions, and actions of four sages and their
families—ancient scholars conducting exegesis, presented in the
context of not only intellectual debate but also physical needs,
desires, and pleasures. Alternating with those sections are three
contemporary ones (“New York,” “London,” and “Jerusalem”).
In “New York” and “Jerusalem,” the first-person narrators are
women: one recovering from a miscarriage and feelings of uncertainty
about her marriage; the other in love with a man from another culture.
“London” consists of letters answering an advertisement from two
“impecunious ugly sisters looking for beaux.” The responses clearly
show the multitude of possible interpretations that any collection of
words can open, a point that is the basis of midrashic method.

Although Lovers: A Midrash is written in prose, it reads like narrative
poetry. It is elusive and puzzling and at the same time satisfying in
its glimpses of the inner intellectual, emotional, and spiritual lives
of its many characters. It explores the nature of the Song of Songs and
of human love while simultaneously exploring the process of
interpretation. An afterword gives some theoretical background to
midrash, to the Song of Songs, and to the connection between old
traditions and current postmodern theory.