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Happy New Calendar! Monday night is New Moon Nisan, the 1st of all new moons!

Thanks to Einstein, we understand well that time is not an absolute, but a relative phenomenon. When we are enjoying ourselves, ‘time flies’. When we feel relaxed, ‘we have all the time in the world’. When we feel less relaxed, we never have enough time, we feel like we are ‘chasing time’, ‘battling time’, and so on.

Towards the dramatic climax of the blockbuster story of the Exodus, between the 9th and 10th Plagues, the action pauses, and the 1st mitzvah (connection) is given to the Jewish People. It’s an even funnier thing, but rather than being a moral law (e.g. Don’t Murder), the 1st mitzvah is an instruction to begin a new calendar, based on the waxing and waning of the moon.

These people must overcome centuries of servitude, torment and self-loathing. I imagine that as slaves, they didn’t have much control over how they spent their time, so the transition into being co-creators of a new civilization is vast! This is why the generation who leave Egypt never make it into the Promised Land – only their children can make that next step of giving root to a new way of life. But the generation who leave Egypt must at least begin the work of leaving behind the thoughts, words and actions of slaves, hence they need a new calendar before the Exodus.

Once the people have absorbed this mitzvah, they are ready to take the substantial step of kid-napping a lamb (an animal worshipped by their host society), slaughtering it (a capital offence), and feasting on it. This feast is the 1st Seder Night, which begins a ritual that Jews all around the world still participate in to this day. I say ‘participate’ because the 1st Seder was not the only ‘real’ one, but rather an opening in the flow of time, which we travel through every year, as we re-live the Exodus as if we ourselves were slaves, on our way to freedom.

To what end?

To remind ourselves that we too were once, and indeed still are, slaves, and that the work of liberation is not yet done.

Now, the question arises, who is ‘we’?

Are we only concerned with the liberation of ourselves?

Our family?

Our community?

Our tribe, people, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, postcode, country…?

According to the beautiful ‘Fourfold Song’ of Rav Kook, the highest aspiration of Judaism is to SIMULTANEOUSLY sing the songs of

1) oneself
2) one’s people
3) humanity
4) Everything/the Universe

We learn here and in many of our other sources of wisdom that the path to attaining such a state is to start from deep within oneself, and to work gradually, patiently outwards. (For example, the Torah says “Love thy neighbor as thyself”, and we know that we can only truly love others to the extent that we love ourselves.)

So, what is this ‘fourfold song’ that is at once “simple, doubled, tripled, quadrupled”? (Meaning that it exists in each one of these states alone, that each of these states interplay with each other, and that all also exist together.)

According to Rav Kook, this song is the Song of Songs, aka the Song of Solomon, which is traditionally read in homes and synagogues on Pesach.

The Song of Songs is a sensual love song, or really a string of songs. It is at once

1) a personal song, between a woman and her lover
2) a song of the relationship between a people and their god
3) a song between the human soul and its Creator
4) the song of all Creation.

These 4 songs flow into each other and nourish each other, like the spiraling cycles of fertility, water, oxygen, nitrogen, Carbon, sun, moon and earth around us, thus creating the dance of life.

Like the Song of Songs, the Song of the Universe has no perceptible beginning or end and consists of both movement and stillness, giving and receiving, ebbing and flowing.
According to the ‘Sfat Emet’, we sing the Song of Songs on Pesach because its subject is a “necessary love”. On Pesach, when we re-live the Exodus, we are privileged to a glimpse of profound freedom, not merely the absence of slavery, but true freedom – a state where everything is in tune with this love.

And so, we sing the Song of Songs, to re-learn how to hear this song, to attune ourselves to the necessary love underlying all life.

If we listen, we might hear the song of our own potential, or of those around us, or of all humanity, or of all Being.

We might, as the Sfat Emet puts it, “wake up to the song in all creations”.

Love

Daniel

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