"In all my years of rabbinic study I cannot remember a single time when the word 'ecstasy' was used in the context of Judaism. This shouldn't surprise you; the word is not all that common in any religious setting. 'It is hardly recognized that ecstasy is a basic human need, just as much as vitamins and proper nutrition, and that when its positive and life-sustaining forms are repressed it is inevitably sought in violence and cruelty.' [Alan Watts, Erotic Spirituality]

"The reason ecstasy is so rare is that ecstasy is subversive. The word itself, ek-stasis, means to stand apart from the norms to which you are supposed to conform. These norms are the cultural, religious, social, economic, and psychological standards that define your sense of self and determine how you are to act in the world. To stand apart from these norms in moments of ecstasy allows you to question them and perhaps even abandon them. This is not something most civilizations value.

"Two thousand years ago Rabbi Akiva complained about drunken revelers singing the Song of Songs in bars as if it were merely a bawdy tale of sexual yearning and consummation. He went so far as to threaten these singers with a loss of entry into heaven for treating the Song in this way. For him the Song of Songs was the 'Holy of Holies,' the most sacred of the sacred texts of the Hebrew Bible. Clearly he saw something in the Song that the inebriated saloon singers did not.

"What he saw in the Song of Songs was a metaphor for God's love of the Jewish people. While his understanding of the Song has been the standard among Jews for two millennia, there is nothing in the Song itself that suggests it is anything more than an erotic love song. Similarly when Christian commentators claim the Song of Songs as a metaphor of the love of Christ for his church, they, too, are reading into the text. I intend to do no less.

"Like Akiva and later Jewish and Christian commentators, I read the Song of Songs through a lens that allows me to see something more than erotic love poetry. And I, like them, read my 'something more' into the Song of Songs rather than out of it. The difference between these commentators and myself is that I want to make it clear that I am doing this, and not pretend that my reading is somehow the true reading. On the contrary; it is simply another reading, albeit one that I find of great value.

"For me, the Song of Songs is not merely a poem to be read, but a map to be followed. The Song is not simply a description of sexual yearning and lovemaking, but a guide to achieving spiritual awakening through sexual ecstasy. For me, the woman in the Song isn't Israel or the church, but Lady Wisdom, the first of God's creations through whom all life is fashioned. For me, the man in the Song isn't God but you, the seeker of Wisdom. So for me, the Song of Songs needs to be embodied by you if the meaning I bring to it is to be experienced in you.

"The erotic nature of the Song of Songs and the explicit lovemaking of which it speaks begs to be lived, but how far you are willing to go in this regard is not for me to say."