Song Of Songs: Healing The Spirit, Deepening Love

Author, composer and musician Rabbi Shefa Gold teaches the arts of Chanting, Meditation, Devotional Healing and Community-Building. Director of The Center for Devotional, Energy & Ecstatic Practice as well as a leader in ALEPH: The Alliance for Jewish Renewal, Rabbi Shefa combines her grounding in Judaism with Buddhist, Christian, Islamic and Native American spiritual traditions. In this podcast we discuss her enchantment with the Song of Songs: an Initiation onto the Path of Love.

Transcript

There you have it.

This is Kabbalah 99.

I'm Deborah Sophia.

Today our guest is Rabbi Shefa Gold.

Rabbi Shefa received ordination from both the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and from Rabbi Zalman Shakter-Shalomi.

She is the director of the Center for Devotional Energy and Ecstatic Practice,

Or C-DEAP.

A composer of music,

Shefa has produced 10 albums of songs and chants and authored four books.

Her newest project,

Love at the Center,

Is an immersion in the Song of Songs,

A mystical text that is meant to transform our lives so that we can transform the world.

So hello,

Rabbi Shefa.

Welcome.

It's so good to speak with you again.

Hi.

Nice to be with you,

Deborah.

We met a while ago at a three-day retreat in Colorado.

And what stays with me most after all this time are the beautiful rhythmic chants that you let us in.

So what draws you personally to chanting and to chanting in community?

Boy,

It makes me want to really chant in community again.

I've been chanting on Zoom with everybody muted right now.

But the practice of chant is one that I came to because I have a great love for sound and music and the Hebrew language and sacred text.

And as I was encountering all the rich inheritance of my tradition,

I decided to take just one phrase at a time.

And instead of learning everything at once,

Just to take one phrase at a time and to learn it deeply.

And to learn something deeply means to embody it,

To take it into my body,

Let it move me,

Let it do its work of transformation.

And so I see each phrase of the liturgy or sacred text as kind of like a magic incantation that has a power if only I could unlock it.

And I unlock it with rhythm,

With melody,

With harmony,

And with intention and with repetition.

And so the practice of chant really helps me to then receive the gift that my ancestors have left me.

Oh,

How lovely.

And it connects us together when I'm with a group and it opens my heart,

Relaxes my body,

Clears my mind.

So I use chant to enter meditation or to do healing work or to do ritual.

You know,

It's an amazing tool.

Can you visibly see the transformation in the people?

Back in the days when we could be in community,

Do you see their lights turn on?

What difference does it make for the people?

Well,

You know,

First I work with my own practice and that practice is about entering into the deeper meaning of Torah through this experience.

And then I found out that other people want to come along with me on this journey or want to have their own journeys and don't just want to stay in their heads to learn.

And the idea is that when we take it into our bodies,

It transforms our lives.

I can give you an example of a phrase that I'm working with right now that has three words from the Song of Songs.

It says,

Mashi-keini acha recha narutza.

So,

Mashkeini means draw me after you,

Pull me towards you.

Mashi-keini acha recha.

And then narutza says,

Let's run together.

And so if I want to open up a place of enthusiasm and willingness to do the spiritual work,

I might chant that for a long time to kindle that fire in me.

And when you do it with a group of people,

That is the power of it is even magnified.

So you mentioned the Song of Songs.

So this comes from the Song of Songs.

It's also known as the Song of Solomon.

Some of you may have heard of it that way.

So what story does the Song of Songs tell?

Well,

It tells the story of love and relationship and nature.

And it is really has been one of the central texts of the mystics in Judaism.

And there's a story about Rabbi Akiva back in the second century,

When they were deciding which texts were going to be holy and which we should throw away,

Let go.

He stood up for the Song of Songs when it was about to be discarded,

Because people said,

Oh,

It's all about love,

It's all about sex,

People are singing it in the taverns,

There's,

God is not mentioned in it,

Let's get rid of this one.

And he said,

No,

He said,

No,

This is not only is this holy,

It is the holy of holies,

Which means it is the central text.

And if we put that love at the center,

Everything else will be different.

And he also said that had the Torah not been given,

We could live our lives by the Song of Songs.

And I was so intrigued by what that meant.

What would it mean to live my life by the Song of Songs?

So it sent me into the text as if it's the kind of the land inside me,

It was like a journey.

And I decided this is where I want to live,

I want to live in this land.

Because really,

The core of Judaism is love,

But it gets kind of covered up by all these other layers.

But to love God with all my heart,

With all my soul,

With all my might,

And to love the stranger and to love the other as myself,

Those are the core commandments.

And,

But we don't know how to do that.

And we run into difficulties along the way.

So the Song of Songs is kind of has the secrets in it,

That will help us to live that love and to explore,

You know,

Whenever I want to live something,

I have to explore what is keeping me from it.

So that becomes the path and the work.

Secrets,

Tell me a secret.

I like secrets.

Well,

The secrets are,

You know,

Happened through our experience.

They don't happen in,

You know,

In something you can say and understand in your head.

They come from the experience.

So the first words of Song of Songs,

It says,

Kiss me,

Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth.

And when we say God,

We don't mean some guy in the sky.

We mean,

You know,

Being being itself,

Our experience of reality.

So what would it mean to kiss and be kissed by your own experience of life?

That's a secret.

And you don't understand it until you,

You know,

You can't explain a kiss,

But you can experience it and say,

Oh,

That's how I want to live.

Well,

To me,

This sounds a lot like Rumi's poetry.

Do you see a connection?

I think that all mystics kind of went to the same places,

You know,

And and were intoxicated by their experience of God.

And then they tried to to bring that experience back to to the people.

And so every every tradition has has that stream in it.

And what's great is that we can we can all inspire each other and fight.

And and when we experience it in a different tradition,

It can send us back to our own roots and say,

Oh,

Where is that here?

You know,

Where can I find that here?

The theme of community comes up a lot when I'm speaking with you about a shared experience.

Can you say some more about that?

You know,

I think that sometimes we have blind spots.

And when we come into intimacy with another,

They can see something in us that we haven't seen in ourselves and awaken something in us.

And then,

You know,

When we come together,

There is the divine presence that comes between us.

You know,

This kind of magic that happens.

So even on Zoom,

It happens.

That's what I'm what I'm seeing are between you and I at this moment,

Because we are looking towards that mystery together.

And so the search that we're on,

It's just magnified by our coming together.

There's a line in the Song of Songs that says,

Chavaarim makhshivim,

The listening friends,

Hashmi'ini,

Let me hear it.

When we come together to listen,

The listening becomes more acute.

But as by myself,

I might not hear it,

But with you or with a community,

That mystery becomes more evident,

More present.

So you're calling your current project Love at the Center.

So what are you seeing about life today that is drawing you to the Song of Songs and guiding us to love at the center?

Well,

You know,

The realization I had is that,

You know,

I've been very immersed in Torah,

Reading Torah every week,

Which is the story of creation and the story of our roots and the story of the journey from slavery to freedom in the promised land.

And it's an important story when you read it over and over again,

It gets inside you and you're living that story.

And I realized that the Song of Songs also needs to get into the center of us.

It needs to be a central text and not just something we read once a year or,

You know,

Very occasionally.

And it's for everyone because the world needs this.

We need to come from love.

We need to explore love.

We need to break down the illusions of separation that get put up between us.

So I felt like this is the time to put love at the center and that the Song of Songs can help us to do that.

So the project is one where people sign up to and they get just a couple lines of this magic text with commentary and then a chant each week to help us to embody that text and then a question.

So,

You know,

That week,

This week,

You know,

The chant says,

Mashi kein niyach arecha narutza.

So draw me after you,

Let's run together.

And the question to contemplate this week that I'm holding and that all of my students are holding is,

What is my calling?

How am I called to embody love,

To bring my unique gift to this world?

What is that calling?

How do I listen to it?

And what's my resistance to that calling?

Because we don't always follow the calling that we hear.

And so this week we explore not only the calling but the resistance as well,

Because I learn as much from that resistance as I do from the teaching itself.

This makes me think a lot about the harsh tzleth lecha,

You know,

That seems to be about finding your purpose in your calling.

Yeah,

Well,

It's also about getting moving,

You know,

Leaving what you know,

In order to enter into the unknown,

Because if we just stay with what we know,

We never grow.

Avram left what he knew physically,

Went like something like 300 miles,

Something like that.

But we don't have to actually leave our house,

Especially during these difficult times.

We don't have to leave our house to get going.

Can you talk a little bit about how we can do that and not leave the house?

I don't take any of these stories literally.

I don't think it's about a story about a person who went someplace.

I think it's about a state of being where we become open to the call and take that step within us,

Even if we don't know where it's leading,

But that we have the faith to step out of our small identity and enter into the identity of our souls,

Really.

And the word tzlech,

Literally,

It means go to yourself,

Because that's where the answer lies.

It's no place else.

The presence of God is there within us to encounter and to live.

I'm really inspired by what you're saying,

Because as I'm reading that Parsha,

I'm thinking Avraham,

Or Avram at that time,

Was already so aware,

Because I learned as a child in Hebrew school that he knew that God couldn't be the son and couldn't be anything that comes and goes and couldn't be in the idols.

So he smashed the idols to show that,

Of course,

That's not God.

And what did he do?

He left one big one and said to his father,

Oh,

The big one did that.

And then the father said,

Well,

That couldn't have happened.

And then why didn't you worship them?

He just made them from clay.

So why did he,

At age 75,

Have to be called again?

I mean,

It seems like he'd already arrived.

Well,

What you're talking about is a midrash.

It's not in the text.

Right.

But I know this about him.

I'm thinking he's already so advanced.

Why does he have to go further?

So first of all,

It's important when you read a text to say,

Oh,

This is not about someone else in some other time.

This is about me,

Right,

In this very moment of my life.

And because that's where Avraham lives,

Is inside of us.

And when we hear the call,

Do we have the courage to step forward?

And to step forward means to expand into the larger being that we are,

And not just stay small and believe everybody else's projections of who we are,

But to really step into a mystery.

It's like sometimes I need to take a step.

I don't know where it's going to go.

But if I don't take that step,

I'll be paralyzed.

And I think there's a lot of when we are afraid,

We either fight or flight or freeze.

And all of those responses are going to lead us into a smaller existence.

And so we need to somehow listen to a different voice within.

So it is the voice of faith.

You wrote in an article I saw about you,

You said that the path of love demands that you acknowledge every obstacle to love's fulfillment.

So tell me more about that.

How do we get past those obstacles?

So I think those obstacles are teachers.

When I make a commitment to the path of love,

Then I want to do a practice to bring love to everything that I do.

And then I come across the moments in my life that aren't loving,

That aren't a loving response,

That aren't filled with my gratefulness.

And the work is then to looking to do the healing,

The purification,

The refinement inside me so that I can walk my talk,

That I can live that love.

I know that for me,

It's a practice of self-awareness.

So when I take a walk in the village near me and I see political signs of a person that I really don't want to get elected,

And my heart closes and there's a kind of an outrage that comes up in me,

I know that I've contracted inside me.

And so I want to be,

And then so then I work with it.

I work with it so that can I walk by those houses and feel my inner calm and give blessing to the people that I don't agree with.

That's the path of love.

And I know when I'm not there that there's work to do.

And then I'm sent to my practice.

So how do we balance the path of love with discernment?

So I say this because sometimes in spiritual practice,

We focus so much on being open that we can lose our sense of healthy boundaries.

It's something that doesn't get talked a lot about,

But healthy boundary or judgment,

Discernment,

Is also valuable for balance and grounding.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Well,

I will discern between discernment and judgment.

There's something different.

Judgment feels very different inside me.

I can make a discernment about what the wisest thing to do in this moment is.

And I want to have access to all of my higher functions.

When I get afraid or reactive,

I lose the connection with my own compassion or wide perspective.

So I need to find that back if I'm going to act wisely in the world and be not only truthful,

But also effective.

And I have to know that when I am holding some of those places of hatred or fear,

It's a toxicity.

And I'm hurting myself with it.

I'm diminishing the being that I am.

So I think these times really require a lot of spiritual practice,

A lot of holding a wide perspective,

Because it's so easy to lose that when we get reactive.

So you are very focused on practice and experience.

Can you give our listeners a practice they can do to help them to live the path of love?

I think what comes to mind is this idea of holding a question.

And lately,

I've been holding this question.

And actually,

My husband really believes in sticky notes.

So he put this question on a sticky note and put it all over the house.

And the question was,

Can you bring love to everything you do?

Can you bring love to everything you do?

So when this question was given to me,

The first thing I turned towards,

It was a terrible,

Terrible dirty pan in the sink that I really didn't want to wash.

But then that question came to me.

It's like,

Oh,

Can I bring love to everything I do?

And so it became a practice to scrub that pot that I didn't want to scrub,

But to say,

I'm going to do this.

I'm going to bring love to this.

And everything that I do in my life,

If I'm asking that question,

That I'm not demanding it of myself.

I just want to stay curious and say,

Is it possible?

Oh,

Can I bring love to this?

Even some of the things I don't want to do,

Rather than just wish it was over,

Can I really use this as an exploration,

As a practice?

So that question alone has changed my orientation towards what's difficult in life.

And our lives are made up of these small moments.

And if we can bring that question to each moment,

For me,

It's been transformative.

It sounds deeply sincere.

You bring a tremendous sincerity to what you do.

You also talk about surrendering yourself totally.

That's a Sufi idea.

We often talk about surrendering ourself.

Could you say more about that?

You know,

It's a Jewish idea also,

To surrender,

The idea is that God is here in this moment.

But I often have resistance to what this moment is.

If I don't like it and I push it away,

I want something else.

I want the next moment.

So surrender,

You know,

In the Song of Songs,

It says,

Zed odib ez rei,

This is my beloved.

This is my beloved and this is my friend.

Oh,

This,

This very moment is how God is showing up for me right now.

You know,

I might just rather have that.

But what I'm given is this.

And this is how,

This is what,

This is,

These are the clothes that God is wearing right now.

Can I be with this and open to the possibilities that are right here.

And,

You know,

I think about what this time of the pandemic is like,

You know,

It's so easy to try to like look for like,

Into the future,

Like,

Oh,

When can I do this?

When I can,

You know,

But the truth is that,

You know,

Here it is,

You know,

This moment is as it is.

And we want to be able to open to it,

Surrender to what is.

And,

And then from there,

The doors of creativity open.

But until the surrender happens,

Those doors will be shut.

I'm glad you mentioned that about the doors of creativity,

Because I have also found during this period,

When I wasn't so drawn to outer activities that I would normally be doing,

My creativity just blossomed.

And I imagine a lot of our listeners had that same experience.

And I guess the turning point is when you accept things as they are and look to the moment for its own beauty.

Yeah.

And it's not an easy thing,

Because there are,

We have such kind of habits of how we live and what we're used to.

And so that's why I think the surrender is really important,

Because those doors to creativity might not open if we're looking for what we can't have,

Rather than opening to what's here.

I remember in your workshop,

There was this wonderful feeling of encountering God.

And that just seems,

I don't know if it was God I was encountering,

But it certainly was a more expansive feeling and loving feeling than I normally would experience.

Well,

One of my favorite names for God is the great mystery.

And the courage to leave what I know and step into the unknown and encounter a mystery,

It means that I might not know what this is,

But I want to fully experience it.

And let it touch me and consent to its movement inside me.

And then stay curious about like,

Oh,

What is this?

When I chant,

At the end of the chant,

It's as if there's a door opening that has been opened by the chant.

And I want to walk through that door.

And I'll be in a new state of consciousness that has been created,

The opportunity for that new state of consciousness has been created by the practice that I just did.

I was thinking as you were talking about that,

That every time I go out of my house and go for a walk,

It's a little bit different.

It may be the same path,

But maybe it's the same path.

But maybe a different cat runs across my path.

I smile at a different person.

The weather's a little different.

Everything's different,

Even though it's the same thing.

But you're different,

But you're different in every moment.

Yeah.

It's a lovely thing.

Nothing's ever the same.

It's just always fresh if you allow it to be.

So you're inspiring me already.

So I want to ask you the perennial question,

One that simmers in every soul.

What is the purpose of life?

Why are we here,

Rabbi Shefa?

You know,

I wouldn't answer it like we.

I would,

Because I would answer that.

I would say that asking the question is more important in each moment and for each person.

Because what,

And I'm always asking that question.

And the people who I do spiritual direction with,

I'm asking that question of like,

What is the purpose of life for you right this moment?

And how can you be aligned with that purpose?

And sometimes the purpose is as simple as,

Oh,

I'm here to bring kindness and beauty into the world.

And then you look at your life and say,

Oh,

Am I aligned with that soul purpose?

Or it might be here to learn how to love or to be loved.

And so asking the question is what's important.

And to not also be attached to one particular answer,

Because that answer might change,

You know,

Tomorrow.

But being in a state of openness to always be looking to fulfill that soul's purpose in each moment and noticing when we're aligned with it and noticing when we're not.

And so I think that's the important thing.

I think you could say that it's all about waking up.

And do you think human beings are evolving?

Are we waking up and dancing?

Or are we going backwards?

We're definitely waking up.

And it's not easy.

It's a not easy thing.

You know,

I think I was just reading about in the Torah,

In Parshat Toldot,

Which you'll get to in a couple weeks,

Rivka is having a very difficult pregnancy.

And she says,

Why is this happening to me?

It's just she almost forgets that she's pregnant,

Because there's this war inside her.

And it doesn't,

You know,

And she forgets that there's a birth happening.

There's a birth that's going on.

And I think we are also birthing a new world.

And there are always contractions involved with birth.

And if you're only focused on the contraction,

You can think,

Oh,

This is the end.

But it's part of a bigger picture of birthing love,

Birthing awareness,

Birthing a sense of connection.

I'm thinking of something that you've been talking about,

And that is that we tend to focus too much on the negative with the news.

And it's just maybe a little bit human nature to want to protect against any onslaught.

But with Love at the Center,

That project that you have,

You seem to want to shift our focus to the good that's happening.

You know,

It's really about widening the focus,

You know,

That all the negativity is happening within a larger context of the world that is waking up.

And so if I'm fixated on it,

It's not that I want to ignore the negative,

The difficult places,

But if I'm fixated on it and I don't notice this is part of that there is a larger perspective,

A bigger picture of an awakening that I want to be part of,

You know,

And that to me is encouraging and that keeps me,

Keeps me going.

And the one thing,

And you know,

In Jewish teaching and Hasidic teaching especially,

Is that when you fall into despair,

You have cut yourself off from God.

And so you can notice feelings coming and going,

But you don't ever have to get stuck anywhere.

You can find yourself as fluidly responding to what's happening in the world.

And I don't know,

It's like you also have to monitor how much news you let in and where that news is coming from because there is this,

You know,

What's called a negative bias of the brain.

It's kind of,

You know,

We evolved as from our ancestors having this negativity bias that kind of holds onto those negative things because we think we're going to stay safe if we're survival.

We're aware of those dangers,

But really it doesn't work so well.

And so that's why we do spiritual practice to overcome the negativity bias of the brain and to put that negativity in a larger context so that we can continue to be on the path of love regardless of what it looks like on the outside.

Because really what we're working with is that each of us is working with the inner evolution.

And when we do that,

I have the faith that the outer world will also be transformed.

That's very uplifting.

I feel very engaged by what you've been saying and I hope to be able to talk with you again in the future because you have so much to say and so much more to say.

And if people are interested in your project,

Love at the Center,

Or your books or your music,

How can they reach out and get in touch with you?

I have a website www.

Rabbi shefa gold.

Com and there's all kinds of resources there and retreats that I'm teaching,

An online retreat called from healing into action so that if we want to be activists,

We need to do the healing inside us in order to do that.

And I teach a class every Thursday night that's open to the world about what I'm working on now.

And it's a very exciting time to do the inner work.

So that's www.

Rabbishefagold.

Com.

I'll put that in the description about you so that people will be able to find you.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for coming on the call.

It's great seeing you again.

My pleasure.

Good to be with you.

For more Mind Heart Awakenings like these,

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Next week,

We'll hear from another thought leader who will help us to explore our experience of life and our place in this universe.

Thanks for listening.

I'm Deborah Sophia.

See you next week.