How Israel Becomes the Scent the World Needs

Most people read Song of Songs as a love poem between two human beings. The rabbis who compiled Midrash Rabbah on it, working in Palestine somewhere between the sixth and eighth centuries, read it as something far stranger. They read it as a coded report on how Israel keeps the world standing. Every flower, every spice, every body part in the poem stood for an emblem Israel carried between God and creation. Lose the emblem, lose the world.

The builders no one called by their right name

Start with the line that names the audience. "Daughters of Jerusalem," the poem sings, again and again. Shir HaShirim Rabbah refuses the simple translation. Read it as bonot, the rabbis say. Builders. Not the women on the rooftops watching the procession pass. The Great Sanhedrin, the seventy-one-judge supreme court that sat in the Chamber of Hewn Stone and ruled on every life-or-death case in the country. Those were the builders the poem was talking to.

Rabbi Yoḥanan, the third-century master of Tiberias, pushed the reading further. The same Hebrew root reappears in (Joshua 15:47), where the towns around Ashdod and Gaza are called benoteha, her daughter-towns. So Jerusalem, in the poem, is a mother city growing daughter cities outward across the nations. The builders inside the walls are also building outside them. The court that judged Israel is the same instrument God uses to teach the rest of the world how to live.

What does a love poem have to do with a smoking altar?

Then the poem turns physical. "A bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me, that lies between my breasts." In Shir HaShirim Rabbah 14:3, Rabbi Yoḥanan hears that line and immediately thinks about the Avtinas family. The Avtinas were the priestly clan that knew the recipe for the Temple incense, and they refused to teach it to anyone outside the family. Eleven spices. Stacte, onycha, galbanum, frankincense, and seven more, in proportions Rabbi Huna derived by counting the words of (Exodus 30:34).

The bundle of myrrh resting between the lover's breasts, the rabbis said, was the incense cloud resting between the two staves of the Ark on Yom Kippur. The smoke rose in a column and spread into a canopy, and inside that canopy, the sins of Israel were covered. The cluster of henna, eshkol hakofer, became mekhaper, the one who atones. Smell, in this reading, was not decoration. It was the medium God chose to receive an apology from an entire nation at once.

The rose that stopped the executioner

Now reach further back, before the Temple, before the priesthood, before the Tabernacle. Shir HaShirim Rabbah 2:3 tells a story about a king and an orchard, passed down from Rabbi Simon through Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Azarya. The king plants figs, grapes, pomegranates, and apples. He hands the orchard to a sharecropper and walks away. Twenty-six generations pass. When he comes back the field is choked with thorns and briars.

He calls for the woodcutters. He is ready to take the whole thing down. The generation of Enosh, who first profaned the divine name. The generation of the Flood, drowned in their own violence. The generation of the Dispersion, scattered from Babel. Twenty-six generations of failure, and God sat enthroned over the flood like a judge over a sentencing. Then, in the wreckage, he sees one rose. He bends down. He smells it. The orchard lives because of the rose, and the rose, the rabbis say, is Israel at Mount Sinai answering na'aseh v'nishma, we will do and we will hear, before they had even been told what the law would require.

Tablets hewn from the orb of the sun

So Israel saves the world by saying yes to something they have not yet read. What they receive in exchange is the strangest physical object in Jewish memory. "His hands are rods of gold set with beryl," (Song of Songs 5:14) sings, and Shir HaShirim Rabbah 14:1 hears the two tablets of the covenant inside that image. Rabbi Yehoshua bar Neḥemya said the tablets were sapphire, flexible, rolled up like a scroll. Rabbi Menaḥama, quoting Rabbi Avun, said they were carved straight out of the orb of the sun.

Then the rabbis fought over how the commandments were written on them. Rabbi Ḥanina ben Gamliel kept it symmetrical, five on each tablet, like the five fingers on each hand. Other rabbis insisted all ten were written on each tablet. Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai doubled it to twenty per side. Rabbi Simai pushed it to forty per side, reading (Exodus 32:15) about writing on both faces as a multiplier. The argument is not about counting. The argument is about how much Torah can be packed into one slab of stone before the stone gives out, and the rabbis are betting the answer is more than you think.

Four emblems, one job description

Lay the four pieces side by side and a single argument falls into place. The builders of Jerusalem speak. The incense of the Avtinas family rises. The rose at Sinai answers. The gold tablets carry the answer down into the world. Voice, scent, fragrance, substance. Each one is what Israel hands to God so that the orchard does not get cut down.

The rabbis writing this commentary were not living in a country with a Temple. The Avtinas family had stopped grinding incense centuries before. The Sanhedrin had been dissolved. The tablets were buried with the Ark, wherever that was. And still, in the ruins, these rabbis insisted that the emblems were not gone. They had moved inside the people who remembered them. A court that learns Torah is still building Jerusalem. A prayer offered at the right hour is still incense. A child saying na'aseh v'nishma at a Shavuot table is still the rose. The orchard is still being kept alive, one small fragrance at a time, by people who have nothing left to offer except themselves.