"A Jewish View of Love" February 25, 7:30pm @ Netivot Shalom!

"A Jewish View of Love" with Rabbi Benjy Segal
Wed, February 25, 7:30pm
Congregation Netivot Shalom
1316 University Ave, Berkeley

This event is free and open to the public.

The Song of Songs is one of the earliest, perhaps the greatest of the world's love poems, in which a picture of ideal love emerges - mutual, committed, equal, erotic and exclusive. The author, a master poet (and possibly a woman), uses interweaving scenes to reflect the story of a young couple struggling against societal standards and family pressures. Making no attempt to reduce shades of meaning to simple prose, Rabbi Segal's new commentary appreciates that complexity and nuance are poetry's greatest power. It proceeds through easily read units, layer by layer unfolding both the background and the tensions. Overviews follow - of love as reflected in the Song, on the history of interpretation and on the poet's techniques.

Join Rabbi Segal, author of the recently published "The Song of Songs: A Woman in Love" for a fascinating conversation upon publication of his new translation and commentary which, according to Rabbi Elliot Dorff, "claim that the Song of Song's voluptuous depiction of love and sex, albeit within bounds, fits nicely into how the rest of the Bible understands love and sex too.  This is a true triumph of scholarship and love." 

Copies of "The Song of Songs: A Woman in Love" will be available for purchase
and Rabbi Segal will be available for signings after the presentation.

Benjamin J. Segal is the past President of Melitz, the Centers for Jewish and Zionist Education, in Jerusalem, and most recently has created within that context the major Jewish learning festival of Sukkot in Jerusalem, "Gateways." A past President of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, the academic and educational center of Masorti Judaism in Israel, he previously served for nineteen years as the Director of the Ramah Programs in Israel, He is former Chairman of the Masorti Movement in Israel and, for many years, served on the Expanded Executive of the World Zionist Organization. He is the chairman of the Executive of the Meimad Political Party in Israel, and serves on the boards of several non-profit enterprises.   

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Rabbi Menachem Creditor
-- www.netivotshalom.org
-- www.shefanetwork.org
-- menachemcreditor.org

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