It’s a curious thing, hearing men read the Song of Songs—and in Orthodox communities it is almost invariably men who read it. Even in the most egalitarian Orthodox synagogues, where women may read from the Torah, it is usually the Torah they read from; you seldom hear an old woman, let alone a young one, singing the Song of Songs on Friday nights or at the Sabbath during Passover—even though half of the poem is made up of a girl speaking to her beloved.

No, it is men who mainly recite or sing this poem, particularly old men. The first time I heard it, in Jerusalem, was in the courtyard of a small synagogue on a side street not far from Abu Tor, the Jewish neighborhood where we lived. In that courtyard on the afternoon of the Sabbath of Passover, an old man stood—not a Yemenite, or anyone else from those eastern communities whose renditions, to my Israeli ear, lend an authentic specificity to the Hebrew phrasings, but just a plain, old, white Ashkenazi Jew whose youngest son had just gone off to the army and had his beautiful long hair buzzed off, just a man singing with a cracked voice from the back of his throat. Singing, as Lorca said in his essay on Spanish deep song, without caring for the external beauty of the performance but for the sake of the song itself. Singing for love.

There is something moving about old men singing love songs. Philip Larkin writes about women’s night wear as it is displayed on dummies in department stores and how, as a result, women are always dreamed of as somehow other: “synthetic, new,/ And natureless in ecstasies.” I suspect that they are other and natureless in ecstasies to boys, or even to men who have not lived with women long enough to have children. To them, women are body parts, nightgowns. To old men who have married wives, seen children grow inside their bellies, seen those children slide out of them and begin to suck, seen those children walk away and the belly recede, recede, then hum to start making new life again—to those old men, women are not a foreign country and the girl walking out of the dunes in the Song of Songs is not anonymous. She is the woman of their youth who never stopped haunting them, then was replaced by that woman in the kitchen at night taking her pills, and who is ill sometimes when they hold her hand. On Friday nights, in Sephardi synagogues, they sing, the old men, about love and about the girl’s beloved, who always seems to be fleeing something. Perhaps he is fleeing the old man he will one day become.

There is nothing like an old Sephardi man whose voice is hoarse and not sweet like a boy’s, whose own breasts are soft now like a woman’s breasts under his white shirt. In the synagogue on Friday night those old men trade verses, singing a chapter of the Song each, calling up the girl, her lover, the guards who hunt her through the city, the vapor rising over the desert road. It is impossible to stay indifferent, to stay outside the Song, while listening to the Song.

In London, already with three children beside me, I used to sit in the Persian synagogue at the top of the huge barn of a synagogue across the road from our tiny flat in Finchley, and I would hear every man of them sing, and when my turn came around I would sing, too, essaying their melodies as best I could. One night the old gabbai Jack, in his seventies, a rug merchant, said to me: “My son-in-law was here today. He asked me: who is that man with the beard, singing? I said, He’s a nice Ashkenazi boy, but he sings Sephardi very well!”

When I started translating the Song I was fortunate to come across the commentary of the late scholar Yehuda Feliks, author of Nature and Man in the Bible. Feliks thinks the poem is a zoological and botanical study of the life cycle of the doe and deer of Israel, and believes their unique mating cycle of staggered coming together and falling apart is what dictates the unique structure and odd chase motif of the poem. I don’t know about the theology of Feliks’s theory. Along with his own commentary he reprints the commentary of Rashi (1040-1105), which he regards as possessing a lyric beauty rivalling that of the poem itself—though he does hold that, as to the color of the girl’s hair, Rashi is mistaken in suggesting it was blond like that of a French goat and not brunette like that of an Israeli goat.

Perhaps it’s about the deer, perhaps not. But I do believe it is a poem about the life cycle, of flowers budding, trees in fruit, the garden, and the wait for the beloved.

I actually felt I was translating a music video, what with the start-stop rhythm and the glories of King Solomon’s wedding divan as a glamorous set for a love story to play out against. I tried to get the faint, tinkling echo of a 1920s dance tune into my lyric version, because popular songs from back then still have an antique tinkle in my ear while still being living song, at least to me. Cole Porter would have been a fine translator of the Song of Songs. That is what the Champagne is doing there, though it has nothing to do with the court of Solomon. I suppose you could also set the poem as a folk ballad or series of folk ballads, which is what some scholars think it is, though then the voice would have to be more mournful; the ballad tradition is more about murder and lost love than about lovers who fall apart and then come together again, forever.

The old men are the key, finally, to hearing the poem, their voices calling the beloved across time. It is the voice of men calling their wives out of the Bible, men who have left their dreams behind long ago, but still live with love.

The commentary of Meir Leibush ben Yehiel Mikhel Weiser (1809-1879), commonly known by his acronym Malbim, has for my purposes the unique virtue of balancing traditional learning with a keen eye for the nuances and particularities of the text. The traditional rabbinic reading of this poem is that it is an allegory or symbolic rendering of the love between the Almighty (the beloved) and Israel (the girl). While adhering to that scheme, the Malbim lovingly constructs a running “plot” for the Song, which he summarizes thus:

I have always found the usual allegorical reading—that the poem is about the relationship between God and the Jewish people—a little forced. To be convincing, a metaphor must spring to mind readily—that is, it must work upon the emotions and not the mind. At least the Malbim gives us a story, and an emotionally convincing one. But I still fail to see how this collection of sometimes frankly erotic lyrics can evoke the relationship between the rather querulous and irrepressibly turbulent Jewish people and the rather turbulent and irrepressibly bad-tempered Deity who roams the verses of the Pentateuch.

For my part, the Malbim’s plot summary calls to mind something I once heard a rabbi in Leeds say at a holiday meal. Each year, he noted, after the High Holy Days and the festival of Sukkot are over, the community goes its separate ways for the coming months. There are Sabbath gatherings, certainly, but the long dark winter is descending. Hanukkah will come along to light the darkness for a week, but basically, after the excitement and sustained communal unity of the fall, people are closing in on themselves for the winter.

And there, for me, lies the personal reading of the Song that comes through in Malbim’s allegory. Throughout the winter the girl, who loves and yearns for the shepherd, is imprisoned in the palace of the king who plies her with food and drink, just as winter forces us all to turn inward and comfort ourselves with food and drink as we hunker down to get through the darkness.

Passover, the spring week when you’ll hear the Song chanted in the synagogue, is when you clean your house, spiritually and emotionally, after the sleepy indulgence of winter. You ask yourself: Am I alert? Am I still listening to my soul and to the call from above? If God were to ask me—just for instance—to slaughter a lamb, the Egyptians’ sacred animal, in broad daylight and daub the blood on my door in front of their very noses, would I do it? If I had been in Egypt, would I have been one of those who stayed behind next to their pot of meat, or would I have gone out with Moses, would I have let myself be free? Would I have gone into the desert, as Jeremiah and the Malbim put it, like a besotted girl, trailing after God? Would I have dared to go?

That is what the girl in the Song of Songs is fleeing to. She is fleeing to be free, and she is fleeing to her love.

So when I hear old men singing those verses on Friday night, or when I hear them sung on the Sabbath of Passover, what I think about isn’t eating bread again. It’s the air, and the wind in your clothes, and the heat of the desert, heat that stays in your heart, stays until maybe even that moment when, as Shakespeare says of the old and dying Falstaff, every part of you is cold, “as cold as any stone.”

When all is said and done, the Song of Songs, just like Ecclesiastes, tells you to rejoice and enjoy while you still can, because the beloved is always fleeing—and because what he is fleeing cannot be escaped. So love, and be free, because both love and freedom are fleeting, even if like the old man singing you can still remember the love of your youth rising out of the desert, and the dripping flowers and the buds in bloom. Love, and run to the desert before the guards catch your soul and pat it down for crumbs. Run, before the guards catch you—don’t hesitate—run.

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Atar Hadari, born in Israel and raised in England, is a poet and translator whose Rembrandt’s Bible, a collection of biblical monologues, was recently published in the UK by Indigo Dreams. His previous essays in Mosaic are “The Preacher’s Air” (on Ecclesiastes) and “Esther in Des Moines”(on the book of Esther), both accompanied by original translations.