A Prayer To Be Sung Analysis

Sex is often talked about behind closed doors, with hands clasped over mouths trying not to giggle as mothers where babies come from. The subject of sex underwent many a change throughout Jewish history, beginning with the more open discussion of the subject in the Bible, and moving on downwards toward the eventual diaspora shtetl beliefs of formal arranged marriages and high necklines, making sex an essentially taboo subject. When the 20th Century begins, the Diaspora Jew is challenged by the ideal of the New Jew: a Zionist who does not wait for God or antiquated opinions to rule their destiny. As such, new Zionist writers were rediscovering ideas from their past, including sex, desire, and the rest of their worlds, to determine the course of their future. The modern poem, “A Prayer to be Sung,” by Miriam Yalan-Shteklis, plays off of the Biblical “Song of Songs,” to determine the sexual, and cultural revolution to come by the …show more content…
Her brothers, the exiled of Israel, are in need of this revolution. They are impoverished and poor, and their freedom will come with the end of the exile lifestyle. The daughter, keeping her heart open, is firmly rooting herself in the sexual revolution, heralding a return to the professions of love from the Biblical maiden. In these women’s development, the last stage in blossoming from chastity and a taboo on lust and the outside world, is, naturally to be deflowered, to explore. The maiden in “Song of Songs” loses her virginity with the symbolism of her beloved setting his flocks to graze in her garden, “Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where thou makest thy flock to rest at noon; for why should I be as one that veileth herself beside the flocks of thy companions?” (1:7). With the specific natural imagery, the lovers are succumbing to the natural world, to their natural instinct to love and be