It is not the Temple, nor anything physical Shlomo HaMelech built, that is his defining legacy, to me. This week we mourn the Beit HaMikdash he built, and this Shabbat, Shabbat Nachamu, we begin to comfort ourselves. Yet the Temple is gone. His palace is gone. His wealth is gone. The kingdom split within a generation of his death. Shlomo lived a vast and complex physical life, and almost none of it survived.

What survived is something else entirely, and it is the real reason I have chosen him. Three works, attributed to him across the three stages of a life: one written in his youth, one in his middle years, one in his old age. Shir HaShirim, Mishlei and Kohelet. Between them they reveal the wisdom, the creativity, the complexity and his sheer brilliance. And more than that, they pushed the boundaries of how we are able to think about the Torah, about our relationship with G-d, and about our relationship with ourselves. I cannot point to anyone else, in anything I have ever read, who did that. It is for this reason, and not for the Temple, that Shlomo is my Role Model this week.

The tradition itself frames the three books as the arc of a single life:

כשאדם נער אומר דברי זמר הגדיל אומר דברי משלות הזקין אומר דברי הבלים When a man is young, he speaks words of song; when he matures, words of parable; when he grows old, words of futility. (Shir HaShirim Rabbah 1:1)

כשאדם נער אומר דברי זמר הגדיל אומר דברי משלות הזקין אומר דברי הבלים

When a man is young, he speaks words of song; when he matures, words of parable; when he grows old, words of futility. (Shir HaShirim Rabbah 1:1)

Youth sings. Maturity instructs. Old age reckons. Three ages, three books, one soul laid bare.

In his youth he wrote Shir HaShirim, love poetry so intense and so human that you could reasonably ask what it is doing in Tanach at all. And yet the tradition reads it as the truest picture we possess of the love between G-d and His........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)