There is something almost defiant about an Israeli spring. It doesn’t ease in gently, doesn’t wait for the calendar or the weather to cooperate. It simply arrives: insistent, extravagant, indifferent to circumstance.
On a drizzly morning run along a trail near my home last week, I found myself experiencing that fact of spring. That morning, I woke in the pre-dawn darkness to birds chirping and assumed that it would be a beautiful, sunny morning. But after lacing my sneakers and stepping outside, a thick fog and raindrops blanketed the terrain all around. Mud puddles caught the sky between my footsteps. A cold wind blew insistently in my face.
Still, the air carried the delicate sweetness of blossoming trees. Wild wheat lined the path on both sides, golden-green and nearly ripe, bending slightly in the cold wind. And then, without warning, a gazelle came bounding past – leaping over clusters of purple wild artichoke flowers, sailing through the valley and up into the hills, gone before I could quite believe I’d seen it. Light, capricious, utterly free.
That, I thought, is the spirit of the season.
Explosive, summoning, impossible to resist
It is no accident that Song of Songs – Shir HaShirim – is read every Passover. The book is saturated with exactly this kind of spring: explosive, summoning, impossible to resist. “The voice of my beloved,” the text declares, “behold, he comes, leaping over the mountains, bounding over the hills.” The image is startling in its energy. This is not a gentle arrival. It is an explosion of energy and new life.
And then the famous call: “Arise, my beloved, and come away.” The dead of winter is past, flowers appear on the earth. “The blossoms have appeared in the land,” the text proclaims – sweetness and abundance are coming. Come away. The beloved is not being invited to admire the scenery. She is being summoned – pulled from inside to outside, from confinement to open air, from stillness into motion.
This, the rabbis understood, is the deepest resonance of Passover. The Exodus from Egypt did not happen in just any season. It happened in the spring. The Torah makes this explicit: “Observe the month of Aviv and keep Passover.” Rabbi Akiva, who called Song of Songs the holy of holies of all scripture, read the entire poem as the story of Israel’s relationship with God – and the spring that runs through it as the spring of redemption itself.
The winter, in the midrashic reading, is the long darkness of slavery. The beloved bounding over the mountains is the Divine call to freedom. The flowers appearing on the earth are not just a pretty backdrop. They are the point.
Living in Israel makes this feel less like a metaphor and more like a memory. I have watched this landscape transform every spring for years now: trails that were brown and cracked in summer suddenly rioting with color, anemones and cyclamen, and the cheerful yellow of mustard flowers rolling across hillsides. I have hiked through fields of wild wheat just like the ones I passed this week and understood, in a way that requires no explanation, why the Torah anchors its festival of freedom to this precise moment of the agricultural year. Freedom and flowering are the same breath.
This particular spring, there is an added weight to all of it. We are a country that has spent years breathing carefully, carrying grief and uncertainty alongside ordinary life. Some of our young people are far away. The trails are quieter than they used to be. And yet – spring does not wait. The cycle of wild wheat and barley growth continues. New blossoms unabashedly release their fragrance into cold, wet air.
Song of Songs understands this, too. It is not only a poem of joyful union. It is equally a poem of longing and delay – “I sought him but found him not,” the beloved cries. The winter is past, the call has been issued, but the going-out is not always immediate. Sometimes, one stands at the threshold a moment longer than intended. The Passover Haggadah, too, acknowledges that the Exodus was not the end of the story. We are still, in some sense, on the way.
But the season does not hold its breath for us. It arrives whether we are ready or not. Song of Songs’ great gift may be this: it reminds us to notice the summons. To hear the beloved calling. To arise and come away, even into the cold wind, even into uncertainty, even now.
The winter is past. The season cannot be contained. Come away to freedom.
The writer is the author of From Southerner to Settler: Unexpected Lessons from the Land of Israel and the founder of Hiking the Holyland.