By: Rabbi Brent Chaim Spodek
Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) is easily one of the strangest books in the Bible.
Proverbs tells us that wisdom leads to a good life.
Deuteronomy insists that righteousness brings blessing.
The Psalms assure us that the world, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, is held by a just and loving God.
Kohelet looks around and says: Really? I’m not so sure.
Good people suffer. Idiots prosper. Wealth disappears. Wisdom cannot save you. Neither can pleasure. Everyone dies.
Hakol hevel, Kohelet says. Everything is hevel.
The word is usually translated as “vanity,” which makes Kohelet sound like he is chastising us for being superficial. But hevel literally means something closer to vapor or breath. Think of your breath on a cold morning: visible for a moment, almost substantial, and then gone.
Kohelet’s claim is not that life is meaningless.
It’s that life cannot be held.
I have spent a significant portion of my own life trying to prove him wrong.
I have chased the usual things educated, ambitious Americans chase: degrees, titles, professional success, public recognition, the sense that somewhere out there an invisible committee is reviewing my file and will eventually send a letter saying, “Congratulations. You have succeeded at being a person.”
I even got a decent number of gold stars.
I became a rabbi. I led organizations. I spoke to large groups of people. I received fellowships and awards with flattering adjectives attached to them. People I barely knew occasionally told me I was inspiring.
This was pleasant. It was also dangerously easy to confuse with having a good life.
The people who complicated this arrangement were my family.
Strangers saw me give a polished 20-minute talk. My wife saw me come home afterward. Strangers encountered the edited version; my kids lived with the director’s cut. They knew whether I was patient when I was tired, whether I listened when they spoke, whether I could put down whatever Very Important Thing I was doing and notice the person three feet away from me.
I once came home from a Very Prestigious Gathering, and when my four year old asked me to play, I showed off my conference badge that literally had a gold star on it because I was the Very Important Keynote Speaker. They were not impressed.
It turns out that impressing a ballroom full of people is sometimes easier than being kind in your own kitchen.
Kohelet understood this problem 2,000 years before LinkedIn.
The book imagines a king conducting the ultimate experiment in success. He acquires wealth, property, servants, sex, music, knowledge – everything a human being might plausibly mistake for the good life. “Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them,” he says.
Then he looks at the whole dazzling pile.
Hevel.
Not bad. Not sinful. Not worthless.
Just incapable of delivering permanence.
And perhaps even more maddeningly, it cannot tell him what comes next.
Again and again Kohelet asks mi yodea? – “Who knows?” Who knows whether the person who inherits everything we have built will be wise or foolish? Who knows what happens to the human spirit after death? Who knows what is good for a person during the few days we have here?
Avivah Zornberg, writing about the Book of Esther in The Murmuring Deep, describes a biblical world in which overwhelming revelation eventually gives way to what she calls the world of chokhmah – wisdom, hints and interpretation. God does not step onto the stage to explain the plot. Human beings have to act without knowing exactly what their actions will yield.
“Who knows?” isn’t a shrug. It’s a spiritual posture. We do not know. We cannot know. Much of our suffering comes from pretending otherwise.
Nevertheless, we spend enormous amounts of energy trying to convert mi yodea? into ani yodea: “I know.”
We make plans, build résumés, save money, buy insurance, obsess over college admissions, monitor our retirement accounts and occasionally check our phones as though an email might arrive explaining how everything turns out.
Planning is useful. I’m really glad to fund my kids’ 529 accounts.
But none of it abolishes “mi yodea?”.
We do not know whether the career will flourish, whether our children will be happy, whether the market will rise, whether our bodies will cooperate, whether the person sleeping beside us will still be there 10 years from now.
And Kohelet’s response to that uncertainty is striking.
He does not say: therefore, despair.
He says: therefore, love.
“Enjoy life with the partner you love, all the days of your fleeting life.” (Ecclesiastes 9:9)
That is a remarkably modest vision of salvation.
Eat something good. Drink some wine. Do work that matters to you. And notice who is sitting beside you.
Years ago, when my wife was being treated for leukemia, the elaborate scaffolding of the life I thought we were building suddenly collapsed. Career plans became irrelevant. The future, which had always seemed like an inexhaustible natural resource, became terrifyingly finite.
After she recovered, you might have imagined we had learned the lesson. We had not.
Soon enough we were back to normal human foolishness: work, resentment, logistics, small arguments, competing stories about who was failing whom. I could still become preoccupied with some imaginary better life somewhere else.
What finally began to change me was realizing that I had spent years judging my actual life against an idea of the life I was supposed to have.
And ideas always win.
The imaginary spouse is never irritable. The imaginary career is endlessly fulfilling. The imaginary children clean up after themselves. The imaginary version of me is wise, toned, financially secure and has no need to answer email.
Reality cannot compete with fantasy on fantasy’s terms.
But fantasy cannot make dinner with you.
It cannot take a walk.
It cannot sit beside you in a hospital room.
It cannot grow older with you.
Kohelet asks us to stop grading our lives against some external rubric long enough to actually inhabit them.
There is a brutal tenderness in that teaching.
The person beside you is hevel. So are you.
The dinner will end. The children will grow up. The body will change. The house will someday belong to someone else. One day, impossibly, one of you will reach across the bed and the other will not be there.
That is not an argument against loving.
It is the reason to love now.
Perhaps that is also why we read Kohelet on Sukkot, when we deliberately leave our sturdy houses and sit in fragile huts. The sukkah makes visible what is always true: the walls were never as permanent as we imagined. Security was always partial. The wind was always getting in.
And yet we bring food into that fragile structure. We invite people we love. We sit together and rejoice.
Kohelet’s wisdom is not that everything is meaningless. It’s that everything is temporary.
Those are very different claims.
Our spiritual challenge is not to build a life so impressive that it defeats impermanence. It’s to stop missing the life that is already happening.
Kohelet does not say: Find the perfect person. He says: find delight in the person you love.
One is an achievement.
The other is a practice.
Success, in the end, is much smaller – and much harder – than we have been led to believe.
Perhaps it is looking across the table at someone you have known for decades, someone flawed and changing and entirely real, and knowing – not because everything worked out according to plan, but because it didn’t – that there is nowhere else you would rather be.
Continue exploring Kohelet with Rabbi Daniel Reifman’s Kohelet and the Time We Are Given.
