Our real journey into the meaning of Sukkot, however, begins with a book that is not merely the strangest in Tanakh, but also one of the most unlikely ever to have been included in a canon of sacred texts: Kohelet, known in English through its Greek translation as Ecclesiastes, meaning “one who addresses an assembly.”
Kohelet is a strange, bewildering and much debated book. It was one of the last to be canonized, though it was widely known and studied long before its status was finalized. It was included in the Septuagint, the first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. It is presupposed by the book known as Ben Sira (also known as Ecclesiasticus), written in the late second century BCE. Fragments of Kohelet were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Nonetheless, there were rabbis who found it problematic. A minority held that it was not to be included in Tanakh. For them it represented merely the human wisdom of Solomon, not a text inspired by ruaĥ hakodesh, the holy spirit, a precondition of being included in the Bible.
A homily in the Talmud (Shabbat 30a) tells us some of the problems the sages had with the book.
O Solomon, where is your wisdom? Where is your understanding? Not only do your words contradict those of your father David, but they also contradict themselves. Your father David said, “It is not the dead who praise the Lord” [Ps. 115:17], but you said, “I thought the dead more fortunate, who have died already, than the living who yet live” [Eccl. 4:2], and then you said, “Better to be a living dog than a dead lion” [9:4].
Is it better to be alive than dead? Kohelet answers both yes and no.
Other rabbis pointed out other contradictions. Ibn Ezra counted nine of them and said that the attentive reader would find more. Kohelet praises joy (8:15) and derides it (2:2). He values wisdom (2:13) and denigrates it (6:8). He says things will go well for those who are God-fearing (8:12) and then says that there are righteous people who suffer the fate of the wicked, and wicked people who receive the reward of the righteous (8:14). Such were the internal contradictions in the book that some sages sought not merely to exclude it from the canon but to have it banned (Shabbat 30b).
Kohelet’s tendency to say one thing and then the opposite makes the book hard to understand, but this alone would not have justified excluding it from the canon. The sages were adroit in resolving apparent contradictions, of which there are many in the Hebrew Bible. Kohelet uses contradiction the way Socrates used questions, to force his listeners to think beyond conventional wisdom, and understand the complexity and many-sidedness of life. He understood what Niels Bohr famously said, that the opposite of a superficial truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. The use of contradiction is common within the wisdom literature. One example comes from the book of Proverbs: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him. Do answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes” (Prov. 26:4–5). It was not its internal contradictions that made some think Kohelet did not belong in the Hebrew Bible, but something far more consequential.
It was that many of the views expressed by Kohelet seem to verge on heresy.1See Leviticus Raba 28:1; Ecclesiastes Raba 1:4, 11:9; Midrash Mishlei 25:1. The same fate, he says, awaits the righteous and the wicked, the pure and impure, the good and the sinner (9:2). There is no correlation between effort and reward. The race is not to the swift, nor bread to the wise, nor grace to the learned: time and chance happen to them all (9:11). Kohelet sees “the victims’ tears and none to console them; power at the hands of their oppressors, and none to console them” (4:1). Where then is justice and the Judge?
“The fate of man is the fate of cattle; the same fate awaits them both,” hence “the pre-eminence of man over beast is nothing” (3:19). What then becomes of the idea of the uniqueness of the human person made in the image and likeness of God Himself? Don’t be too righteous or too wicked, says Kohelet (7:16–17). What then should we do: be a little righteous and a little wicked? “Follow your heart where it leads you, your eyes where they allure you,” he says to the young man (11:9). What then happens to the third paragraph of the Shema which tells us not to stray “after your heart and after your eyes” (Num. 15:39)?
Kohelet says not a word about Jewish particularity. Scholars have long noted its similarity to other wisdom literature of the ancient Near East, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, even Canaanite. It would not have been out of place in Greece in the third century BCE: in places it reads like a Stoic or Epicurean text. Though it contains many references to God, it never once uses the four-letter name we refer to as Hashem, that is, God as He relates specifically to the Jewish people. Kohelet speaks only of Elokim, that is, the God of creation, nature and humankind as a whole.
The most important feature of Kohelet that makes it seem so remote from faith is his repeated use of the word hevel. It occurs no fewer than thirty-eight times in the course of the book, more than half of its incidences in Tanakh as a whole. Hevel has traditionally been understood to mean futile, meaningless, empty, pointless, “absurd” in the existentialist sense, and most famously in the King James translation: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”
This is what makes the book so challenging. Religion in general, Judaism specifically, is the attempt to find meaning in the cosmos and in human life. Faith is the attempt to hear the music beneath the noise, discern the path amidst the undergrowth, to sense the destination of the long journey of which our lives are a part. Judaism is the bold attempt to address directly what Viktor Frankl called “Man’s Search for Meaning.” To see life as meaningless – hevel – seems in the most profound sense to part company with Jewish tradition.
Thus Kohelet, despite its invocations of God and its pious ending, reads at first like a subversive book. If there is no justice in history, if the strong crush the weak, and power is in the hands of the oppressor, if the wise man who saves the city is forgotten while evil reigns in place of judgment, why are we here at all? We live, we suffer, then we die. That seems to be Kohelet’s philosophy. Homo sapiens, however “noble in reason and infinite in faculty,” is ultimately no more than the “quintessence of dust.” But this is Hamlet, not Judaism. And even if a case can be made for its inclusion in the library of sacred texts, why, of all the books, was it chosen for Sukkot, zeman simĥateinu, “our time of rejoicing”? Of all our holy books it seems the most bleak and depressing.
Kohelet is a puzzle to be solved, a mystery to be decoded. If we do so, we will discover not only that it is a profound statement of faith, one of the deepest in literature, but also that it is the key to understanding Sukkot itself.
I. Who Was Kohelet?
Fortunately, the book gives us the clue that allows us to unpack its meaning in its second word, the one that gives it its title as well as the name of its author: Kohelet. Who was he? There is only one possible answer: Kohelet was Solomon. The opening sentence states: “The sayings of Kohelet son of David, King of Israel in Jerusalem.” The only son of David who became king was Solomon. The rest of Kohelet confirms this identification. Solomon was the only king of Israel whose life matches the description in chapter two, of a man who amassed a great estate, built palaces, planted vineyards, orchards and gardens, had vast numbers of slaves and servants, accumulated silver and gold, and had many wives and concubines.
Kohelet’s claim to have gathered more wisdom than any other king before him (1:16) parallels the description of Solomon in I Kings 5:9, in which “God gave Solomon wisdom and very great insight, and a breadth of understanding as measureless as the sand on the seashore.” The statement at the end of the book, that Kohelet “weighed and explored and assembled many wise sayings” (12:9), matches the statement in the book of Kings that Solomon “spoke three thousand proverbs,” and was so famous for his wisdom that “people from all nations came to listen” to him (5:12–14).
If Kohelet was Solomon, why is he not called Solomon? This is the first indication that the book is not a treatise to be read, but an encrypted text to be deciphered. Note that the question is not the historical one: who actually wrote Kohelet? Whoever wrote Kohelet, without a shadow of doubt it is meant to be read as the reflections of the man known as Israel’s wisest king. In which case, the book should mention Solomon. That is the case with the two other books traditionally ascribed to him, the Song of Songs and Proverbs. The name Solomon appears nowhere in Kohelet. What is more, the word “Kohelet” appears nowhere else in Tanakh. This strongly suggests that Kohelet is more than the name of the author. It is a clue to the interpretation of the book.
The point is often missed in translation, because it is difficult to convey in other languages the density of associations often carried by a single Hebrew word. That is clearly the case here. The word “Kohelet” comes from the root k-h-l, meaning “to gather people together.” Thus it is usually translated as “preacher,” “teacher” or “convener of an assembly.” However, what matters here is not what the word means, but rather the associations it carries with it. As soon as we turn to the other key instances of the verb, a fascinating picture begins to emerge.
The first connection is with the mitzva known as Hak’hel: the command that the king was to assemble the people every seven years at a national assembly on Sukkot at the end of a sabbatical year.
Every seventh year, in the scheduled year of release, during the festival of Sukkot, when all Israel comes to appear before the Lord your God at the place that He will choose, you shall read this law before all Israel in their hearing. Assemble the people – men, women and children, as well as the aliens residing in your towns – so that they may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God and to observe diligently all the words of this law, and so that their children, who have not known it, may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God, as long as you live in the land that you are crossing over the Jordan to possess. (Deut. 31:10–13)
Here then is an immediate connection between Sukkot, a king, an assembly, an act of teaching, and the verb hak’hel, from the same root as the word “Kohelet.” This connection was not lost on the sages, who explained that Solomon was called Kohelet precisely because of this role, and suggested that the book is based on what Solomon taught at these gatherings (Ecclesiastes Raba 1:2). Something of this is hinted at the very end of the book: “Kohelet’s wisdom went further than this; he taught the people understanding always, and weighed and explored and assembled many wise sayings” (12:9). We do not find in the story of Solomon that he “taught the people.” Hence it was not absurd to suggest that this happened at the septennial gathering of the nation on Sukkot.
There is, as we noted in the first section, another connection between Solomon and Sukkot, namely the dedication of the Temple, which took place over a fourteen-day period, the last seven of which coincided with Sukkot. If we turn to I Kings 8, the chapter that describes the consecration of the Temple, we find that the verb k-h-l plays a key role in the text. It appears seven times, and a seven-fold repetition is often used in biblical prose to indicate a key word. The chapter tells how Solomon assembled the elders of Israel and all the heads of the tribes to bring up the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord out of the city of David, which is Zion. Again we find a connection between a national assembly, the king and Sukkot.
There is a third connection, more oblique, but one that will eventually prove highly consequential. The Temple was the successor to the Mishkan, the Tabernacle or Sanctuary that the Israelites made in the desert, their first collective house of worship. Construction began immediately after Moses descended from Mount Sinai with the second set of tablets, having broken the first after the sin of the golden calf. In this narrative, too, the key word is k-h-l. At the making of the calf we read that “when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together [vayikahel] around Aaron, and said to him, ‘Come, make gods for us, who shall go before us…’” (Ex. 32:1). After securing atonement for the people, Moses commanded them to build the Sanctuary. The narrative begins, “Moses assembled [vayak’hel] all the congregation of the Israelites…” (35:1). Again the key word is k-h-l.
The assembly Moses convened to set in motion the building of the Sanctuary was a tikkun, a setting-right, of the assembly that had committed the sin in the first place. According to tradition, Moses descended the mountain with the second tablets – the sign that the people had been forgiven and the covenant between them and God was still in place – on Yom Kippur. That is why the anniversary of that day became, throughout the generations, the day of forgiveness and atonement. The next day, work on the Sanctuary began (see Rashi to Ex. 35:1). Still today the custom is to begin making the sukka immediately after Yom Kippur.
So there is a whole series of connections between the word “Kohelet,” from the root k-h-l, and a king, a national assembly, the Sanctuary in the wilderness, the Temple in Jerusalem, and Sukkot. Indeed the prophet Amos calls the Temple Sukkat David, “David’s Tabernacle” (Amos 9:11). These echoes and evocations are too strong to be coincidental. The key to understanding Kohelet is Sukkot, and the key to understanding Sukkot is Kohelet. Nor is the root k-h-l the only link between the book and the festival.
II. Wisdom, the Universal Heritage
Recall Zechariah’s prophecy that one day Sukkot would be celebrated by all the nations on earth, and the sages’ understanding that the seventy bullocks offered during the festival were on behalf of the seventy nations, that is, on behalf of humanity as a whole. Sukkot is the most universalist of the festivals, and Kohelet is by far the most universalist of the five “scrolls” – the Megillot. Ruth, Esther and Lamentations tell highly particularist narratives about characters and events in Jewish history. The Song of Songs is about the particularity of love: what makes this lover and this beloved unique. But Kohelet is consistently, even surprisingly, universal. The word “Israel” only appears twice, and then in the form of an editorial aside, “I Kohelet was king of Israel in Jerusalem” (1:12, and compare 1:1). The four-letter name of God, Hashem, indicating His specific I-Thou relationship with the people Israel, never appears in the book. Instead, forty-two times the word “Elokim” is used: that is, God in His relationship with humanity as a whole.
The reason for this is that Kohelet is supremely written in the wisdom voice. There are three primary voices in Tanakh. Each corresponds to a different way in which we encounter God, and each is embodied in a different kind of leadership role. Respectively, they are the king, the priest and the prophet, and they correspond to the three modes of God’s relationship with the world: creation, revelation and redemption.
The priest speaks the language of revelation, that is, God’s word in the form of law. The priest’s key roles are lehavdil, “to distinguish,” “to separate,” and lehorot, “to instruct,” “to give a legal ruling.” The priest sees distinctions in the world invisible to the naked eye. They are not part of the physical world as such; they are, rather, part of the sacred ontology, the underlying divine order, of the universe. The key words in the priest’s vocabulary are tahor and tameh, pure and impure, and kodesh and ĥol, holy and profane. He (priests in Judaism were always male) lives within a structure of time wholly determined by divine service: originally the sacrificial service of the Temple. The priest represents the holy in Jewish life. Halakha, Jewish law, belongs to the priestly voice.
The prophet hears and speaks God’s word, not for all time but for this time: this place, this context, this circumstance, the today that is different from yesterday and tomorrow. He or she (prophets could be either) senses the presence of God in history, specifically history as a journey toward redemption, that is to say, a society that honors God by honoring His image, humankind. While the priest looks at the sacred nature of things, the prophet is concerned with relationships between persons, and between the individual and God. His or her key words are tzedek, fairness, mishpat, retributive justice, ĥesed, covenant love, and raĥamim, compassion. While the world of the priest never changes, the prophet’s world is constantly changing, depending on where the people are and in which direction society is moving. The prophet is concerned with faithfulness in Jewish life: loyalty, integrity and honesty between the people and God and between one another.
Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible is very different from the worlds of the priest and the prophet. It is almost always associated with kings and royal courts, and it is universal, not specific to Judaism. It is part of the human heritage: it is part of what it means to be created in the image and likeness of God. Thus the sages said: “If you are told that there is wisdom among the nations, believe it. If you are told there is Torah among the nations, do not believe it” (Lamentations Raba 2:13). The sages coined a blessing on seeing “a great sage from the [other] nations” (Berakhot 58a). The wisdom literature of Tanakh – Kohelet, Proverbs, Job and some Psalms – is recognizably similar to the wisdom literature of the ancient Near East as well as the philosophers and moralists of ancient Greece and Rome. Whereas priestly and prophetic consciousness lives in particularity, the essence of wisdom is universality.
If the priestly voice is about revelation and the prophetic about redemption, wisdom belongs to the realm of creation. It is about what we would nowadays call the natural and social sciences. Wisdom and Torah are very different. Wisdom is about facts, Torah is about laws. Wisdom is about what is, Torah about what ought to be. Wisdom is descriptive while Torah is prescriptive. Wisdom is acquired through observation and reflection. Torah is acquired through revelation and tradition. In relation to wisdom, what matters is the truth of a proposition, not its source. Hence Maimonides’ famous axiom: “Accept the truth, whoever says it” (Introduction to Pirkei Avot). In the case of Torah, however, source is of the essence. Does it come from the revelation at Sinai, or from the Oral Law, faithfully transmitted? Hence the rabbinic rule: “Whoever reports a saying in the name of the one who said it brings deliverance to the world” (Avot 6:6).
The words ĥakham, a wise person, and ĥokhma, wisdom, appear fifty-three times in Kohelet, as against a mere thirty-three times in the entire Mosaic books, where (with the exception of Deuteronomy) they are almost entirely used in connection with the royal court in Egypt – Pharaoh and his advisers – or the Sanctuary, where ĥokhma is used in the sense of craftsmanship.
It is therefore no accident that the most universal of books, Kohelet, is read on the most universal of pilgrimage festivals, Sukkot. Wisdom, the knowledge of God in creation, belongs to the seventh month, the month of creation (Rosh HaShana as the anniversary of the birth of the world and humankind). And just as Zechariah said that there would come a time when “those remaining from all the nations…will go up year upon year to bow down to the King, the Lord of hosts, and to celebrate the festival of Sukkot” (Zech. 14:16), so the book of Kings says, “From all nations people came to listen to Solomon’s wisdom, sent by all the kings of the world, who had heard of his wisdom” (I Kings 5:14). That is the second connection between Kohelet and Sukkot. But it is the third that is the most surprising.
III. The Structure of Joy
Kohelet is often seen as a depressing, despairing, almost nihilistic book. The author is old, disillusioned, skeptical about the ability of humans to change the world or institute justice in the affairs of men, disinclined to find any redemptive quality in life itself. So, of all biblical books, it seems the least appropriate to read on Sukkot, “the season of our joy.” Yet, counterintuitively, it turns out that this is precisely what Kohelet is about.
The root s-m-ĥ, meaning joy or rejoicing, appears no fewer than seventeen times in the course of the book. To put this in context, the same root appears only once in each of the first four Mosaic books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, and twelve times in Deuteronomy. There are more references to joy in Kohelet than in all the Mosaic books combined.
Nor is this all. The references to joy are carefully structured. The overall development of the book is not clear, but one thing is: seven times, after a sequence of dispiriting reflections, Kohelet interrupts his theme with a reference to joy:
1. There is no good for man to find, but that he eat and drink and show himself some good of all his labor; this I saw to be a gift from God…. He gave wisdom and insight and joy to those who are satisfied with what they have. (2:24–26)
2. And so I know that there is no good for them but to be happy and to do what is good in their lifetime. And if any man eats and drinks and sees some good of all his labor – that is a gift from God. (3:12–13)
3. I saw that there is no good at all but for man to take pleasure in his works; for that is his share. (3:22)
4. This is what I have seen that is good: the beauty of eating and drinking and seeing some good of all the labor one toils over beneath the sun, all the days of the life God has given one – for this is one’s share. For if God gives any man wealth and belongings, and grants him the power to eat of them, to take hold of what is his, to take pleasure in his labors – that is a gift from God. For he will not think too much about the days of his life; for God has given him the joy of his heart to be occupied with. (5:17–19)
5. And so I praise joy – for there is no good for man beneath the sun, but to eat and drink and be happy. This is what he has to accompany him in his labors, through that life that God has given him beneath the sun. (8:15)
6. Go, eat your bread in joy, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has accepted your deeds…. Live well, with the woman you love, all the days of the shallow breath He has given you here beneath the sun. (9:7–9)
7. There is a sweetness in the light; it is good for the eyes to see the sun. And should a man live many years he should rejoice in all of them, remembering, too, the days of darkness, for there will be many. All that comes is but a breath. (11:7–8)
Then comes the ten-line coda, precisely symmetrical with the ten-line introduction to the book. The closing movement, a long adagio beginning with the words, “Young man, rejoice now in your youth” (11:9), is one of the most moving descriptions of age and physical decline in all literature, comparing it to the darkening of the sun, the slow decay of an old house, a well that no longer yields water, a shattered lamp, a broken pitcher, and dust returning to the earth as it was, ending with the words, “‘Shallowest breath,’ said Kohelet, ‘It is all but shallow breath’” (12:8). The introduction begins with almost identical words, “‘Shallowest breath,’ said Kohelet, ‘The shallowest breath, it is all but breath’” (1:2), and then describes the endless cycles of nature in which “one age departs, another comes” (1:4). Between the beginning and the end, we have moved from abstract to concrete, from a general statement about the human condition to the intensely personal pattern as the dying author urges the young man to rejoice while he can.
We see here something fascinating. The main text reads almost like a dialogue between the author’s jaded persona and his other voice that keeps saying, “Rejoice.” It is no accident that this happens seven times. The number seven is a key figure in relation to Solomon. The building of the Temple took seven years (I Kings 6:38). The celebrations were in the seventh month (I Kings 8:2). They lasted for “seven days and another seven days” (I Kings 8:65). In his prayer at the dedication, Solomon made seven petitions to God (I Kings 8:30–53). So the sevenfold interruption of joy in Kohelet is not random. It is a feature of the text that the author expects sensitive readers to notice. These seven injunctions to joy coincide with the seven days of the festival of joy.
The coda corresponds to the eighth day, on which Solomon took his leave of the people: “On the eighth day he let the people go. They blessed the king and returned home, joyous and glad of heart for all the good which God had shown His servant David and His people Israel” (I Kings 8:66). That day was, of course, Shemini Atzeret. Not only, then, is Kohelet the only book of the Hebrew Bible that is a treatise on joy. Even its structure precisely parallels that of Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret, seven days of joy plus one.
We have now established three sets of connection between Kohelet and Sukkot. One is the name Kohelet itself, with its multiple associations with kings, the Temple, the Tabernacle and Sukkot. A second relates to ĥokhma, wisdom, its universality and its connection to creation. The third has to do with simĥa, joy, the theme both of the festival and the book. We can now hazard a hypothesis: this is the interpretive key that unlocks the book and its teachings.
Kohelet has been analyzed by scholars as an isolated text. As such, we cannot begin to say what it means because of its internal contradictions and because we do not know precisely when it was written and why. Who was the intended audience? What were they expected to draw from the book? Which is the real Kohelet, the voice of despair or the counter-voice of joy? Considered in and of itself, the book could mean almost anything.
But placing it within the canon and the calendar, and associating it with Sukkot – an association, we have argued, that is anything but random – it ceases to be a work in and of itself. It is part of a larger pattern. That is what we will argue in the chapter on Pesaĥ about another perplexing work, Shir HaShirim, the Song of Songs. Considered in itself, it reads like a series of secular love songs. But considered in its calendrical and canonical context, it resolves one of the most fundamental questions in Judaism: Where is the answering response on the part of the Israelites to God’s freely given love? A single verse from Jeremiah makes the connection: “I remember of you the kindness of your youth, your love when you were a bride; how you walked after Me in the desert, through a land not sown” (Jer. 2:2). The Song of Songs is the record of that love.
Kohelet has a similar function within the Hebrew Bible. What, though, is the question to which it is an answer?
IV. Breath
The meaning of Kohelet hinges on one word: hevel. As we saw, it occurs thirty-eight times, more than half of all its occurrences in Tanakh. No other book announces its theme more emphatically, by using one word five times in a single sentence, the second in the book. “‘Hevel of hevels,’ says Kohelet, ‘Hevel of hevels, all is hevel.’”
The word has been translated many ways: “pointless,” “meaningless,” “futile,” “empty,” “vapor,” “smoke,” “insubstantial,” “absurd,” “vanity.” There is something to these translations, but they do not represent the word’s primary meaning. It means “breath.” The Hebrew words for soul – among them nefesh, ruaĥ and neshama – all have to do with the act of breathing. The same is true in other ancient languages. “Psyche,” as in psychology, also derives from the Greek word for breath. Hevel specifically means a shallow breath.
What obsesses Kohelet is that all that separates life from death is a shallow breath. He is obsessed by the fragility and brevity of life, as contrasted with the seeming eternity of the universe. The world endures forever. But we are, as we say in our prayers on Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur, “like a broken shard, like grass dried up, like a faded flower, like a fleeting shadow, like a passing cloud, like a breath of wind, like whirling dust, like a dream that slips away.” Dust we are and to dust we return. Take breath away and a living body becomes a mere corpse. Reading Kohelet reminds us of the scene in Shakespeare’s King Lear, when the aged king holds in his arms the dead body of his daughter Cordelia, the only one who truly loved him, and whose faithfulness he discovered too late, and says, “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have breath, and thou no breath at all?” Or it recalls the verse of T.S. Eliot: “I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
Kohelet is a sustained meditation on mortality, one of the most profound in all literature. He is traumatized by the “unbearable lightness of being,” the fact that life is lived toward death, that our days are numbered, that like Moses, for each of us there will be a Jordan we will not cross, a fulfillment we will not live to see. We do not, cannot, know how long we will live, but life will always seem too short.
This single fact, for Kohelet, overshadows all human existence. It mocks all achievement and aspiration. We may accumulate wealth, but who knows what those who come after us will do with it? We may achieve power, but it will pass, on our demise, to other people – as Solomon’s kingdom fell to his son Rehoboam, whose failure to heed his father’s advisers caused the kingdom to split into two, a division from which it never fully recovered, and which undid all that his father and grandfather had striven to do.
Who knows how posterity will judge us? Who knows if we will be remembered at all? And if we are not remembered, of what consequence is our life? It is a mere pattern drawn in sand that will be dissolved by the next high tide. Whatever we achieve in this life will not save us from oblivion. Naked we came into the world and naked we will return.
That is the overwhelming fact for Kohelet. That is why he says that there is no ultimate difference between the righteous and the wicked, or between man and the animals. We will all die in the end, and that is the most important fact about us.
We can now state, simply and boldly, the connection between Kohelet and Sukkot. A sukka is a dirat arai, a temporary dwelling. Kohelet is about the fact that the human body is a temporary dwelling. Life is a sukka. We are strangers and temporary residents on earth. As Rilke said, “even the noticing beasts are aware that we don’t feel very securely at home in this interpreted world” (Duino Elegies, 1). We seek the security of a house, a home, and find there is none to be had. There is no way of making human life everlasting. We cannot banish risk and uncertainty. Time is a desert, a wilderness, and all we have as we journey is a hut, a booth, a tent. Kohelet is a philosophical statement of life seen as a sukka.
As such it is not a unique voice in Tanakh. We find something similar in the book of Psalms:
You have made my days mere handbreadths;
the span of my years is as nothing before You.
Mere breath is each man standing…
Man walks like a shadow,
He goes as a breath,
Storing without knowing who will gather…
Surely everyone is but a breath…
I dwell with You as a stranger,
a temporary resident, like all my fathers. (Ps. 39:6–13)
Likewise in the book of Job:
Remember, O God, that my life is but a breath;
Not again will my eyes see good…
I despise my life; I will not live forever.
Let me alone, for my days are mere breath. (Job 7:7, 16)
Kohelet was thus not the first to feel that death cast its shadow over the whole of life. Nor was he the last. In 1879, having reached his fiftieth birthday, Leo Tolstoy had achieved success and acclaim. He had published two of the greatest novels ever written, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He owned a vast estate, was married, and had fourteen children. Yet he succumbed to precisely the thoughts that had driven Kohelet to despair.
He recounts his crisis by way of a story. A traveler is crossing the steppes when he encounters a ferocious wild animal. To escape, he hides in an empty well. But at the bottom of the well he sees a dragon, its jaws open, ready to eat him. He cannot leave the well for fear of the beast. He cannot drop to the bottom because of the dragon. He seizes hold of the branch of a bush growing in a crevice in the well’s wall. It is all that is saving him from death. His arms are growing weak, but still he holds on. Then he sees two mice, one black, the other white, gnawing at the branch. Soon they will eat through it, and he will fall into the dragon’s mouth. He sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the bush and stretches out his tongue to lick them.
That, says Tolstoy, is how his life feels to him. He has almost no strength left, he is about to fall, the black and white mice – nights and days – are gnawing away at his future and even the drops of honey no longer give him pleasure. The question that haunted him was simply this: “Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?” (Tolstoy, A Confession).
Like Kohelet, Tolstoy searched for an answer in wisdom, that is, in science and philosophy, and like Kohelet he found none. Science could not understand the question, and philosophy could only repeat it. For Tolstoy, like Kohelet, the fundamental human question is simply: Why live?
We now sense the depth of the drama of Sukkot seen through the eyes of Kohelet. For ten days, beginning on Rosh HaShana and reaching a climax on Yom Kippur, we have prayed, “Remember us for life, O King who desires life, and write us in the book of life – for Your sake, O God of life.” Now, having survived the trial, we are faced with the deepest question of all. What is life? What is this gift we have been granted? What gives life meaning, purpose, substance? What will redeem us from the shadow of death?
V. A Critique of Pure Happiness
Kohelet’s answer, in a word, is joy. That, as we have seen, is the repeated refrain of the counter-voice within the book. Kohelet’s alter ego knows that, yes, life is short, knowledge painful and the ruling powers corrupt. The righteous sometimes die young, and evildoers sometimes reach old age. If you make justice – visible, manifest justice, down here on earth – your precondition for making a blessing over life, you will wait a long time, and you will die disappointed. Kohelet tells us these truths with brutal honesty. But he has grown older, wiser. He has passed through the valley of disillusion and emerged on the other side.
What redeems life and etches it with the charisma of grace is joy: joy in your work (“The sleep of a worker is sweet” – 5:11), joy in your marriage (“See life with the woman you love” – 9:9), and joy in the simple pleasures of life. Take joy in each day. Above all, rejoice when you are young. Kohelet is an old man. No one has written a more moving description of the dying of the light in old age than does Kohelet in the last chapter of the book. Yet his conclusion yields to neither cynicism nor despair. You do not need to be blind to the imperfections of the human world or the slow ravages of age in order to rejoice. You can know life with all its flaws and still have joy.
Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics said that happiness is that at which all people aim. It is the one thing good in itself and not as a means to some other end. Judaism in general, and Kohelet specifically, disagree. Yes, happiness – osher in Hebrew – is a value in Judaism. Its derivative ashrei is the first word in the book of Psalms. We say the prayer we call Ashrei three times each day. Yet it is not the supreme value. Simĥa, joy, is. As we noted, it appears twelve times in Deuteronomy, seventeen times in Kohelet. What is the difference?
Happiness in the classic sense, eudaemonia in Greek, felicitas in Latin, and ashrei in Hebrew, means doing well and faring well. The good person acts morally and is respected by others for doing so. Barring accidents or misfortune, he or she is blessed with a good marriage, children, a reputation for integrity (“the crown of a good name” – Avot 4:17), an honored place within the community and the feeling of a life well lived. He sleeps well at night, knowing he has done nothing of which to be ashamed. That is the happy individual of Psalm 1. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that gives forth fruit in its due season and whose leaves do not wither. Psalm 92, the Psalm of the Sabbath day, deepens the imagery. The wicked are like grass: they grow fast but are soon cut down. The righteous are like a tree, giving fruit and shade like a palm, growing tall like a cedar in Lebanon. Happiness is the outcome of a moral life.
But happiness depends on many external circumstances. What of the poor, the exploited, the unemployed? What, asks the Torah repeatedly, of the orphan, the widow and the stranger within the gates? What, asks Kohelet, of the tears of the oppressed who have no comforter? What of the wise man who saved the city only to be unthanked, ignored, forgotten? What, we might ask nowadays, of the victims of terror, or those who live under tyranny? To speak of happiness under such circumstances is almost to mock the afflicted.
When the world is in a state of order, when there is peace and good governance and accountability, when there are shared values within a society, and those who are blessed share their blessings with the vulnerable and the destitute, when the great and the good are indeed great and good, yes, one can speak of happiness as a central value. What, though, survives when none of these preconditions are met? What is left when the world we live in looks less like a house than a sukka, open to the wind, the rain and the cold? What remains, other than fear, in a state of radical insecurity?
The answer is simĥa, joy. For joy does not involve, as does happiness, a judgment about life as a whole. Joy lives in the moment. It asks no questions about tomorrow. It celebrates the power of now. The Talmud says that each Sunday, Shammai, the great sage of the late Second Temple period, was already preparing for Shabbat. Hillel, however, lived by a different principle: “Blessed be God day by day” (Beitza 16a). Joy blesses God day by day. It celebrates the mere fact of being here, now, existing when we might not have existed, inhaling to the full this day, this hour, this eternity-in-a-moment that was not before and will not be again. Joy embraces the contingency of life. It knows that yesterday has gone and tomorrow is unknown. It does not ask what was or will be. It makes no calculations. It is a state of radical thankfulness for the gift of being. Even in an age too fraught for happiness, there can still be joy.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in one of his letters, “The reality of joy in the world is indescribable; only in joy does creation take place (happiness, on the contrary, is only a promising, intelligible constellation of things already there); joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.” He added, “How superficially must happiness engage us, after all, if it can leave us time to think and worry about how long it will last.” What saved Kohelet was his belated realization that joy, not happiness, is what redeems life from the shadow of death. Joy does not ask how long it will last. It discovers epiphany in the here and now.
Joy is the antidote to the sickness we sense in the great autobiographical section of Kohelet chapter two. There is no passage like it anywhere else in Tanakh. Kohelet is speaking about how he acquired houses, vineyards, orchards, male and female servants, silver, gold, wives and concubines. He had everything. Except meaning. Except purpose. Except joy. What makes the text unique is its double use of the first person singular. “I built for myself…I planted for myself…I collected for myself…I acquired for myself…” (Eccl. 2:4–8). Kohelet’s error was spelled out in the Mishna centuries later by Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I?” (Avot 1:14).
Happiness is something I can feel on my own. But joy in the Torah is essentially shared. A husband must make his wife rejoice (Deut. 24:5). Festivals were to be occasions of collective rejoicing, “you and your sons and daughters, your male and female slaves, and the Levite, the stranger and orphan and widow that dwell within your gates” (Deut. 16:11). Bringing first fruits to the Temple involved collective celebration: “You and the Levites and the strangers in your midst shall rejoice in all the good things the Lord your God has given to you and your household” (Deut. 26:11). Unlike happiness, simĥa only exists in virtue of being shared. It is a form of social emotion.
It is also a religious one. Kierkegaard once wrote, “It is moral to grieve; it is religious to rejoice.” Joy is a form of thanksgiving. It is a way of acknowledging life as a gift – and if it is a gift, there must be a Giver. Joy is King David dancing before God the day the Ark was brought to Jerusalem. It is the “righteous and men of good deeds” doing somersaults and juggling with flaming torches in the Temple courtyard during Simĥat Beit HaSho’eva. Joy is a Jewish wedding. It is dancing in the presence of the Divine. There is nothing in it of pride or self-satisfaction. It defeats the fear of death by turning our attention outward. For a moment the “I” is silent and we become part of the celebrating “We,” our voice merging with others in the song creation sings to its Creator, the nation to its sovereign God, and we to God for “keeping us alive and sustaining us and bringing us to this day.” The Shekhina, said the sages, does not live in sadness or depression, but in the joy of fulfilling God’s command (simĥa shel mitzva).
Unlike happiness, joy is not conditional on things going well. No one put this better than the prophet Habakkuk, in one of the most moving passages in the prophetic literature:
Though the fig tree does not blossom,
and no fruit is on the vines;
though the produce of the olive fails
and the fields yield no food;
though the flock is cut off from the fold
and there is no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will exult in the God of my salvation. (Hab. 3:17–18)
Joy alone, Kohelet realized at the end of a long life, has the power to defeat despair. It does not speak the language of reason. It does not answer the existential questions of a disillusioned philosopher-king. Joy belongs to an older, deeper part of the brain. Like music, it gives expression to the inexpressible. It says, yes, life is sometimes unfair and the world unjust, but the very brevity of life makes each moment precious. It says: stop thinking of tomorrow. Celebrate, sing, join the dance however undignified it makes you look. Joy bathes life with light. It liberates the soul from the prison of the self. Joy is Jerusalem on Sukkot. Joy solves no problems but it gives us the strength to keep searching. It sustains the faith we need if we are, in the year ahead, to face the future without fear and heal some of the fractures of our injured world.
VI. The Limits of Wisdom
Kohelet ends with an epilogue, written as if by another hand. It says: “The final word: it has all been said. Hold God in awe, and heed His commands, for that is all man has.” It was this sentence that warranted the book’s inclusion in Tanakh. Some of the sages questioned Kohelet’s place among the sacred scriptures. They held it should be banned (“hidden”) because its teachings could lead to heresy. Those who argued for its inclusion said that it began and ended with words of Torah. So this penultimate sentence of the book can look contrived, as if it were added as an afterthought, the intellectual equivalent of a kashrut certification. But this is to misjudge the book as a whole.
On the surface it reads like a subversive book. It challenges conventional religious faith at many points. It questions whether there is justice in the world, whether there is a real difference between the righteous and the wicked, or even between Homo sapiens and the animals. It hints that there are limits to our freedom: what is crooked can never be straightened (1:15; the source of Kant’s famous remark that “out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made”). Nothing is really new, “that which is to be is what has been already” (1:9), and try as we might to change the world, it stays as it always was.
God exists – Kohelet uses the word more than forty times – but in the book He seems a long way away. He is in heaven, we are on earth, and there seems to be no contact between us. But this, to repeat, is on the surface. Kohelet is really subversion of a second order. It undermines those who undermine, critiques the critics, subverts the subversion and shows how too much reliance on intellect and wisdom can lead to nihilism.
It is one of those rare books that refutes itself. Yehuda HaLevi in the Kuzari wrote a critique of philosophy in the language of philosophy. Ludwig Wittgenstein did something similar in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He showed that the ultimate truths of philosophy were inexpressible in philosophy. “Of what we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.” Philosophy is like a ladder on which we climb to a higher plane and then find that we must throw the ladder away. Kohelet is Tanakh’s most powerful critique of wisdom spoken in the voice of wisdom itself.
Kohelet is not negative about it. He says that wisdom stands to folly as does light to darkness (2:13). It is a shelter, an estate (7:11–12). It “gives the wise man more power than ten rulers in a city” (7:19). It lights up a person’s face (8:1). But it fails to uncover meaning in life. It tells us how but not why. It gives us prudence and pragmatism, not moral passion. If you want this, do that. If you want to avoid this, guard yourself from that. It constantly asks, “What is the yitaron, the advantage, the return on investment, the cost-benefit ratio?” It speaks of profits, not prophets. It tells us which pitfalls to stay clear of, but not who we are or why we are here.
Recall what we said about wisdom in Tanakh. It sees God not in revelation or redemption, but in creation. It speaks the truths that are universal, not those that are particular. It relates to Elokim, not Hashem, or as Yehuda HaLevi put it, the God of Aristotle, not the God of Abraham (Kuzari IV:16). It belongs not to the priest in the Temple nor the prophet in the town square, but to the court and advisers of the king. It speaks the language of realpolitik. Don’t criticize a king. Don’t curse a rich man. Diversify your investments. When evil is abroad, stay at home. But it fails to give an answer to the most basic of questions: Why live? The best answer it can come up with is that life is hevel. It is empty, meaningless, futile, as pointless as trying to chase and hold the wind, but at least it is short.
If the only way we seek to encounter God is through creation, we will discover the deep truth embedded in biblical Hebrew, that olam, meaning “universe,” comes from the same root as ne’elam, “hidden.” Nature is not transparent to the purposes and presence of God. By and large, and with some notable exceptions, mainstream Judaism did not follow Christianity in predicating faith in the existence of God on natural theology, itself built on the Aristotelian premise that purposes are inherent in nature. In the Hebrew Bible nature does not prove the existence of God. It sings the praises of God, and that is something else altogether. If all we have are universal laws and personal choices – as we have today in our secular, scientific, individualistic culture – we will not discover meaning. We will land up where Kohelet found himself after pursuing possessions, power and a thousand women: pronouncing life hevel, a mere shallow, fleeting, insubstantial breath.
There is a reason for this. The meaning of a system lies outside the system. The meaning of chess is not contained in the rules of chess. You can know all the rules by heart and still have no idea why people play it and are so absorbed by it. The meaning of the universe lies outside the universe. That is why Abrahamic monotheism was so transformative – not because it reduced the many gods of paganism to one, but because it spoke about a God outside nature who created nature, a God beyond the universe who made the universe. For the first time it showed that there is meaning to life, not one we invent but one we discover. It was this that rescued the human condition from the tragic sense of life.
But meaning cannot be accessed by pure reason, by “wisdom.” That is because, as Kohelet says no fewer than thirty-two times, wisdom tells us what exists “under the heavens,” or “under the sun.” Like science, it establishes connections between different empirical phenomena. If X then Y. It does not, cannot, reach beyond the physical universe to that which lies beyond. Wisdom is neither the revelation of the priest nor the word of the prophet. Wisdom can tell us where, when and how, but not why. Questions of meaning will systematically elude it. Wisdom will always conclude, in the words of the late Sir Bernard Williams, one of the wisest of his generation, “that the world was not made for us, or we for the world, that our history tells no purposive story, and that there is no position outside the world or outside history from which we might hope to authenticate our activities.” In short, all is hevel.
Meaning is not engraved in nature. It is not written in the galaxies with their billions of stars, nor is it inscribed in the 3.1 billion letters of the human genome. Meaning is not universal but particular. It lives in stories, memories, rituals, songs, in collective acts of worship, and in communities bound together by shared history and the bonds of collective responsibility. It is something we inherit from our parents and hand on, if we are blessed, to our children.
Meaning is more like music than words, more like poetry than prose, more like home than a hotel. It lives in stories, not scientific formulae. Wisdom can give us stoic acceptance or epicurean pleasure, but not meaning. For meaning, we need the priest and the prophet. We need revelation and redemption. We need the word from beyond the universe that created the universe and is capable of inspiring us to change the universe. We need a sense of the sacred and a feeling, however inchoate, for God’s purposes in history. That is why, in ancient Israel, there was not one kind of leader but three, and why Tanakh is written in a multiplicity of voices, each with its own perspective and sensibility.
After Tolstoy had experienced his own dark night of the soul, what restored him was neither philosophy nor science but the faith of the workers on his estate, simple people leading ordinary lives, who suffered without life losing its meaning for them. Tolstoy eventually came to the conclusion that what they had was faith. “If a man lives, he believes in something…. If he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live.”
That is the meaning of the penultimate sentence of Kohelet. Note that wisdom almost invariably uses the metaphor of seeing. We speak of insight, foresight, hindsight, vision. We make an observation. We adopt a perspective. When we understand, we say, “I see.” Kohelet uses the word ra’iti, “I saw,” eighteen times. But revelation, the source of meaning, is not something we see. It is something we hear. That is why shema is the key word of Deuteronomy, where it occurs ninety-two times. As Moses said about the revelation at Mount Sinai, “You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice” (Deut. 4:12). That is what the penultimate sentence is saying: “The final word: it has all been said. Hold God in awe, and heed His commands, for that is all man has.” Meaning is what we hear, not see.
The divine word is what links the finite – us – to the Infinite, God. In the beginning was the word: “And God said, ‘Let there be….’” And, concludes Kohelet, “Sof davar,” “In the end is the word.” Seeing makes us wise, but it is listening that gives life meaning.
VII. The Freedom of Insecurity
Kohelet is a commentary, oblique and subtle to be sure, to the life of Solomon. It is an answer to the questions that anyone who reads Solomon’s story in the book of Kings must ask. What went wrong? How did the wisest man on earth go so far astray? How did the man who built the Temple become the one who, through his myriad wives from many nations, admitted idolatry into the national life of Israel? How did the king whose name means “peace” and whose reign was marked by peace, become the figure who generated so many tensions within the nation that, shortly after his death, it split into two and never in all the subsequent centuries recovered the greatness it once had?
The story of Solomon is the most perplexing in Tanakh. It starts with immense promise. God, through the prophet Nathan, had told David that he would not build the Temple, but his son would. He would have what David lacked: peace. God said that He would adopt David’s son as His own: “I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to Me a son” (II Sam. 7:14). It is a uniquely auspicious beginning.
That mood is maintained when David dies and Solomon inherits his throne. God appears to Solomon in a dream and offers him anything he wishes. Solomon asks for only one thing: “an understanding heart, to judge Your people and discern between good and evil” (I Kings 3:9). Pleased with this reply, God says that He will indeed give him wisdom, but also in addition, “riches and honor, so that no other king shall compare with you, all your days” (ibid. 13).
So it was. Solomon had, says Kings, “wisdom and understanding beyond measure, and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore.” His acumen surpassed that of “all the people of the East and all the wisdom of Egypt.” He composed three thousand proverbs. His fame spread throughout the region and “people of all nations came to hear” his wisdom (5:9–14). No other figure in Tanakh is spoken of in these terms.
When the fall came, therefore, it was serious and surprising. Deuteronomy contains three commands about a king of Israel. He should not “acquire many horses for himself or cause the people to return to Egypt” to buy them. He should not have many wives, nor should he accumulate “much silver and gold” (Deut. 17:16–17).
Solomon broke all three. He had twelve thousand horses (I Kings 10:26). He “exceeded all the kings of the earth in riches” (10:23). He had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines including, says the text, many from “the nations concerning which the Lord had said to the people of Israel, ‘You shall not enter into marriage with them, neither shall they with you, for surely they will turn away your heart after their gods’” (I Kings 11:1–8). The result was that idolatry was introduced into Israel at the highest level.
The Talmud (Sanhedrin 21b) is candid. It says that Solomon fell because these commands were given a reason by the Torah itself. The king should not own too many horses because that will cause him to return to Egypt to buy them. He should not have too many wives “lest his heart turn away.” Solomon thought he was clever enough to break the law without suffering the consequences: buying horses from Egypt or being led astray by his wives. He was wrong in both cases. Tanakh leaves us in no doubt as to his epitaph: “Solomon did evil in the sight of the Lord” (I Kings 11:6).
Much though the narrative tries to skirt around it, one of the precipitating factors was the building of the Temple itself. In a sentence that proved retrospectively to be deeply ironic, the text says that “in the four hundred and eightieth year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt,” Solomon “began to build the House of the Lord” (I Kings 6:1). It was a way of saying that the act of Temple-building was about to bring the long Jewish journey to closure.
The idea that there would one day be a central sanctuary in the Promised Land goes back to the song at the Reed Sea: “You will bring them and plant them on the mountain of Your inheritance – the place, Lord, You made for Your dwelling, the Sanctuary, Lord, Your hands established” (Ex. 15:17). It had taken centuries for the land to be conquered and settled, the tribes united under a single king and Jerusalem made the capital city. Building the House of God was now all that remained to be done.
But there are ominous notes throughout the narrative. The building involved a treaty with Lebanon in exchange for the large amount of cedar wood involved in the construction. A labor force was drafted of thirty thousand men working in monthly shifts for the wood alone, together with eighty thousand stone-cutters, seventy thousand men employed to transport the stone and 3,300 officers to supervise the work (I Kings 5:15–25).
The local non-Israelite population – the remaining Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites – were taken as slaves. The text adds that “of the people of Israel, Solomon made no slaves” (I Kings 9:22). That this needed to be said is alarming. The entire narrative echoes the experience of the Israelites in Egypt, sometimes using the same words. We now realize the significance of a fact told at the very beginning of the story, that “Solomon made an alliance with Pharaoh king of Egypt and married his daughter” (I Kings 3:1). What was a king of Israel doing by forging an alliance, in the form of a marriage, with the imperial power that had once turned his ancestors into slaves? By turning his own people into a corvée, an unpaid, conscripted labor force, Solomon had in effect transformed Israel into a second Egypt.
The consequences were far-reaching. After Solomon’s death the people came to his son and successor Rehoboam, complaining, “Your father put a heavy yoke on us, but now lighten the harsh labor and the heavy yoke he put on us and we will serve you” (I Kings 12:4). Rehoboam consulted his father’s advisers, who told him in effect: if you serve the people, they will serve you. He did not listen, preferring instead the advice of his own friends who told him to assert his authority by making the burden heavier still. Instead of serving the people, Solomon’s son expected them to serve him. This was the single most fateful moment in Israel’s history. The people rebelled, the kingdom divided and the nation never fully recovered.
What went wrong? That is Kohelet’s question. To understand his answer we must turn to Sigmund Freud’s most brilliant disciple, Otto Rank. Rank’s most original contribution to the study of human nature was his insight that we are torn between two fears: the fear of living and the fear of dying.
The fear of living is what we experience in early childhood, namely separation anxiety. The young child knows how vulnerable and dependent he or she is, especially in relation to the mother. We fear being alone. We need the protective embrace of human others. It is for this reason that we seek to identify with a group, a team, a community or a nation. We merge our identity with theirs. It is the anxiety about being singular, different, individuated, that Rank called the fear of living.
No sooner do we identify with a group, however, than we fear the opposite: losing our individuality. When the “I” is wholly subordinated to the “We,” we feel stifled, submerged, suffocated. This is what Rank called the fear of dying. Rank’s view was that it was this second fear that led people with a strong sense of self to seek immortality through heroic acts of death-defying courage, or by creating works of art that will live forever (Shakespeare’s “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme”). In ancient times rulers sought immortality by building imperishable monuments – temples, pyramids and palaces that would stand forever. The stronger the “I” and the greater the refusal to merge into the “We,” the deeper becomes the fear of death, and the more powerful the temptation to defeat it by a personal immortality project, something that will allow my name to live forever.
That is what Kohelet is telling us about Solomon. As we have already seen, no other book in Tanakh uses the first person singular as often as does Kohelet: “I built for myself…I made for myself…I gathered for myself…I acquired for myself” (Eccl. 2:4–9). These are the words of someone obsessed with I-me-mine. And, as Rank said, one with an exaggerated sense of self supremely fears death. That is Kohelet, telling us thirty-eight times how haunted he is by the realization that life is hevel, a mere breath that will one day cease, returning us naked to the grave, and turning our bodies to dust. Kohelet does not speak about the Temple, or how Solomon spent thirteen years – almost twice as long as the seven years it took to build the Temple – building a palace for himself (I Kings 7:1–12). But these facts hover in the background, unmistakably there.
The rabbis said something very acute about Solomon’s Temple. They understood Psalm 24 – “Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in His holy place?” – as referring to the Temple dedication ceremony. The psalm ends with an odd repetition:
Lift up your heads, O gates; be uplifted, eternal doors,
so that the King of glory may enter.
Who is the King of glory? It is the Lord, strong and mighty,
the Lord mighty in battle.
Lift up your heads, O gates; be uplifted, eternal doors,
so that the King of glory may enter.
Who is He, the King of glory?
The Lord of hosts, He is the King of glory, Selah. (Ps. 24:7–10)
This is how they interpreted these lines: When Solomon tried to take the Ark into the Holy of Holies, the doors refused to open. Hence his command, “Lift up your heads, O gates.” The gates then asked him, “Who is the King of glory?” Solomon replied, “The Lord.” Yet the doors still refused to open. So Solomon had to ask again, and still they did not open (Shabbat 30a). In other words, the sages attributed to gates the suspicion that Solomon regarded himself, not God, as “the king of glory.” A man who spends almost twice as long building a palace for himself as building a house for God lays himself open to the suspicion that the Temple was Solomon’s own immortality project, the building he believed would make his name live forever.
Those who fear death spend their lives in a futile quest for security, for something they can attach themselves to that will not die. That, suggests the psalm, is the allure of idols: “They have mouths but cannot speak, eyes but cannot see. They have ears but cannot hear” (Ps. 115:5–6). You know where you are with an idol. It does not move. It does not breathe. It does not change. Hence the sin of the golden calf. Recall that it began with the people panicking because of the absence of Moses. They needed a leader. Why did they not do the obvious and turn to Aaron, Moses’ brother, his partner, spokesman, colleague and companion? Why an object made of gold? Because they wanted something predictable, something that did not get angry with them, challenge them, urge them to ever-greater heights. Bricks, mortar, stone, marble, cedar, silver, gold: these are things you can safely worship because they make no demands. They are there, unchanging, forever.
Implicit in Kohelet is a story about Solomon’s life as a search for security in terms of what we have, what we own and what we can control. That is a temptation that has led astray some of the most gifted leaders of all times. But it is a false quest. Sukkot tells us why: you can live in a hut with only leaves for a roof, exposed to the wind, the cold and the rain, and still rejoice.
And it is joy, not monumental architecture, that defeats the fear of death, because it lifts us beyond the self, the insistent, interminable “I.” Joy is something we share with others. Joy is gratitude for the gift of life that we feel in the presence of the Giver of life. We become eternal not by constructing buildings, but by opening ourselves up, making ourselves vulnerable, to the Eternal, to God Himself.
God brought the Israelites from slavery to freedom. But freedom requires the ability to live with insecurity. It means making space for other people to express their freedom in different, unpredictable ways. It means empowering your children, as God empowered Abraham, saying “Walk on ahead of Me” (Gen. 17:1). It means not seeking to turn those around you into clones of yourself or servants of your will. It means, in Judaism, living with an unpredictable God who, when asked by Moses for His name, said, “I will be what I will be” (Ex. 3:14). It means living with God who made every human being in His image, yet who does not have an image. Without the courage to live with insecurity, even the wisest of men, King Solomon, can go astray.
Sukkot is the festival of insecurity. It is the festival of a people who know they will never be entirely safe, surrounded as they are by larger, stronger nations, assaulted as they have so often been for having the courage to be different. Sitting in the sukka, betzila demehemnuta, “under the shadow of faith” (Zohar, Emor 103a), is all the security we need. As David said in Psalm 27:5, “He will keep me safe in His pavilion [lit. sukka] on the day of trouble.” If God is our refuge, who then shall we fear? We do not need what Solomon made for himself: a palace of cedar. A sukka is the polar opposite. It is spiritual security in the midst of physical vulnerability. The most monumental building, even the Temple itself, will not guarantee the safety of the nation, if what matters is the building, not the builders, and if we think we are “the king of glory.”
Solomon’s Temple, the noblest of projects executed in the wrong way for the wrong reason, did not make the king immortal, or the nation invulnerable. It left Solomon with a terrible epitaph, and divided the nation, leaving it very vulnerable indeed.