Bar-Ilan University
Parshat Hashavua Study Center
Sukkot 5776/September 28-October 4, 2015
This series of faculty lectures on the weekly Parsha is made possible by the Department of Basic Jewish
Studies, the Paul and Helene Shulman Basic Jewish Studies Center, the Office of the Campus Rabbi, BarIlan University's International Center for Jewish Identity and the Computer Center Staff at Bar-Ilan
University.
Please feel free to like our facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/BIUParsha.
For inquiries, contact Avi Woolf at: opdycke1861@yahoo.com.
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What we should learn from Ecclesiastes
By Daniel Shmueli*
The book of Ecclesiastes, read on the intermediate Sabbath of the festival of Sukkot, is
ascribed to King Solomon on the basis of its content and explicit assertion: “I, Kohelet,
was king in Jerusalem over Israel” (Eccles. 1:12). The book is characterized by bleak
descriptions of life, soul-reckoning, and the sayings of someone who ostensibly finds no
real point in life and sums life up with the words encapsulating the principle message of
the book: “Utter futility!—said Kohelet—Utter futility! All is futile!” (Eccles. 1:2).
If such things had been said by the average man on the street we would not ascribe them
much importance and would say they were written by someone on the brink of despair,
someone who had not found what to do in life and had not realized himself and therefore
said such things out of bitterness. But when these things are uttered by King Solomon—
said to have been the wisest of men, extraordinarily wealthy and known for his
righteousness, and even privileged to have built the Temple—then it is surprising. Since
*
Daniel Shmueli, Synagogue Commemorating the Victims of the Helicopter Disaster.
these things were said by him, clearly they contain a lesson learned by him who had
experienced almost everything. To fully appreciate the significance of this, we must follow
the narrative of the book and discover the central message in the thought of Kohelet.
Who was Solomon?
King Solomon himself attests that he was greater than all the kings who preceded him,
and the emphasis placed on this in Ecclesiastes make the central message even more
poignant and forceful (Eccles. 2:4-10):
I multiplied my possessions. I built myself houses and I planted vineyards.
I laid out gardens and groves, in which I planted every kind of fruit tree. I
constructed pools of water…I bought male and female slaves, and I
acquired stewards. I also acquired more cattle, both herds and flocks, than
all who were before me in Jerusalem. I further amassed silver and
gold…and I got myself male and female singers, as well as the luxuries of
commoners—coffers and coffers of them…and denied myself no
enjoyment.
So we see that Solomon was extremely wealthy and wanted for nothing. He attests that he
fully enjoyed every opportunity and all that any man could long for. What is more, the
lessons are spoken by a person who in his life knew joy and knew how to derive pleasure
from what he had. With all this, the poignant question arises: to what end is it all, and
what will be in the future? Indeed, after reaching the pinnacle, beyond which one can
go no higher, comes the fall (Eccles. 2:17-18):
And so I loathed life. For I was distressed by all that goes on under the sun,
because everything is futile and pursuit of wind. So, too, I loathed all the
wealth that I was gaining under the sun. For I shall leave it to the man who
will succeed me.
These words sharpen the principal paradox in what he says. It turns out that fully
realizing one’s objective in life makes life void of all meaning and content. A person who
fulfills himself, who has achieved all his goals or who has no goal, feels empty and is seized
by despair. Hence the disagreement about how one should approach the book of
Ecclesiastes, to the extent that some Sages wished to sequester it, as we read in Tractate
Shabbat (30b):
“The Sages wished to hide the book of Ecclesiastes, because its words are selfcontradictory; yet why did they not hide it? Because its beginning is religious teaching
and its end is religious teaching.”
This statement leads us to understand that Ecclesiastes contains a message which is
constructed from the book as a whole, and that is how this book should be examined.
The goal and its attainment
In considering the book as a whole, one must distinguish between the process of fulfilling
one’s expectations and their fulfillment. When a person has objectives in life that have
not yet been attained and the person acts in the light of these objectives, striving to attain
them, then the person is filled with satisfaction and joy. But when the expectations are
fulfilled, then the person has a sense of emptiness and utter lack, and all that the person
has achieved does not satisfy him or her.
The sense of emptiness leads to the person despairing and despising the life loved brief
moments before, so much so that all the person’s wealth and achievements seem
meaningless in his eyes. Moreover, suddenly the person discovers that all the toiling
invested in achieving these goals was spent in vain, and all the satisfaction experienced
thus far from the effort invested becomes an impediment: “and I despised life.”
We learn from this that someone who lacks a goal and meaning in life essentially lacks
everything, despite all that he or she might have. The unattained goal, the striving
towards a specific purpose is what gives flavor to what we do in life; but once the goal is
achieved, especially a material goal, no zest remains to what has been achieved, unless one
has a more sublime goal.
Therefore, in order that we not be seized by despair, we must always set ourselves goals
and would do well to place at the pinnacle of our aspirations a goal that, even if never
achieved, will always motivate us to strive for it. What is the sublime goal that has the
power to give meaning to life and make a person content, happy and not despairing?
Kohelet answers from the heights of his experience with the saying: “To the man, namely,
who pleases Him He has given the wisdom of shrewdness to enjoy himself; and to him
who displeases, He has given the urge to gather and amass” (Eccles. 2:26). In other words,
the sublime objective is found in wisdom and knowledge which lead to true spiritual
happiness; whereas fulfilling material aspirations to gather and amass all that one can is
the root of evil, the essence of sin and despair.
But if we ask ourselves what is preferable—a rich man who is unhappy or a man who is
not wealthy but is happy—it seems we will prefer the happy person to the rich one, since
riches are intended to bring happiness to man, and if they do not fulfill this purpose then
they lose their value. Whereas having a sense of happiness, even if not riches, suffices to
fill a person with satisfaction.
This is what distinguishes the spiritual from the material. Achieving material
objectives—wealth, status, honor, and the like—comes to an end, just as any material
thing does. Of all these objectives it is said: “What real value is there for a man in all the
gains he makes beneath the sun?” (Eccles. 1:3). But with spiritual objectives, having no
end, one can never reach the ultimate fulfillment and realization of the objective; for
example, happiness, which can fill a person boundlessly. Spiritual objectives have the
capacity to safeguard a person from despairing and despising life. What was the infinite
spiritual objective attained at the end of Solomon’s personal odyssey?
“The sum of the matter, when all is said and done: Revere G-d and observe His
commandments! For this applies to all mankind” (Eccles. 12:13). In other words, the
spiritual goal of fearing the Lord is of its very nature unbounded, just like Divinity itself,
and it is that which gives meaning to a person’s life so that all the riches and material wellbeing, including the physical body, are naught but vanity and pursuit of wind.
Kohelet and the festival of Sukkot—why sadness coupled with joy?
Considering how bleak the contents of this book, people have wondered why it was
chosen to be read precisely on the festival of Sukkot, characterized by the commandment
to rejoice.
Quite simply it can be said: that is life. Life is not all joy; it is also sorrow. Someone who
has not known sadness perhaps will not know how to be happy. But even a person who
experiences sorrow should understand that this is part of life. The person should probe
his or her sorrow while doing soul-reckoning as Kohelet did, and thus come to true
happiness. Sadness is thus a means and part of the process of building human happiness
and joy. Sorrow is designed to stimulate probing and seeking that ultimately leads to
discovering the truth, and in this discovery is infinite and true joy.
Just such a process King Solomon went through in his life and sought to bequeath his
conclusions to subsequent generations. The biography of King Solomon, described in I
Kings, is of a man who began high and mighty, with great riches, and proceeded to fall
abjectly into ugly sinfulness. Thus the book of Ecclesiastes is a long confession of
someone who was also acquainted with sin and who in the end did thorough soulsearching and fully repented.
Pesikta de-Rav Kahana (26) presents a midrashic explanation of Solomon’s repentance in
the book of Ecclesiastes:
At that moment an angel in the form of Solomon descended and sat on his
throne, while Solomon put in at all the synagogues and houses of study in
Jerusalem and said to them: I, Kohelet, was king over Israel in Jerusalem.
And they would say to him: King Solomon is sitting on his throne and you
say: I am King Solomon? And what would they do to him? They would hit
him with cane and place a bowl of barley in front of him. At that moment
he would say, “Utter futility!—said Kohelet—utter futility! All is futile.”
This midrash explains that the book of Ecclesiastes was written on the basis of Solomon’s
personal experience as someone who had been one of the wealthiest monarchs in the
world but had fallen from greatness due to his sins. It teaches that riches are not eternal
and that one must know how to place bounds on one’s material aspirations and see them
only as a means and never as the end.
Kohelet, who begins by saying that all is futile (Eccles. 1:2), ultimately reaches the
conclusion that indeed “all is futile” (Eccles. 12:8) but that human life has meaning, as
explained above: “The sum of the matter, when all is said and done: Revere G-d and
observe His commandments! For this applies to all mankind.”
In order to rejoice truly, as we are commanded on the festival of Sukkot, a person must
base his or her happiness on deep personal experience, on study, understanding and
awareness of reality, and not on frivolity. Therefore precisely on the festival of Sukkot,
when people are commanded to rejoice, the book of Ecclesiastes serves to balance
rejoicing with deep words and philosophy, imbuing our happiness with true meaning, as
said in Shabbat 30b:
This teaches you that the Divine Presence rests [upon man] neither
through gloom, nor through sloth, nor through frivolity, nor through
levity, nor through talk, nor through idle chatter, save through a matter of
joy in connection with a precept.
Conclusion
Contrary to what might seem upon the surface, the book of Ecclesiastes is not despairing
or pessimistic, certainly not as an end in itself, but quite the opposite: the book takes us
through a though process that gives reason and meaning to life by presenting the various
alternatives standing before us: on one hand, material existence in which a person places
himself, his needs, and realization of all his material aspirations as the supreme goal, when
it appears to him that in this manner he will find happiness and spiritual elevation. But
this spiritual elevation is specious, a bubble destined to burst and leave a feeling of
emptiness and despair.
To reach this understanding, one must traverse the path to understanding that life
without an objective is futile, and paradoxically, in order to find the purpose of one’s life it
is necessary to experience how small and insignificant one is in comparison to the
objective. In other words, a person must understand that his or her individual existence
and satisfaction of needs are not the goal, rather a means towards the end, and then
one’s personal existence takes on meaning. Out of the futility of life grows the meaning of
life, and to have true, not illusory, happiness in one’s heart, in accordance with the precept
of the festival, a person must complete this journey and find the purpose of his or her life;
otherwise, they will not know true happiness.
Translated by Rachel Rowen