The Elusive Secret to Meaningful Life

Ecclesiastes 9:13–11:7

Commentaries by Debra Band and Menachem Fisch

Works of art by Debra Band

The Wise Farmer

Resilience offers humankind our best chance to survive life’s arbitrary fortunes in the face of our inability to predict divine intent.

Gazing from a palace balcony, the philosopher-king Qohelet considers farmers caring for their crops and land, and completes his search for wisdom under the sun.

The wise farmer, he realizes, may seem tiny from the king’s height, yet his lands, carefully divided into multiple plots as orderly as the mosaics on the palace walls, offer him the best chance of reward for his labours. While some plots’ crops languish from little rainfall and beating sun, other plots receive a balance of sun and rain, and the crops burgeon. Careful planning for diverse contingencies, embedded in a life of clear vision and righteous conduct—together with one’s beloved—offers the clearest path to resilience and consequent serenity not only for the farmer but for all humankind.

Observing the wise farmer, Qohelet attains the elusive secret to a meaningful life beneath the unknowable heavens.

References

Band, Debra, and Fisch, Menachem. 2023. Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living (Waco: Baylor University Press)

When Fools Govern

Commentary by Debra Band

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Pity the person who works for a careless employer. All the more so if the employer is a ruler! Here spilt wine has spattered a pair of illuminated court documents, the pride of the childish ruler. The careless act has undermined the very grandeur and authority of his decrees—in which policies, we might understand, Qohelet assumes his audience has been involved.

In late biblical texts such as Esther, the importance of the preparation of royal documents was carefully marked, and within the Muslim court culture of the medieval period, within which the Alhambra shone, illuminated books and documents gleaming with precious gold and paints were the pride and envy of the royal court.

These modern illuminations were inspired by illuminated manuscripts made in the Ottoman palaces of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The one at right presents the text of verses 16–20 of chapter 10 of Qohelet (Ecclesiastes). At left the painting creates another mock document illuminating a passage attributed to Rabbi Tarfon from the small ethical tract of the Mishnah, Pirke Avot, Ethics of the Fathers:

The day is short and the work much;
the workers are lazy and the wages high;
and the Master of the house presses (Pirke Avot 2:20)
(translation by William Berkson & Menachem Fisch)

Rabbi Tarfon might indeed have had Qohelet’s words in mind, for just as his next recorded words warn that ‘you are not obliged to complete the work, but you are not free to neglect it’, Qohelet admonishes his listeners and readers that they cannot neglect their responsibilities despite the foolishness, and even danger, surrounding them.

References

Band, Debra, and Fisch, Menachem. 2023. Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living (Waco: Baylor University Press)

Illuminating Limits

Commentary by Debra Band

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In this section, Qohelet’s thoughts turn back to the arrogant foolishness of those people—powerful or seemingly insignificant—who believe that their deeds will bring triumph and eternal glory to their name. Only God, who assigns each person his or her lifespan, is timeless. While the pleasure or pain of the immediate moment may be all we can be sure of, time and chance happen to all, and even our best efforts and actions may never be recognized or remembered.

Yet, as Qohelet reiterates throughout his book, the wise person must persevere, even struggle, in his or her work in this world under the sun—while he or she has the time.

In the left-hand illumination here, the hourglass with which the philosopher-king measures minutes and hours holds, he imagines, not sand but floating, fleeting vapour (hevel in Hebrew). Dice tossed on the surface before him suggest the gamble of every moment. At his side the intricately carved frieze, the fruit of many hours of a nameless craftsman’s days, shows careless damage, even as it fills the room with beauty.

The illumination on the right-hand page offers a view of a lion fountain in the Alhambra palace in Granada, originally built by its fourteenth-century craftsmen as a water-clock that sprayed water from a different lion’s mouth for each hour of the day. Three centuries earlier, Sephardic poet and philosopher, Solomon ibn Gabirol, had described a similar fountain in a wondrous Andalusian palace that reflected its master’s vast power.

The poem that Ibn Gabirol—not only poet but also philosopher—composed about the palace reveals his own struggle with Qohelet’s assertion of the limits of human deeds. In this illumination, the entire panegyric poem is inscribed in micrography, in a pattern that still decorates the Alhambra’s Generalife Gardens.

Ibn Gabirol characterizes the shifting light and lifelike animal statuary in his patron’s palace as a microcosm of creation, yet asserts that the memory evoked by the poet’s imagination will outlast the actual stone that will (and indeed did) ultimately crumble. (Like Qohelet’s mist, it vanished.)

The caper sprig in the foreground symbolizes Israel’s quality of perseverance in the Babylonian Talmud (Beitsa 25b). Able to sprout among dry rocks, with no water or nourishment, and produce a fresh bud, blossom, and fruit every day, the caper reminded the rabbis of Israel’s ability to persevere through adversity with only God’s unseen—Qohelet might say inscrutable—support.

References

Band, Debra, and Fisch, Menachem. 2023. Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living (Waco: Baylor University Press)

Demiriz, Y. 2017. Islam Sanatinda: Geometrik Süsleme (Istanbul: Hayalperest)

Hareuveni, Nogah. 1984. Tree and Shrub in Our Biblical Heritage, trans. by Helen Frenkly (Kiryat Ono, Israel: Neuot Kedumim)

Scheindlin, Raymond P. 1996. ‘Poet and Patron: Ibn Gabirol’s Poem of the Palace and Its Gardens’, Prooftexts 16.1: 35

______. 2016. Vulture in a Cage: Poems by Solomon ibn Gabirol (New York: Archipelago), p.221

Debra Band :

The Wise Farmer, 2022 , Slunk vellum, ink, gouache and gold

Debra Band :

The Day is Short and the Work is Much & When the King is a Child, 2021 , Slunk vellum, ink, gouache and gold

Debra Band :

Wisdom is Better than Strength, 2021 , Slunk vellum, ink, gouache and gold

Doing Our Human Best

Comparative commentary by Debra Band and Menachem Fisch

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Though bitterly worded, chapter 10 is as close as Qohelet will get to a moment of comic relief. As if to counter the impression left by the end of chapter 9, that despite psychological and sociological problems, a small group of properly situated and appreciated wise people of voice and standing will suffice in order to prepare for the worst (amid a pleasure-bent majority hoping for the best; 9:15–16), Qohelet turns to consider the disturbingly disruptive potential of energetic fools of voice and standing: how a single death-fly can rot a precious ointment (10:1).

Qohelet shows us two kinds of fool: busy fools on the one hand—overconfident in their knowledge and ability—and passive, slothful fools on the other. Both are contrasted with those whom Qohelet deems to be genuinely wise.

Fools of the first type deny Qohelet’s hevel principle, that ‘all is vapour [hevel]’; transient and provisional. They object to the claim that all human knowledge is time-bound and hypothetical. Qohelet’s uber-wise fools are still very much with us today. The triumphs of science, our widely accepted moral principles, and the marvels of technology, many people argue, are living proof of our ability to recognize certitude. But they confuse broad, momentary agreement with actual truth, and feeling certain with proving certitude. If history teaches us anything, it is that radical paradigm shifts puncture and dissect the long march of human accomplishment into a discontinuous patchwork of undeniable, yet later abandoned, certitudes. These fools’ brazen, cocksure self-confidence, for which the hesitant, self-doubting, deliberating, and humbly thoughtful wise are seldom a match, is capable of winning over the heart of a city.

Fools of the second type fully accept Qohelet’s hevel premise but answer his big question negatively: because our knowledge of the good and the true can never be ascertained, our worldly undertakings can never be properly deemed worthy. As a result, they face the world with apathetic indifference.

Qohelet’s satirical depiction of the topsy-turvy disruption of the city’s social fabric through the slapdash projects of cocky, reckless fools which unwittingly bring greater harm than they were meant to prevent (10:6–10), together with the pathetically neglectful disrepair caused by idle fools of the second category (10:18–20), is more effective than any philosophical argument to bar such strategies from entering the discussion.

‘Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many days’ (11:1) is the motto that captures the precariousness of prospective action, hoping that, yet never knowing if, our investments might eventually yield a reward. But the mention of bread and water lends a pungent urgency to the clichéd piece of friendly advice. Our very existence depends on bread, and our bread on water—the great unpredictable necessity on which Qohelet’s agrarian world depended for its very life. Yet clever farmers do eventually ‘find it’. Uncertain as to which crops will survive, or when the rain will come, they wisely hedge their bets by subdividing their plots. They have to sow in advance of rain, but not too early. If they wait for clouds to gather, they will have missed their chance and will never sow in time. Nor can they predict the rainfall by gauging the ever-changing wind (11:3–4). It is as impossible to chart nature’s course as it is to chart the formation of a foetus in its mother’s womb (11:5). Acutely aware of the hevel premise, as of the vital yitaron (worth, value) of bringing forth bread from the earth, good farmers wisely hedge their bets again by subdividing their time, as they did their fields: sowing both morning and evening, instead of vainly forming futile forecasts or gambling recklessly.

And so, from being the critical obstacle to life’s yitaron, Qohelet’s cruel hevel-premise as to our inherent and unsurmountable mist-like temporality and fallibility has morphed into the key to achieving life’s yitaron. We are able to live worthy lives devoted to the great tasks with which God has given us to contend. To do so, we are not required to overcome and transcend the time-bound uncertainties of our hevel existence—the idea that we can do so is a dangerous delusion—but, on the contrary, to properly endorse and internalize them. Being forever on the lookout for what we deem to be failings and problems, shortcomings and wrongs, we form tentative plans to solve and right them, forever humbly aware, that others, past and present, may well have seen and done things differently, and still do. Availing ourselves to the mutual challenge of such a constructively critical environment, we can rest assured by the end of the day that we have done our human best.

References

Band, Debra, and Fisch, Menachem. 2023. Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living (Waco: Baylor University Press)

Fisch, Harold. 1988. ‘Qohelet: A Hebrew Ironist’ in idem, Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press)

Next exhibition: Song of Solomon 3