To Everything There is a Season: Reading Ecclesiastes

This week, dear friends, our Shabbat falls during Chol HaMoed Sukkot – the intermediary days of the Festival of Sukkot. The traditional Torah portion read during Shabbat Chol HaMoed Sukkot is Exodus 33:12-34:26. We will read that text when we approach it during Parashat Ki Tisa later this year.

We would be remiss if we allowed Sukkot to pass without studying the Megillah associated with the festival: Kohelet (Ecclesiastes). Kohelet is a seemingly ironic choice for Sukkot, particularly since Sukkot is nicknamed, “Zman Simchateinu,” the Festival of Gladness. We celebrate the bounty of our harvest, we welcome guests of all kinds into our sukkahs. After the cerebral, emotional holidays of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, it feels so refreshing to think about the physical world outside of ourselves and surrounding us.

However, this chag also falls during the autumn, a time synonymous with aging and reflection on the good times that came before. Just as the mythological God Cycle teaches us, we were (re)born in the spring, we thrived during the summer, we age during the autumn, and we die in the winter. We know that the emptiness of winter is on the horizon. According to Jewish tradition, the book of Kohelet is attributed to King Solomon in his old age. With this context, the themes of Kohelet seem more appropriate: futility, injustice, fear of meaninglessness. We read of a man, looking back at his life, and worrying that it was all for naught.

Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger writes,

This is the profoundly pessimistic premise that suffuses that Book of Ecclesiastes, which we read during synagogue services on the Shabbat of Sukkot. The book struggles with the meaning of life in light of death. Again and again it repeats the refrain “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity,” as it catalogues our efforts to provide our lives with a sense of meaning by building monuments that will outlast us. A small number of us endeavor to amass wisdom that will be passed on and will live beyond our deaths. Many more of us amass material goods in great quantity, hoping somehow to create a permanence that will outlive our limited time on earth. We toil and we construct and we hoard. Sometimes we perhaps do not even consciously understand that it all arises from a vain desire to overcome the inevitable temporality of life. We carry within us a deep sense of humiliation in the face of death. It is degrading to live and then be gone forever and ever, and so we have an existential need to make a mark that will last.

In the midst of our celebrations of Sukkot, we also focus on the temporary nature of life, and the fragility of the sukkah itself echoes our own fragility.

So, ready for some heavy reading? We’ll study selections of Kohelet together this Shabbat.

Shabbat Shalom!