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Erica Brown, "Ecclesiastes and the Search for Meaning" (Maggid, 2023)
00:21:00
An interview with Erica Brown
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A
Hello, everybody.
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B
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Ecclesiastes has long been viewed as the great existential work of the Hebrew Bible, containing the famous cry vanity of vanities. All is vanity as part of a search for enduring meaning. It questions the nature of work, mortality, happiness, justice, goodness, and life itself. Abounding with careful observations, disappointments and insights. Ecclesiastes is one of the richest and most complex books in all of Tanakh. Join us as we speak with Erica Brown, whose Commentary offers a fresh and hopeful look at this ancient book as she synthesizes rabbinic commentary with modern scholarship, fine art, and poetry. You're listening to New Books in Jewish Studies, a channel of the New Books Network, and I'm your Host, Michael Morales. Dr. Erica Brown is the Vice Provost for Values and Leadership at Yeshiva University and the founding director of its Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Herrenstein center for Values and Leadership. Erika, welcome to New Books and Jewish Studies.
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C
Thank you. It's lovely to be here with you.
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A
So, Erika, let's begin by having you tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to write a book on Ecclesiastes.
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C
Yeah. I currently serve as the Vice Provost for Values and Leadership at Yeshiva University, and I run a center to promulgate the teachings of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the Sacks Herrenstein center at Yeshiva University. Rabbi Sacks was One of my teachers, I lived in England and had the gift of having him as a master's thesis advisor. And so it's an honor really to, and a privilege to be able to teach his teachings and mentor students, to follow in his, his footsteps. Not that, not that he's replaceable. I started, I, I have done two other books in that series. It's a series on the Hebrew Bible put out by Magid Publishers. They're part of, they're an imprint of Koren from Jerusalem and they've published, I think this is my eighth book with them. And they have a series, it's a series trying to cover all the biblical books. I did the Book of Jonah and that was a fantastic book because he's such a complicated and psychologically intriguing character. I love the fact that the book is canonized, that we say, oh, you have your doubts, you want to run away from responsibility. The prophetic voice is not for you. There's a place for you here. That voice is important and allowing others to understand, allowing readers to understand that there are call texts all over the Hebrew Bible and, and every response is not the same. I always say there's the silent yes of just going forth the way that Abraham did. There's the articulated yes of Hineni. I am fully present. And, and the answer is yes. And I think that's the most desirable because it reflects the most intention and thoughtfulness and, and, and an active articulation that one is ready to make this kind of covenantal commitment. And then of course there's the Moses and Jeremiah no, that's the articulated no. And then there' is just the silent no. Just, you know, you run in the opposite direction. And I think we all have moments in our lives where we find ourselves in all of those sort of, in all of those categories of agreeing to things we, we don't want to do and, you know, being convinced or sometimes saying yes when we should have said no. So I, I, I, I did Jonah, and it was a lot of fun to research. And at the time they had asked me if I wanted to do Jonah or the Book of Esther, Esther seemed a little bit daunting. I wrote my disser, a 16th century commentary of the Book of Esther. So it should have been the natural yes for me. And at the same time, I guess because of my research, I knew what a serious exegetical history it had. And I wasn't quite sure. You know, Joan is nice, four chapters, very short, great story. So I did that and about two weeks when I was done. When I was done with that and the book had come out corn and asked me if I wanted to do Esther. And I worked on Esther, which was a really big undertaking. And when I finished, my guy said, I will never write a book this long again. And then I did it. And actually I had contacted Koren because I was working on a book that I had not yet published on Song of Songs. And it very creative, very literary, and I just wasn't sure where it was going and I was sort of frustrated about it. And I called Corinne, my friends at Corin, and I said, do you have any other books in that series? And they said, we have Proverbs and we have Ecclesiastics. I'm like co hella at Ecclesiastes. That's just my favorite of all time. So I'll definitely do that. So writing on that during COVID was a really interesting experience. There's a lot of the themes questioning our mortality, aging, disease, money and work. These were all themes during COVID You know, what's, what's the purpose of work? How is work revolutionized as a result of ways in which we began to disconnect from the workplace, physically and mentally. So I think on some level though it made a terrible situation internally harder. Doing a lot of thinking in the space. I think it also gave me a lot of clarity on issues that were the issues of the day.
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A
Ecclesiastes is not an easy book to understand. What were some of your biggest challenges in writing about it?
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C
Fantastic question. In part, the repetition. Some of the themes come up again and again. How many times can you say there's nothing new under the sun or all is vanity, all the variations of that or even the book is punctuated by statements about happiness, about seeking transient happiness and food and in, in, in certain kinds of relationships. So I, but I actually came to, I think a good place around the repetition. I think the repetition in some way mirrors our own human struggle of going back to the same sorts of questions again and again and sometimes getting more clarity and sometimes pedaling backwards. You know, we, we face some kind of corruption in society and we ask one kind of question about justice. And then when injustice happens to us, we may ask that with greater vehemence and indignation. So I think, I think it is a very natural thing when someone says, when someone asks a question, when a five year old asks a question about death, it's very different than when a 35 year old asks a question about death or when an 85 year old and they might Be the same question. You know, when my second son, my. For my first son, my second child when he was four, he really loved my husband's slippers. And he said, when you die, can I have your slippers? Right. So, you know this at that age, he was sort of thinking he was just learning about death. That's very different than when someone has a chronic illness that's terminal and begins to ask questions about legacy. So I think. I think repetition, the repetition was really a function of the sort of review of existential questions that you have. And you have those lots of times.
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A
Erica, do you have a favorite passage or two from Ecclesiastes you could share with us?
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C
Yeah, I mean, I could go to the sort of standards, which is the time poem. You know, there's a Season for Everything. That was fun to write on. But I sort of. I mean, there were so many places. Tova, Schneim and Echad. You know, two are better than one. And whether that was utilitarian because, you know, if one falls, you can pick the other one up and one warms the other in the bed. And you can understand that on lots of levels. But, you know, whether that's utilitarian or whether that's really a statement of how you negotiate a human condition which tends to loneliness or tends to narcissism, you know, what does it mean to invite others into your life? I would say that, you know, something I've taught, and I really helped guide me personally, is the fly in the ointment statement, chapter 10. You know that that expression, the fly in the ointment is sort of paralyzes us, right? We say, oh, here's something beautiful, this perfumed ointment that was very expensive, and now there's a dead fly in it. And then you say, well, it's a dead fly. Ruins the ointment. And as an expression, something small really can minimize or diminish from the beauty of the entirety of something. And, you know, this. There's some Talmudic writing on it. There's a lot of interesting medieval commentaries on what this verse means. And then one of the Michael V. Fox, you know, said something is very profound. He's a contemporary scholar of the Bible, and he said, you know, actually, flies don't do anything to ointment. You could just remove them. You know, it's. It's a decision that you make whether or not you're going to throw everything out because something about it seems imperfect. And so for me, I think we live in a society where we know that we can achieve perfection. But that doesn't stop us from holding up very unrealistic aspirations about what our bodies should look like, about what our. Our daily lives should look like, what our work should look like. And then something goes wrong, and it's as if it ruins the ointment, as opposed to saying, well, what would it look like to take a tweezer and take out the fly? When there's a fly buzzing? Michael. It doesn't matter how large the room is or what's in the room. It's all you notice. And I think that's. That's really true for human nature. Are we hardwired for happiness or are we kind of hardwired to. To be critics? You know, and it's. Nothing is easier than being a critic. You know, you. You hyper focus on something that goes wrong, and then you lose total perspective. So I think that I. I spent a lot of time thinking about that verse and its implications for me as an educator and as a parent and as a spouse and as a human being who hears the. The inner critic all. All day long. Yeah.
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A
Would you explain why Ecclesiastes is traditionally read on the holiday of Sukkot or the Feast of Booths?
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The.
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Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of reasons that are given around the reading of ritual texts at particular seasons. One that I think. And that's actually how I end the book. That's the epilogue. Because it's sort of not the place that you'd expect it to be read, because Sukkot is called in Jewish liturgy Zman simchatenu. It's the time of our happiness. It's the time of the harvest. So it was a time of economic stability. One would hope it was a time of feast. You know, imagine a pastoral painting. The sense of working hard and enjoying the fruit of your labor. On Sukkot, we take different. The Dalit minim, the Arba minim, different species, the palm, the myrtle, the citron. We take those and we bring them together and we sit in a sukkah and we eat beautiful meals. But there's another aspect of Sukkot that I think Kohele really does speak to, and that is when you sit in sukkah, a sukkah is, as we would say in Talmudic dirat Arai, a temporary building. It cannot feel permanent. In other words, in order to fulfill the commandment of this holiday, one needs to sit holy as the totality of one's body under a roof that is not permanent. The walls can be permanent, but the roof can't be permanent. And so if you think about that as an amazing metaphor for the vulnerability and exposure that we experience in life, we're sort of no matter what walls we built, and those could be walls of refuge and walls of protection, but they can also be walls that block others out, right, that feel impermeable. And no matter how high we make those walls, and there is a height limit in Jewish law, the ceiling has to feel open. There's some aspect, the crevices, what you can see through and the materials that you can make it out of, so that your experience of heaven, if you like, your experience of what's transcendent in life, has this open and expansive, but also exposed sense. And so when you think about Qohelet, you're talking about the most raw and exposed questions. You know, one thing that's fascinating about the book of Ecclesiastes is that there is. There's no family really mentioned. He does mention inheritors, but he doesn't mention inheritors in the warm fuzzy. Who's going to inherit my legacy? It's more like, I don't. Why should I work so hard? It could be a wise Chacham or Sachal or a fool will inherit all this wealth. I won't even know how it's going to be spent. So what was the purpose of me doing all this work, this Amelut, this, this laboring in this life, when some might be irresponsible with my inheritance in a life that I can't see? And so that there's almost a depersonalization of others in the book. And I think asking those very profound, very difficult questions is part of the Sukkot experience and really in some way emblematic of Judaism, which is celebrating the partnership that we have with God, with the divine, with the work that we do in this world, to be productive? And then there's the sort of existential hovering cloud that we can never escape. It's always there. It's always there. And what does a marriage of those two things look like? Well, that looks like Sukkot.
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A
Erika, what would you say is the main message of Ecclesiastes?
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C
Right. So, I mean, that's a softball, Michael, because you could say, hevel havala kole havalim. It's all vanity and that. And that would. That. And that would be good. Put a punctuation, you know, put an exclamation point on and call it a day. So I actually think I'm going to take Robert Alter's translation of Havela's breath, right? The idea that all is breath. When you say all is vanity, that's a pejorative statement. That means that nothing is worthwhile. But when you say all is breath, what you mean is that so much if not everything in this world is transient. And then the question is, can you find transient value? I think what Qohelet, what Ecclesiastes did as the preacher is he was seeking a world. He was seeking to understand if there's anything of real duration and endurance. And so he throws up in this thought. In these thought experiments he conducts, he throws up, well, could it be this. Could it be. Could it be money and wealth and pleasure? Well, he says, like, I got pleasure out of my pleasure, but that's all I got out of my pleasure. He concludes in chapter two. So, you know, you can't really resolve some of the larger issues. So. And he's not advocating. He's not advocating death, right? There's nowhere where he's saying, there's another world and the other world is brighter and better, or death will resolve all of these things. It. You know, I do deal with the relationship between Ecclesiastes and Job, because you really do have to go there. But whereas for Job, it's deeply personal, right? It's his suffering, it's his loss and his grief and his questioning of how God could do this to him. Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes doesn't really have any of that and engages in some of the questions, but not with that personal. Not with that personal suffering. In fact, you almost feel that this is a man relatively free of suffering. He has all the wealth in the world. He can do anything with it. And so I think it comes down to, if I could use one sentence, take pleasure in the transient moments, because those are the only moments you have. So make them worthwhile.
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A
Before we say goodbye, would you tell us about any other projects or books you're working on?
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C
Oh, I'm always working on something I'm working on. I. I do a weekly. A weekly podcast on the Torah portion of the week, podcast video essay called the Torah of Leadership. I'm putting those things together. It really has a leadership focus. And I am. I am trying to. I'm going back to Song of Songs. I've had. I've had. Been working with someone on the editing of it to try to sort of shift and sift through some of the ideas and how to make it a little bit more accessible. You know, that was. That was another sort of COVID project that I began largely because I was spending so much time outdoors. Right. And if you remember that spring, you just sort of noticed everything. I could say that was an amazing spring, but maybe every spring is just as amazing. But the intensity of that experience of being with nature and in many ways alone with nature made me really, really go back to this idea of the garden. And why would the ultimate love take place in a garden? Which of course brought me to the Garden of Eden and the resonances between those two books. So that was yeah, it was fun to be in that garden. And I hope to go back there sometime this year.
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A
Erica, thank you so much for joining us to talk about the amazing book of Ecclesiastes. All the best.
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C
Oh, thank you. I hope this wasn't vanity Friends.
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You've been listening to New Books in Jewish Studies, a channel of the New Books Network.