A (6:51)

Ecclesiastes is not an easy book to understand. What were some of your biggest challenges in writing about it?

C (6:58)

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.

A (9:02)

Erica, do you have a favorite passage or two from Ecclesiastes you could share with us?

C (9:07)

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.

A (12:06)

Would you explain why Ecclesiastes is traditionally read on the holiday of Sukkot or the Feast of Booths?

B (12:12)

The.

C (12:12)

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.

A (15:57)

Erika, what would you say is the main message of Ecclesiastes?

C (16:02)

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.

A (18:28)

Before we say goodbye, would you tell us about any other projects or books you're working on?

C (18:33)

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.

A (19:50)

Erica, thank you so much for joining us to talk about the amazing book of Ecclesiastes. All the best.

C (19:57)

Oh, thank you. I hope this wasn't vanity Friends.

A (20:01)

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