Shabbat of Sukkot: Kohelet Through The Lens of Yizkor
(Delivered by Student Rabbi on October 17, 2022)
Over the course of our lives, the number of people we carry with us grows and grows. Sometimes that number starts when we are very young. Some of us find healing. Some of us don’t. Some people find Yizkor to be deeply beautiful. And for some of us, it brings pain we didn’t know we were holding onto.
Ideally, a Yizkor service should be tasteful. We certainly don’t expect to hear anything that will make us angry. But depending on the quirks of the Jewish calendar and traditions specific to certain synagogues, Shmini Atzeret, this day of Yizkor, is also a day when we read Megillat Kohelet, or Ecclesiastes.[1] Along with Eicha, Lamentations, Kohelet can be seen as one of the most depressing books in Jewish biblical canon, at least in terms of the worldview it expresses. And in many people’s minds, it is the most cynical. Kohelet has upsetting views about death, and strange views about the meaning of life. It opens with, “הַכֹּל הָבֶל.” “Everything is vanishing vapor.[2]
This is not the sort of message you want to give to a mourner on a Yizkor day. At least on Yom Kippur, a deeply serious day when Yizkor is also held, we are offered a chance at redemption and renewal. For a mourner, Kohelet has the potential to make you neither happy nor sad. Rather, when you hear Kohelet’s views on death, it has the potential to make you flat out angry. How could King Solomon, lauded for his legendary wisdom, for whom Kohelet, say the Rabbis, was a supposed pseudonym, say some of the things in this scroll? Where is the wisdom in this, and whose idea was it to sometimes put it on a Yizkor day?
The book of Kohelet was highly perplexing to the ancient rabbis, and people needed to find new ways to look at it in order to make it an acceptable part of our canon. People can say Kohelet was a realist. Others say he was a cynic. Today, I want us to look at him another way. If King Solomon was truly wise, then this book may not represent him at his peak. Kohelet’s cynical passages have the potential to become deeply powerful during Yizkor, if we allow ourselves to imagine one pivotal thing. That Kohelet represents some of our deepest fears; specifically, our fears about death.
Fear of death consumes Kohelet. He can hardly seem to think about anything else.
Chapter 3 of Kohelet tells us, “There is a time and season for every experience under Heaven. A time for being born, and a time for dying. A time for weeping, and a time for laughing. A time for wailing, and a time for dancing. A time for throwing stones, and a time for gathering stones. A time for embracing, and a time for shunning embraces.”[3] There are references to death and Jewish mourning practices in each of these verses, each held alongside a more happy occasion. It would seem however, that Kohelet has experienced lots of grief in his life. He probably lost many loved ones.
After listing these different happy and sad times in our lives, he remarks, “What then, is the advantage of our labor?…I realized that the only worthwhile thing to do, is to enjoy [ourselves] and do what is pleasurable in our lifetime.”[4]
Kohelet has seen happy times, and he has seen sad times. And he has had enough of the sad times. He wants to shield himself from sadness, indulging only in happy occasions. Kohelet did not want to allow himself to feel grief, to feel anguish. It seems that his solution was to drown himself in pleasures. When we are grieving, our minds can be like a prison, and our thoughts can range from sweet, to wistful, to dark and depressing.
“I love you. I miss you. I need you. I am helpless without you. I’m trying, but it hurts too much. I can’t go on without you. Every day is a waking nightmare.”
“Why did you have to go? Why couldn’t it have been me? Why couldn’t we save you? Why did G!d take you from us? Maybe there is no G!d. I just don’t care anymore.”
These are just some of the thoughts that might have been going through Kohelet’s head. It’s not easy, being a mourner. There has been many a person driven to suicide over the death of a loved one. Perhaps Kohelet tried to drown out those thoughts in an endless cycle of physical pleasures.
And yet, Kohelet was obsessed with death. To him, death was the only thing in life that was ever certain. He said that G!d keeps us guessing all the time about when we will die, but never grants us the knowledge of when it will come to pass.[5] He tried to suck out all the pleasures of life while he still could, but it was no way to live. It was a half life. It is the sad things in life that make us truly appreciate the happy ones. When all you do is indulge in happiness, there is a diminishing rate of returns on those happy events. Eventually, you become numb to the world.
If you are in mourning, you can also become numb to the world. The difference however, is that by allowing ourselves to feel sad, we also leave a light for ourselves at the end of the tunnel. There is a possibility of recovery. We don’t all get there, but there is at least a possibility that things will get better. But if we don’t allow ourselves to feel what we need to feel, it is not a tunnel. It is a collapsed cave, with no way out.
One might think that if death was the only constant in life to Kohelet, he might embrace it. Perhaps he might see death as a way to be reunited with his loved ones. But we know this is not the case. He says, “people are no different from animals. Both come from dust, and return to dust. They both go to the same place. Who even knows, if people’s spirits truly rise upward to heaven when they die?”[6]
It’s so deeply provocative. Could Kohelet, King Solomon, truly be having doubts about heaven? If we feel the desire to put King Solomon on a pedestal, his disbelief in heaven seems irreverent, and we see him as unworthy of our affections. But the fact that we have this in our canon, our ancient and sacred tradition, is so beautiful.
It’s beautiful, because it’s relatable. So many people, even those who are religious, and believe in heaven, worry about what happens to their loved ones when they die. It’s OK to have doubts. What it shows is that we love them. We worry, because we care.
Kohelet’s problem was not that he didn’t believe in heaven. It was that he did not find a way to honor the memory of his departed loved ones. He said, “The dead know nothing. Even the memory of them has died.”[7]
This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Heaven or no heaven, our loved ones are always with us. They live on in our hearts. They live on in our minds. Their names are etched on our yahrzeit plaques. The people affected by their good deeds are touched and motivated to do good deeds for future generations, and they in turn are touched and motivated to do good deeds for generations even further in the future. Where would we be in our lives if it weren’t for our loved ones? Think of all the goodness we experienced because of them. Though it’s natural to miss them, and to feel sad, we also take a moment to stop and say thank you. Thank you for touching us the way you did.
Kohelet said that it does not matter if we are wise or foolish, righteous or wicked, because in the end, death comes for all of us, and we are not remembered.[8] And that is his excuse for living a life of only pleasure, and no sorrow. Kohelet talks so much about futility, but he missed the greatest futility of all! And that is, if you are determined not to remember your loved ones because it makes you sad, then they will not be remembered! Kohelet does not think those who leave this earth are remembered, because he chooses not to remember.
There is one thing on this earth that is even more precious than a life. That thing is the memory of a life. A life has an expiration date. But a memory can live forever, if we only remember to remember it, and to pass it on.
For all of Kohelet’s doubts about death, I like to think that in the end, his faith in love, and his faith in memories, was restored.
Kohelet ends with a 6 verse epilogue that was added by later authors. The original ending of the book was a poem about our fears of mortality that come with old age or illness. Though he tried to pretend he wasn’t afraid of death, he wrote the following:
“When our ribs become creaky, and our legs cannot stand,
When we can no longer chew, and our eyesight grows dim,
When our hearing is cut off, and the sound of our stomach becomes faint,
When you rise with the song of the bird, but the sound of music seems
indistinguishable from conversation,
When you are afraid of heights, and are terrified on the road,
Our tailbone protrudes,
Our bodies are a burden to us,
And our desires cease,
So we are going to our eternal resting place,
And mourners encircle the streets.
Our dust settles on the earth from whence it came,
And our breath returns to G!d, who gave us our spirit.
Vanishing vapor, said Kohelet! All is vanishing vapor.[9]
And that is how the book originally ended. On the surface, it ended the way it began, by saying that all was vapor. But by the end of the book, Kohelet’s view on what vapor meant had radically changed!
His faith that HaShem takes care of our loved ones was restored. But perhaps even more importantly, his faith in humanity itself was restored! He mentioned mourners! Mourners encircling the streets! This was the same person who said earlier that the dead are not remembered! At the end of his life, despite all his coping mechanisms that led him to run away from the memories of his loved ones, Kohelet decided to embrace the idea of memories after all.
Because the Shabbat of Sukkot fell on Chol HaMoed this year, we did not end up reading Kohelet on the day of our Yizkor service in 5783, but the point remains. If you view it from a certain perspective, Kohelet is such a valuable book to read on a Yizkor day.
Kohelet reminds us that sometimes, death can seem very final. It tells us that it’s OK to wonder, “Where exactly did the spirit of our loved ones go?” But in the end, it tells us that though their bodies are no longer with us, perhaps their spirits never left. We carry them inside us. If we allow ourselves to mourn, then we allow ourselves to remember. And as long as there is someone to remember, a memory never dies.
May the memories of our loved ones live forever within us, and within the lives of the people we impact in the course of OUR lifetime. May they be an influence for good, and may they be an eternal blessing to this world.
Zichronam livracha.
Thank you. Thank you for the memories.
[1] Golinkin, David. Why and When Do We Read The Book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) In Public?, 10 Nov. 2006, https://schechter.edu/why-and-when-do-we-read-the-book-of-kohelet-ecclesiastes-in-public-responsa-in-a-moment-volume-1-issue-no-2-october-2006-orah-hayyim-6632-1/.
[2] Kohelet 1:2.
[3] Kohelet 3:1-5 (consolidated).
[4] Kohelet 3:9, 3:12.
[5] Kohelet 3:11 (paraphrased).
[6] Kohelet 3:19-21 (paraphrased).
[7] Kohelet 9:5.
[8] Kohelet 2:16, 3:17.
[9] Kohelet 12:3-8 (paraphrased based on Rashi’s deconstruction of the many metaphors).