Of merriment, “What good is that?”
The race is not won by the swift,
Nor the battle by the valiant;
Nor is bread won by the wise,
Nor wealth by the intelligent,
Nor favor by the learned.
For the time of mischancejEuphemism for death. comes to all.kI.e., the insignificant duration of life renders all successes illusory; cf. 4.15–16. (12) And a man cannot even know his time. As fishes are enmeshed in a fatal net, and as birds are trapped in a snare, so men are caught at the time of calamity,jEuphemism for death. when it comes upon them without warning.
(10)Kohelet sought to find words of delight; and words of truth written honestly
(7) God יהוה formed the Human. from the soil’s humus,” blowing into his nostrils the breath of life: the Human became a living being.
שמחת בית השואבה שמשם שואבין רוח הקודש כי השמחה הוא כלי לשאוב מים חיים והוא רוח הקודש דכתיב ויפח באפיו נשמת כו'. וכפי שאדם מתדבק בעיקר החיות שיש לו מהשי"ת מתפשט החיים בכל איבריו. ואיתא לא ראינו שינה כדאיתא במד' על משה רע"ה שכל מ' יום שהיה בשמים לא הי' יכול לישון שידע שאין שיעור מה שיכול לקבל בכל שעה ושעה ... שעיקר הארת השנה תלוי' בז' ימים אלו. והכלי לקבל הוא השמחה:
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The Hebrew word for oneness—echad—comes from the same root as the word for joy—chedva. We experience joy when we feel a sense of oneness and connectedness. This is the central aim of all Jewish spiritual healing—to restore a sense of unity, joy, and connectedness in a world in which brokenness seems inevitable.
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...when we speak of joy...we are not speaking of fun. Joy is a deep release of the soul, and it includes death and pain. Joy is any feeling fully felt, any experience we give our whole being to. We are conditioned to choose pleasure and to reject pain, but the truth is, any moment of our life fully inhabited, any feeling fully felt, any immersion in the full depth of life, can be the source of deep joy.”
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Joy is a meeting place, of deep intentionality and of self-forgetting, the body alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formerly seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music in the kitchen, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of a daughter: the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us...
To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become fully generous; to allow ourselves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious worried self felt like a thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace and a source, the claiming of our place in the living conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the presence of a mountain, a sky or a well-loved familiar face—I was here and you were here and together we made a world.
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What brings you joy? In general? In challenging times?
Rabbi Alan Lew, z''l, from This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared
...We sit flush with the world, in a ‘house’ that calls attention to the fact that it gives us no shelter. It is not really a house. It is the interrupted idea of a house, a parody of a house… And it exposes the idea of a house as an illusion. The idea of a house is that it gives us security, shelter, haven from the storm. But no house can really offer us this. No building of wood and stone can ever afford us protection from the disorder that is always lurking all around us. No shell we put between us and the world can ever really keep us secure from it. And we know this. We never really believed this illusion. That’s why we never felt truly secure in it [...] In the sukkah, a house that is open to the world, a house that freely acknowledges that it cannot be the basis of our security, we let go of this need. The illusion of protection falls away, and suddenly we are flush with our life, feeling our life, following our life, doing its dance, one step after another. |
(יב) אף על פי שכל המועדות מצוה לשמוח בהן. בחג הסוכות היתה במקדש יום שמחה יתירה שנאמר ושמחתם לפני ה' אלקיכם שבעת ימים.
(12) ...Although it is a Mitzvah to rejoice on all festivals, on the Sukkot holiday there was a time of overabundant joy, for it is written, you shall rejoice before the Eternal your God for seven days.
(יז) הִנֵּ֞ה אֲשֶׁר־רָאִ֣יתִי אָ֗נִי ט֣וֹב אֲשֶׁר־יָפֶ֣ה לֶֽאֶכוֹל־וְ֠לִשְׁתּוֹת וְלִרְא֨וֹת טוֹבָ֜ה בְּכָל־עֲמָל֣וֹ ׀ שֶׁיַּעֲמֹ֣ל תַּֽחַת־הַשֶּׁ֗מֶשׁ מִסְפַּ֧ר יְמֵי־חיו [חַיָּ֛יו] אֲשֶׁר־נָֽתַן־ל֥וֹ הָאֱלֹקִ֖ים כִּי־ה֥וּא חֶלְקֽוֹ׃ (יח) גַּ֣ם כָּֽל־הָאָדָ֡ם אֲשֶׁ֣ר נָֽתַן־ל֣וֹ הָאֱלֹקִים֩ עֹ֨שֶׁר וּנְכָסִ֜ים וְהִשְׁלִיט֨וֹ לֶאֱכֹ֤ל מִמֶּ֙נּוּ֙ וְלָשֵׂ֣את אֶת־חֶלְק֔וֹ וְלִשְׂמֹ֖חַ בַּעֲמָל֑וֹ זֹ֕ה מַתַּ֥ת אֱלֹקִ֖ים הִֽיא׃ (יט) כִּ֚י לֹ֣א הַרְבֵּ֔ה יִזְכֹּ֖ר אֶת־יְמֵ֣י חַיָּ֑יו כִּ֧י הָאֱלֹקִ֛ים מַעֲנֶ֖ה בְּשִׂמְחַ֥ת לִבּֽוֹ׃
(17) Behold that which I have seen: it is good, yea, it is comely for one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy pleasure for all one's labor, wherein one labors under the sun, all the days of one's life which God has given him; for this is one's portion. (18) Every person also to whom God has given riches and wealth, and has given him power to eat thereof, and to take his portion, and to rejoice in his labor—this is the gift of God. (19) For let her remember the days of her life that they are not many; for God answered her in the joy of her heart.
Kohelet: Radical Joy | Rabbi Sacks | הרב זקס
Published 18 September 2019
The meaning of Kohelet, the megillah that we read during Succot, hinges on one word: hevel. It occurs 38 times, more than half of all its occurrences in Tanach. No other book announces its theme more emphatically by using one word five times in a single sentence, the second sentence in the book: “Hevel of hevels“, says Kohelet, “hevel of hevels, all is hevel” (Kohelet 1:2). What does the word mean? It’s been translated as ‘pointless’, ‘meaningless’, ‘futile’, ’empty’, ‘vapour’, ‘smoke’, ‘insubstantial’, ‘absurd’, ‘vanity’, but the primary meaning is ‘breath’.
The Hebrew words for ‘soul’, among them nefesh, ru’ach and neshamah, all have to do with the act of breathing. Hevel specifically means ‘a shallow breath’. What obsesses Kohelet is that all that separates life from death is a shallow breath. He’s obsessed by the fragility and brevity of life as contrasted with the seeming eternity of the universe. The world endures forever, but we are, as we say in unetaneh tokef, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, “like a broken shard, like grass dried up, like a faded flower, a fleeting shadow, a passing cloud, a breath of wind, whirling dust, a dream that slips away, dust we are and to dust we return”.
Kohelet is a sustained meditation on mortality, one of the most profound in all literature. He is traumatised by the unbearable lightness of being. The fact that life is lived toward death, that our days are numbered. That like Moshe, for each of us there will be a Jordan we will not cross, a fulfilment we will not live to see. We don’t and can’t know how long we will live, but life will always seem too short. We now sense the drama of Succot seen through the eyes of Kohelet. For 10 days, beginning on Rosh Hashanah and reaching a climax on Yom Kippur, we’ve prayed zachreinu l’chaim, “Remember us for life, King who desires life, and write us in the book of life for Your sake, God of life.”
Now, having survived the trial, comes the deepest question of all. What actually is life? What is this gift that we’ve been granted? What gives life meaning, purpose, substance? What will redeem us from the shadow of death? Kohelet’s answer is, in a word, joy, simcha. What redeems life and etches it with the charisma of grace is joy in your work: “sweet is the sleep of the labouring man” (Kohelet 5:11); joy in your marriage: “see life with the woman you love” (Kohelet 9:9); and joy in the simple pleasures of life: “take joy in each day”. Simcha, joy, doesn’t involve, as does happiness, a judgement about life as a whole. Joy lives in the moment. It asks no questions about tomorrow; it celebrates the power of now.
The Talmud says that Hillel lived by the principle, “baruch Hashem yom yom“, “blessed be God day by day” (Beitza 16a). That’s what joy does, it blesses God day by day. It celebrates the mere fact of being here, now, existing, when we might not have done. Inhaling to the full this day, this hour, this eternity in a moment, that was not before and will not be again. Joy embraces the contingency of life. It knows that yesterday is gone and tomorrow is unknown. It doesn’t ask what was or will be. It makes no calculations. It’s a state of radical thankfulness for the gift of being. Even in an age too fraught for happiness, there can still be joy.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in one of his letters, “The reality of any joy in the world is indescribable, only in joy does creation happen (happiness, on the contrary, is only a promising and interpretable pattern of things already existing); joy, however, is a marvellous increasing of what already exists, a pure addition out of nothingness” (Letter to Ilse Erdmann, 31 January 1914). What saved Kohelet was his belated realisation that joy redeems life from the shadow of death. Joy doesn’t ask how long it will last, it discovers epiphany in the here and now. Yes, life is sometimes unfair and the world unjust, but the very brevity of life makes each moment precious.
Joy says stop thinking of tomorrow. Celebrate, sing, join the dance, however undignified it makes you look. Joy bathes life with light, and liberates the soul from the prison of the self.