Final Words - It's All Here.

Kohelet 12:13-14

Is it all futile vapor- or what IS the meaning of life?

Kohelet’s philosophical-poetic journey ends with a surprisingly pious tone -- trust God no matter how fleeting and futile life is -- and all will be well. It’s a bit underwhelming after all the broody existential stuff and most scholars widely believe that the final verses were added by later editors to frame the book within a more traditional theological perspective.

It probably would not have entered the biblical canon otherwise, or received the rabbinic stamp of approval. Maimonides writes in his Guide for the Perplexed that

"The purpose of all knowledge is to bring a person to love and awe of God. This, Kohelet tells us, is the totality of man."

And a thousand years later Rabbi Kook wrote that

"The book of Kohelet shakes a person from the sleep of routine, making one ask: What truly lasts? And its conclusion is the call to align our transient lives with the eternal light of divine wisdom."

The scroll ends with these words:

סוֹף דָּבָר הַכֹּל נִשְׁמָע אֶת־הָאֱלֹהִים יְרָא וְאֶת־מִצְוֺתָיו שְׁמוֹר כִּי־זֶה כׇּל־הָאָדָם׃ כִּי אֶת־כׇּל־מַעֲשֶׂה הָאֱלֹהִים יָבִא בְמִשְׁפָּט עַל כׇּל־נֶעְלָם אִם־טוֹב וְאִם־רָע׃

The sum of the matter, when all is said and done: Revere God and observe the commandments! For this applies to all humankind:

God will call every creature to account for everything unknown, be it good or bad.

Kohelet 12:13-14

But is this end a consolation? In the Talmud, Rabbi Yohanan, who famously lost ten of his sons to disease or to wars, was known to weep each time he came to these final words:

“When R. Yoḥanan reached this verse, he cried: “That God will call every creature to account for everything unknown” (Eccl. 12:14). He said: "This is a servant whose master weighs his unwitting sins just as intentional ones - and is there a remedy?”

Rabbi Yonahan’s tears are one classical way of responding to this scroll’s mixed messages.

A more poetic response comes from biblical scholar Prof. James Kugel, in his book The Great Poems of the Bible:

“Ecclesiastes, if read from end to end in one sitting, seems much longer than its twelve chapters. By the time one reaches chapter 10 or 11, the book begins to feel like an all-night vigil, as if one stayed up to the early hours to follow a winding, tedious argument, going over and over things, until now, just as the sky has finally started to change color and the first hint of dawn is seen, one has reached, if not one great conclusion, then at least an exhausted state of equilibrium, perhaps even some kind of peace.”

Perhaps.

But perhaps the most inspiring response to this scroll comes from a contemporary poet - one who walked the streets of Jerusalem and knew the pages of the bible as only a poet could.

Yehuda Amichai’s response to Kohelet is astounding and astute. He will have the final word here, as we wrap the scroll and get ready for the final and fifth scroll that begins tomorrow, with gratitude, continued questions exhaled on:

A Man Doesn't Have Time In His Life for Everything

Hear this poem here.

“A man doesn't have time in his life

to have time for everything.

He doesn't have seasons enough to have

a season for every purpose.

Ecclesiastes Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,

to laugh and cry with the same eyes,

with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,

to make love in war and war in love.

And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,

to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest

what history

takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.

When he loses he seeks, when he finds

he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves

he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul

is very professional.

Only his body remains forever

an amateur. It tries and it misses,

gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,

drunk and blind in its pleasures

and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,

Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,

the leaves growing dry on the ground,

the bare branches pointing to the place

where there's time for everything.”

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