What is the purpose of poetry when war ravages our lives and violence demands silent obedience? What can words lift up when illness and fragility threaten our most basic joys? Can we taste the light when dark days divide us?
For the biblical poet as for so many poets since - it is precisely the protest of poetry that helps us raise our heads and see beyond the current moment, however painful or peaceful it is.
The author of Kohelet, nearing the scrolls ends, dedicates these last two chapters to wisdom at its best - a farmer still tilling the field, sunrise and sunset in the face of uncertainty. The original premise was that all is futile - breath and vanity, fleeting and meaningless and yet all we’ve got. Throughout the book’s musings this premise has morphed from being a critical obstacle to its very focal point. Only by fully realizing and internalizing our time-bound certainty, the meaning of sunsets, can we fully live life at all.
In Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living, by Debra Band and Menachem Fisch, Prof. Fisch suggests that:
“Qohelet has solved the problem from which he anxiously set forth, and can boldly declare to his readers, in stark contrast to the dark despair of chapter 2, that raising our eyes from our human vantage point under the sun enables us to see that “Truly the light is sweet..”
The verse he quotes, halfway through chapter 11 bring an extra-sensory, almost an experience of Synesthesia - reminding us to try and see and taste the simple sweet even when life offers bitterness and war:
וּמָתוֹק הָאוֹר וְטוֹב לַעֵינַיִם לִרְאוֹת אֶת־הַשָּׁמֶשׁ׃
How sweet is the light, what a delight for the eyes to behold the sun!
Kohelet 11:7
The founder of the Hasidic Movement, the Baal Shem Tov is said to have taught that the verse encourages finding joy even in difficult times. Even in exile, even in struggle, if one can behold the light—whether physical or spiritual—one can find sweetness in the moment. This is a radical contrast to the usual “vanity of vanities” tone of Kohelet.
Another famous poet also thought a lot about Koehelt and during the first days of what would become World War 2 - as the horrors of the Holocaust just began to dawn, wrote a powerful manifesto that still matters and shattered - today.
Lea Goldberg, beloved poet, wrote these powerful words, in Tel Aviv, on the 9th of September 1939, protesting the power of poetry especially at times of conflict and global woes. She begins by commenting on this verse:
"And the light is sweet, and it is good for the eyes to behold the sun" (Ecclesiastes 11:7).
I believe with complete faith that if human life has value, it lies primarily in the things that have existed since the dawn of humanity—for "the light is sweet, and it is good for the eyes to behold the sun" (Ecclesiastes 11:7).
I believe that it is far more pleasant to hear the silliest song from a kindergarten than the sounds of the most advanced artillery.
I believe that the living, warm body, carrying within it the possibilities of love and suffering in all their forms—the body of a living human being—is of greater importance to life than all the corpses of the dead (even if they were heroes) on the battlefield. And not because “a live dog is better than a dead lion” (Ecclesiastes 9:4), but because a living human being—capable of thinking, loving, hating, and transforming the world—has far greater worth than all the inanimate objects.
And a field of wheat will always be better and more beautiful than a wasteland flattened by tanks, even if the purpose of those tanks is the noblest imaginable.
And I also believe that it cannot be that the only way to eradicate evil in the world is through the slaughter of human beings. It is the laziness of thought that always leads us down the same well-trodden path, even when that path is paved with the bones of millions.
And from this comes my deep conviction that the poet is the one who, in times of war, must never—never—forget the true values of life. Not only is it permissible for a poet to write a love poem in times of war, it is essential—because even in times of war, the value of struggle is greater than the value of killing.”
Look up. See the light. Honor the poets, with gratitude, on these, and all days, mid horror and war, who remind us to look up, taste the light, sweet sorrows and all that reminds us to find hope, to seek healing, and to lean into love, above and beyond.
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