Ecclesiastes: and the Search for Meaning

contradictions may serve a heuristic purpose, setting those who struggle through them the task of negotiating complex values and personalities without reducing them to simple binaries.

“Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being.”

Rashi, and those he cites as he weaves his interpretation, transforms greed into spiritual ambition, a desire to know and to grow, which should never be sated. Abundance is only truly meaningful in the realm of ideas.

Money, in their world, was an instrument to support a transformative occupation and to feed an addiction, indeed a compulsion, to live on a higher spiritual plane.

The myth of our own resourcefulness repeats itself on an endless loop,

Eventually, the excessive hedonic test Kohelet devised in chapter 2 settles into a more modest eudaemonic mandate: “Go, eat your bread in gladness, and drink your wine in joy; for your action was long ago approved (ratza) by God”

Kohelet, however, did learn something about himself. Ultimately, hindsight is a better teacher than foresight.

Both Shakespeare and Ecclesiastes force us to ponder if it is, indeed, true that there is nothing new under the sun because, ironically, their works were radical and enduring.

It appears more of a finessed rationalization of decades of acquisitive pursuits justified as if they were all part of a test rather than an expression of unbridled material desire that, from the very start, could bring nothing but enjoyment. After all, the experiment was not bound by any demonstrable time in which to question if materialism could