Ecclesiastes: and the Search for Meaning

Happiness is about now. Meaning is often about our reflections on the past, the commitments we make in the present, and the way that we think about and shape the future.40 Happiness, however, can never replace meaning.

Kohelet’s enduring appeal is its gift of truth-telling; it does not minimize the difficulties we face in our short lives but names them and brings us into the struggle for meaning.

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.

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

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.

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.

having a human-only focus ultimately leads to anguish and despair.

Hevel appears seventy-three times in Tanakh; thirty-eight of those instances are in Ecclesiastes, making it the work’s repeated, summative, and unavoidable drumbeat of a mantra.