Main news for 28 November 2024

The most remarkable thing about the personality of Ecclesiastes is that at the end of the path he became Ecclesiastes. A preacher. And a Preacher with a capital letter. A witness. The word "ecclesiastes" itself, translated from Greek, means "preacher," just like the corresponding Hebrew "Qoheleth," which is the Hebrew name of the Book of Ecclesiastes. The issue is a Temple or synagogue preacher. Ecclesiastes was neither priest nor prophet; the Temple court could hardly have become his platform.

The synagogue was another matter: anyone could preach there. But active synagogue preachers rarely came from the highest aristocracy, to which Ecclesiastes undoubtedly belonged. For a person like Ecclesiastes to become the one remembered by tradition, something unusual must have happened to him. Conversion. Spiritual renewal. Birth from above. What else could he have preached about? The reflections we find in the book could hardly have become the basis for a sermon, especially a synagogue sermon. There is too little hope there, and no answer to the main question: what is the meaning of human life before the face of Sheol?

Without such an answer, being a preacher, God's witness, is impossible, even if one has sufficiently deep personal spiritual experience. And Ecclesiastes seems to have found his answer: the fear of God and His commandments. Of course, here is the quintessence of Ecclesiastes' preaching, an extract made by one of his disciples or followers. But the meaning is evidently conveyed accurately. Of course, the issue is not commandments as a legal or moral code. Before the face of Sheol, morality is as powerless as jurisprudence. The issue is something else: what in the Second Temple era came to be called the inner Torah.

The commandment not as a prescription, but as a spiritual and moral imperative that does not restrict a person from without, but builds his life from within. It might seem that Ecclesiastes' experience of having been at that boundary of silence where God's eternity touches creation has little connection with the Torah, even the inner Torah. But this is only how it seems at first glance. What is a commandment as a spiritual reality? God's will addressed to a person. God's intentions directly entering his soul, as God's word enters the world, changing it. And these intentions remain with the person.

Not only during that sacred dance in which a person participates together with all creation, the dance that Ecclesiastes was able to discern in the eternal circling of the universe, but also when the dance ends and the person leaves the great round dance. The eternity of unceasing movement is replaced by the eternity of rest and takes the form of the inner Torah. This core can stand before the face of Sheol. What comes after, what is there, beyond, in eternity? Ecclesiastes is silent. Perhaps he knows but does not speak. Or it is not in the book. For the book is about something else. It is about the search for the path. And the inner Torah is the path already found. That is another story.