The Futility, and Joy, of Life
Shemini Atzeret, 5784
הֲבֵ֤ל הֲבָלִים֙ אָמַ֣ר קֹהֶ֔לֶת הֲבֵ֥ל הֲבָלִ֖ים הַכֹּ֥ל הָֽבֶל
Utter futility, said the preacher. Utter futility, all is futile!
Due to a quirk of the calendar, we read those words today. Normally, we would read them on the Shabbat that falls in the middle of Sukkot. But since Sukkot began on Shabbat, we read them on Shemini Atzeret, the first Shabbat after Sukkot begins. A holiday. A day in which we are supposed to rejoice, the second day of which is quite literally Simchat Torah, the rejoicing with the Torah! And yet, we are reminded, throughout the long book of Kohelet, that all is futile. אֵ֥ין כּל־חָדָ֖שׁ תַּ֥חַת הַשָּֽׁמֶשׁ There is nothing new under the sun. Kohelet tells us how he absorbed himself into material possessions in an attempt to make himself happy, and that did nothing. He tried immersing himself in learning, but וְיוֹסִ֥יף דַּ֖עַת יוֹסִ֥יף מַכְאֽוֹב, increasing knowledge increases pain. We are born, we live, we die, and the world keeps turning. And yet, it’s Shemini Atzeret. Let’s celebrate!
How do we rationalize these two competing ideas? How can we both acknowledge the futility of our existence and rejoice and be merry? Kohelet was, in its own way, predicting the philosophy of existentialism that would arise thousands of years later with the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard believed to that life was futile, filled with anguish about our inevitable death, terror in the knowledge that we did not exist before our birth and will not exist after our death, that life is simply, for all intents and purposes, absurd. His solution was the “leap of faith,” simply accepting a (for him Christian) religious viewpoint and holding that against the absurdities of the world. In other words, one simply gives up on this world, absurd and the realm of men, and gives oneself wholly to the irrational, to faith in God. In the twentieth century, Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus would modify Kierkegaard’s philosophy to better fit an atheistic viewpoint. Yes, the two said, the world is absurd and life inherently has no meaning. However, rather than abandon this world and leap into faith, we create our own meaning. We can rejoice in whatever we wish to impose on this futile world. It was Camus who said that in the Greek myth of Sisyphus, the man doomed to role a boulder up a mountain for all of eternity, we must imagine Sisyphus happy, since he can create his own meaning out of rolling the boulder. Each of us individually creates our own meaning out of life.
These are both rational responses to the absurdity of life. But Kohelet beat them both to it by 2000 years and found them both wanting. Kohelet tried wisdom and submission to God, but noted that righteous and wicked alike are judged by God and die, and go to same place as animals. And as for rejoicing in the moment, all our sustenance comes from God, and is temporary. We cannot take it with us. What means religion, God, faith, hedonism, living in the moment when we are doomed to lose it all and die?
In modern times it was Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the 20th century philosopher and rabbi known as “the Rav,” who synthesized these contradictions together. The Rav noticed the two different narratives of the creation of Adam in Genesis chapters 1 and 2, and hypothesized that there are two types of “Adam,” of archetypal man, that each exist to larger or smaller extent inside all of us: The “first Adam” from the first story of creation, given charge to master and dominate the world, and the “second Adam,” from the second story of creation, told to tend the Garden of Eden. The first Adam is confident, assured of himself, and seeks to master space and time. The second Adam is lonely, unsure, seeking to understand why the world is at it is. The first Adam is not bothered by the issue of non-existence, seeing time and its passage just as another cosmic system; the second Adam is terrified of it. It is the second Adam that is represented in Kohelet, in Kierkegaard, in Sartre and Camus, in us when we feel that life is absurd and meaningless.
The Rav offers a solution for the second Adam in us: to be in what he calls “a covenantal community,” to see the world through the eyes of halacha. In essence the Rav admits: yes, the world is futile, and all things and people die. But halacha, living a Jewish life, allows us to overcome that fear of the now. It roots us in a community not just of today, but in a tradition practiced by our ancestors, and that will be practiced by our children and grandchildren. It stretches across time and space. It does not ignore the world as Kierkegaard proposed, but embraces it, turning it into a means of practicing Judaism and being in community. It does not embrace self-determination, like Camus and Satre, but emphasizes connection and that which is above ourselves. As the Rav wrote, “thus, the individual member of the covenantal faith community feels rooted in the past and related to the future.” Life may be absurd, but we have imposed meaning on it. Not I, not You, but We. Our ancestors, ourselves, and children together unite to make sense of the world, to see in it an opportunity to fulfill God’s commandments. And in that fulfillment, we can find genuine joy together!
So yes, everything may be futile. But Kohelet ends his book with:
ס֥וֹף דָּבָ֖ר הַכֹּ֣ל נִשְׁמָ֑ע אֶת־הָאֱלֹקִ֤ים יְרָא֙ וְאֶת־מִצְותָ֣יו שְׁמ֔וֹר כִּי־זֶ֖ה כּל־הָאָדָֽם
This is the sum of the matter: listen to God and observe his commandments, for this applies to all humanity.
Some scholars have said this line is thematically out of place, but I think it makes a great conclusion to the book. You or I - by ourselves - may be alone, frustrated by the world, unable to make sense of its futility. Together, in our covenantal community, we can.
So my challenge for you today: go forth and rejoice together! Yes, all may be futile. Yes, life may be absurd and lonely. But we are part of a community stretching back thousands of years that will stretch forward thousands of years, a community of this world, that seeks to understand it, fix it, rejoice in it. We can acknowledge that life can be terrifying, that it may seem futile. But when we view the world through the eyes of halacha, of Jewish tradition and community, we make meaning out of the world not just as individuals, but as a group, as a global Jewish community. And that itself is reason to celebrate.
