Prison or Possibility

        Warning: do not read Ecclesiastes if you are depressed. You may choose to end it all.

        That’s because Qoholeth, or “The Teacher,” who authors the book is a real downer. The very first words he utters are, “Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, / vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (v. 2). By vanity he means empty of meaning. Everything is empty, devoid of purpose. Life is meaningless. Why bother trying? “What do people gain from all the toil / at which they toil under the sun?” (v. 3), he asks rhetorically.

        We don’t know the identity of Qoholeth, but tradition names Solomon, a contention that is bolstered by verse 1, which calls him “the son of David, king in Jerusalem.” Whether Qoholeth is Solomon or not is uncertain, but the former’s cynical approach to life accords well with what we know of the latter—a king swaddled in riches and luxury who took twice as long to build his own palace as he did the temple of his God, who built a harem to the tune of approximately a thousand wives and concubines, and who became religiously syncretistic in his later years, building temples and shrines for the deities of his foreign wives, actions that bespeak a “What’s the difference?” attitude, said with a yawn of ennui.

        The book of Ecclesiastes is one long, monotonous drumbeat of, if not despair, at least boredom and world-weariness. The refrain he sounds in his first words—all is vanity—worms its way through the entire book. It’s depressing just writing about it.

        So I’m going to focus on just one verse in chapter 1 and be done with it. In verse 10 the Teacher asks, “Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’?” and immediately answers his own question: “It has already been, in the ages before us.” I take issue with that assertion. The thing that gives life its meaning, its freshness, is that every moment we have the opportunity to build upon or change directions from what has occurred in the past. And every present moment represents an amalgamation of what has come before and the possibilities for the future, which means, among other things, that no moment, no experience, no being is exactly the same as it was in the past. Far from the Teacher’s conclusion that “there is nothing new under the sun” (v. 9), in fact everything is new all the time. Possibilities, at least for creatures of higher consciousness and even a modicum of imagination, are virtually endless.

        If we listen to the Teacher and accept his conclusions as true, we can easily find ourselves trapped in a prison of our own making. If we fail to take advantage of our opportunities to make a new future out of the raw materials of our past, we surrender our God-given freedom and enclose ourselves in a tiny cell of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, if we choose to believe we are bound by the past, we will be bound by the past, and we will give up our chance to realize a different future.

        I’m glad Ecclesiastes is in the Bible, because it shows the range of philosophical opinions held by thinkers in ancient Israel. But I don’t have to fall into Qoholeth’s trap of seeing everything as meaningless—“vanity and a chasing after wind” (v. 14). Sure, the past, both our individual and our collective past, has power. It can limit us and push us to make poor choices. We can never be entirely free of its influence.

        But we need not be imprisoned by the past. Let us take what is best about our heritage, choose among the possibilities set before us in the present moment, and forge a new future in relationship with the divine Source and Repository of every possibility.