Just Breathe for Qohelet/ Ecclesiastes
I spent a day last week with one who was dying, body failing, spirit hovering. The hospital machines whirring and spinning, some would soon be removed. “Breathe” urged the loved one to the dying one, when every breath was painful effort. “Breathe” and for him she did for a few more days.
“Hevel, merest breath”, is our life, says Qohelet, (Q1:2) Biblical book of wisdom. Yet merest breath is a Divine gift, and cannot be forced. “It sucks, said the loved one” “Yes” I replied, validating his sorrow and anger. “Only love is as strong as death,” (shir ha’shirim 8:6 )I suggested, but his need/desire was too great to let go.
We seek insights on what it means to be alive and in relationship with others. In the ancient Biblical words of Qohelet we find wisdom to help us gain perspective and understanding of the enormous issues of where G8d is in the passage of time and mortality, and why bad things happen to good people in the presence of a loving G8d. This gift of wisdom is not unique to Jewish literature and also appears in the ancient Chinese wisdom of Lau Tzu’s Tao te Ching. Of the beloved’s strong need for his wife’s breath “…free from desire, you realize the mystery, caught in desire, you see only the manifestations, Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness, gateway to all understanding” (TTC 1).
The fact that we are here, as unlikely as that is, is a miracle, as are love, and beauty and goodness. These we attribute to a loving G8d. However, coming to terms with mortality, the inhumanity of some human behavior, illness and suffering can powerfully challenge us. “no amount of effort can make right something truly perverse, and things that are lacking almost never manage to come into existence in a real enough way to count” (Q1:15) says Kohelot, in the gorgeous melody of a trope that paradoxically lifts our spirits. These words validate our fears, acknowledging their weight and their shared human concerns. All people in various cultures who have sought wisdom must deal with such questions. We perhaps reject, as I do, a G8d that micromanages, and can make our team win with supplications or animal sacrifices. Just having lived to pursue goodness may have to be enough. In trying to control and fix the world, we have separated ourselves from it, and created ecological ruin. The technology that protects us, uses resources, creates waste, destroying the natural environment, which we are meant to be a part of, Just as the technology that prolongs death destroys dignity, and we must let go in the end.
In this week’s parashah, Yaakov, who has been the heel-grabber, tries to manipulate things to “win” at life, will finally wrestle with his demons and his intense desires to dominate his brother. He will let his family and wealth cross over to offer them up to his brother, and there see the face of G8d. Perhaps this can only happen wrestling with the Source in the darkness. In the mystery he will be blessed with disability and re-Named, yet the Tau warns us. …the Name that can be named is not the eternal Name (TTC:1)
Qohelet, much like the Tao te Ching, says the world can’t be tampered with, or “you’ll ruin it”, that the Master sees things as they are without trying to control them (TTC 29)…lets them go their own way. Our technology is “shaping clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds what we want.” (TTC 11) Qohelet recognizes the “helvel/emptiness inside”. The river of time and events “flows into the sea, yet the sea is never filled” (Q 1:7). It cannot be stopped, we cannot fight it. The spectre of death is also a(n) hevel/emptiness, but one which gives life infinite meaning. The value of humans is not what we can get out of one other, but is in their bonding. Qohelet says “two are better than one…if the one should fall down, the other one can at least help him up…if someone attacks two can fight (them) off (Q4:9-12). It is brothers that we need!
In Jewish tradition, Qohelet is read during Sukkot, our week-long festival spent outside, in a fragile hut, unprotected, and open enough to see the stars, and find our perspective in the larger world. We read Qohelet to know that life is ephemeral, and precious: “Do whatever you can manage to accomplish in this life, because in Sheol you fill find no activity, no reckoning, no knowledge and no wisdom, and that is precisely where you are going!”(Q9:10)
Similarly, the wisdom of the Tao is reflected in Chinese paintings which offer a different perspective, of human beings as a small part of a much larger creation. We can be liberated by giving up control of things beyond our strength to the heavens, in the words of Qohelet: banish worry from your heart, and regret from your flesh, for childhood (life) lasts as long as a breath. Then when we return to our dwellings, perhaps our roof will be unable to separate us from G8d. Our gratitude will be richer for our blessings, and a full harvest, or even death will not harden our hearts. If he can let her go, their love can survive beyond her body. Perhaps the harmful dramas will abate as we relinquish control. Rather we can be generous with ourselves and others, to “send our bread out onto the water….(and) sow (all) our seeds and not desist even in evening” And emerge into the day and declare “how sweet the light and how good for the eyes to see the sun!” (Qohelet 11:1,6, 10, 7) .
If I can let you go as trees let go
Their leaves, so casually, one by one;
If I can come to know what they do know,
That fall is the release, the consummation,
Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep,
The strong root still alive under the snow,
Love will endure – if I can let you go.
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