All Is Vanity

Unprecedented days? Yeah, sure they are.

I was recently encouraged to submit a piece for an anthology with this focus: “Perhaps there is hope.”

I was like, yeah, sure there is. But you know: an opportunity to write? for a book project? Of course I wrote a piece. I did not, however, come down on the side of there being hope. In a subsequent post I will share the piece I wrote (and will keep you updated on whether it seems likely to end up in that anthology). I came down very much on the side of hope being utterly beside the point.

That is: feeling hopeful right now is laughable; yet feeling hopeless seems to imply we should just curl up in the fetal position and whimper until they grab us up and send us to the camps.

I urge a third way: the way of Ecclesiastes. The book of Ecclesiastes, the Bible’s most pissed-off book, has a few simple premises: Everything sucks. Everything has always sucked. What you do doesn’t really make any difference in the long run. In addition, you are going to die. Once you die you stay dead forever. And after a very short while nobody will remember you.

La la la! Fun, right? I didn’t say it was the Bible’s most cheerful book; I just believe it’s by far the Bible’s most accurate book, and certainly the book that speaks most powerfully to us in this moment. We say “unprecedented times” so much these days those words seem printed on the insides of our eyelids. When in fact these days are so precedented that throughout human history they’re the norm. It’s probably not terrible to remind yourself of that in … well, These Terrible Days™.

Anyhow, I’ve been studying Ecclesiastes for years; I’ve talked to rabbis and researchers; and I’ve read and reread and rethought. This substack will tell you what I think Ecclesiastes — and its crabby author, Qoheleth — have to share with us right now. I hope it will help. Or anyway, I HOPE I hope that.