Sukkot: Koheleth

Koheleth says that life is futility.
The preacher says that life is vanity.
The philosopher says that life is useless.
The teacher says that life is meaningless.
The quester says that life is smoke.

I could imagine a short play for five characters who squabble about the meaning of life.

They parse the shades of meaning between the very similar language they use to express their thoughts. Perhaps each would use some sort of representative prop that helps define him or her as a character; the quester carries a map, for example, or the preacher a holy book. The reveal at the end of the play is that the characters are all the same person.

The five sentences above are inspired by five different translations of the Hebrew text that came to be known in English as the book of Ecclesiastes.

Preacher/vanity comes from King James, philosopher/useless from the Good News, teacher/meaningless from the New International Version, and quester/smoke from the Message. I keep each of these texts on a shelf in my house.

Koheleth/futility comes from the translation printed in the prayer book at Tifereth Israel, the synagogue I attended for Shabbat/Sukkot services Saturday morning. Koheleth is the actual Hebrew term, which many sources (including a footnote in the Bible that translates it as "teacher") state originally meant "member of the assembly." In synagogue this morning, we treated it more or less as a proper name. (“Let’s see what Koheleth has to say.”)

The word that has been rendered as futility, vanity, useless, meaningless, and smoke apparently shows up as "breath" elsewhere in the Hebrew Psalms.

I had selected Tifereth as my synagogue of choice this morning, because they advertise American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation for their Saturday morning services. I don't know Hebrew, but I'm competent in ASL, so after reading four versions of Ecclesiastes during the first four days of Sukkot, I was eager to see it rendered in ASL -- a language of face and body rather than a language of voice and breath or a language of the printed page.

Services were scheduled for 9 - 12:30, with ASL translation beginning at 9:45. I woke up late and didn't leave my house until around 8:45. I thought of biking, because Tifereth is nearly an hour away on foot, and the bus is sometimes unreliable, but I decided arriving just in time for the ASL to begin would be fine. I preferred to take the hour to clear my head on a crisp fall morning, and I knew from a previous visit that most congregants don't arrive until around 10.

To get to the synagogue, you walk about four blocks from my house toward the Unitarian Church. At the Unitarian Church, you turn left, and then walk a straight-shot north of about fifty blocks or so, passing literally dozens of other houses of worship (Seventh Day Adventist, Greek Orthodox, AME Methodist, etc.), as well as the Carter-Barron Amphitheater and the Walter Reed Medical Center.

I strode up the street in grey wool pants, a black silk shirt, blue corduroy jacket, and black boots, listening to music and admiring the morning light and the slight turnings of color on the trees' leaves. I dialed my iPod toward a list of “recently played” tunes, which eventually cycled around to a song from Dolly Parton's 2005 album of 1960s-era covers -- her bluegrass version of Turn, Turn, Turn. This song, made famous in 1965 by the Byrds, is, of course, a musical rendition of the most famous section of Ecclesiastes.

To everything, there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven:
A time to be born, a time to die;
A time to plant, a time to reap;
A time to kill, a time to heal;
A time to laugh, a time to weep;
A time to build up, a time to break down;
A time to dance, a time to mourn;
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together;
A time of love, a time of hate;
A time of war, a time of peace;
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to gain, a time to lose;
A time to rend, a time to sew
(A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.)

Dolly Parton can play the part of Koheleth today, I thought!

She sang her way through the entire song, and I had the same problems with the text of that Scripture as I always do. I love most of the couplets and the overall message about duality in life, but if I were to record a version of this song for myself, I could not record it as written.

For one thing, the “time to kill” line triggers not only with moral issues with the text for me, but also raises concerns about the overall logical consistency of the poem. The rest of the couplets all present opposites (gain/lose, rend/sew, etc.). “Kill” and “heal” are not opposites.

The opposite of “to kill” is “to resurrect.” The opposite of “to heal” is “to injure” or perhaps “to sicken.”

Furthermore, the other verbs all refer to human activity. But for the most part, humans do not heal. I suppose that across time doctors and prophets and others have been considered people who heal, but I don’t think healing is the same sort of universal human activity as dancing or laughing or weeping. And killing?

Broadly speaking, I do not believe in killing. We could parse out the lines of argument on all sides of many divisive issues, from capital punishment to assisted suicide to abortion, and I'd start to nuance things a bit, but even at that, "killing," like “healing,” ruins the universal appeal of the poem. Society absolutely restricts legitimized killing -- to medical professionals, to law enforcement, to soldiers.

A believer might say that killing and healing are activities that should be left for God, and they don’t belong in a poem about the dualities of human life.

Rather than “heal," humans nurture. We nurture each other and hope that it leads to healing.

I don’t know what the original Hebrew for this couplet meant. But I do know that to coax the poem to make consistent moral sense to me -- to make it into something I could recite or sing -- I wish to edit the line about healing and killing.

If I could edit Ecclesiastes 3, I would change the third verse to read:

A time to nurture others through their pain, and a time to accept nurturing for our own.

I would not be the first to make a change. The final line of Turn, Turn, Turn, (“a time for peace, I swear it’s not too late“) does not exist in the Bible, and Dolly-as-Koheleth also tragically eliminates two of the best couplets from Ecclesiastes:

A time to search, a time to give up;
A time to be silent, a time to speak.

*****

Tifereth is a conservative synagogue that requires kippot, so I pulled mine out of my pocket and bobby-pinned over the baldest part of my head when I was about a block from the building. Tifereth’s sukkah, like the orthodox sukkah in the park, was made of a metal frame hung with white and blue plastic. The roof, however, rather than being made of fronds, was composed of branches from deciduous trees (tulip poplars?). The branches appeared to be cut, rather than fallen, and their still-green leaves were drying to a sickly gray.

I entered the building and hung my corduroy jacket in the coat room. I accepted a program and a supplemental prayer book from a woman in a flowered suit and pink hat standing at the door to the worship space. The woman and I greeted each other with a “Shabbat Shalom,” and I noticed that she gave my head a quick glance to check for kippot, much as Zaki had slipped a quick glance at my wedding ring finger at the Ahmadiyya mosque. I took a seat toward the front, but off to the side.

The ASL interpreter was not working yet, and as it turned out, she wouldn't start translating the service until about an hour later, when one deaf woman arrived alone. As a result, when the reading of Koheleth/Ecclesiastes began a few moments later, I did not get to see the ASL version. Rather, I followed along with the English translation in the supplemental book, and also raised my head to watch the speakers.

Tifereth employs one rabbi and no cantor, and encourages its congregation to accept leadership roles in the service. So, four chapters of Koheleth were recited by a combination of six people (three men and three women), including the rabbi. Their voices varied along a continuum of chanting versus singing. Five of them held their books aloft, in front of their chests, though the third reader left her book resting on the podium in front of her and gripped the sides of the podium tightly with both hands. She wore a white crocheted kippah and a white shawl over a simple brown dress, and she wore her thick, brown hair very long, to her waist. Her interpretation seemed, to me, the most intense of the six of them, and I wondered what I was missing by not knowing how she was accenting or emphasizing or shaping the phrases of her Hebrew to color its meaning. Her voice was huskier than Dolly Parton's and her delivery was more forceful than Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam's.

After the section of text chanted by the rabbi, he took note, in English, that he did not approve of all he had just said. I wondered if he disapproved of the same section of text as I.

Tifereth's standard prayer books don't have phonetic transliterations in them, so when we moved on to the Torah portion of the service, I couldn't follow along very well. I fell largely silent during the bat mitzvah portion that included a 13-year-old girl and great crowds of her relatives and friends leading the congregation through the annual text from Exodus (the section where Moses asks to see God, and God says nobody may see His face and live, so God shows his backside instead).

Of the supplemental texts on Saturday, the first was from Numbers, a text that lists God's desired offerings on the different days of Sukkot ("On the fourth day, prepare ten bulls, two rams, and fourteen male lambs, all without defect ... On the fifth day, prepare nine bulls, two rams, and fourteen male lambs, all without defect…” etc.) The second was from Ezekiel's prophesies about Gog and Magog descending on Israel only to be destroyed by God ("I will execute judgment with plague and bloodshed. I will pour down torrents of rain, hailstones and burning sulfur... and so I will show my greatness and my holiness.")

The girl sang all of this beautifully. She was afterward congratulated by the rabbi who praised her intelligence and creativity and compassion for the poor, as recently evidenced by a marathon jump-rope session she organized to raise money for charity.

The rabbi took this moment to illuminate his earlier comment about the disagreeable section of Koheleth. He did not zero in on the "time to kill" or the "time for war," but on the paragraph immediately before this section, which begins with the sentence: "A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work."

The rabbi noted that there is more to life than this, and he predicted a lifetime of devotion to God and to others for the girl who was being bat mitzvahed.

Through all of this, my view of the interpreter, after she started her work, had been partially obscured. I was too far from her and at too much of an angle to see clearly, especially with other congregants shifting into and out of my line of sight. Also, I realized after a while that part of my problem was that the interpreter was left-handed, which is not a problem in normal conversation, especially for the fluent, but for me -- a relative newcomer to the language, and sitting at my weird angle -- it sometimes confused me. (Imagine a person whose speech is already muffled using an upside down mouth.)

I couldn’t catch nearly everything the interpreter was signing during the Hebrew prayers, and it was only after she had repeated a certain construction many times that I realized a sign I was apprehending as "school" really meant "praise."I stifled a laugh as the full phrase "Thank you God and we praise you" flooded into my consciousness.If I’d been interpreting, I probably would have made “praise” a bolder sign, and probably would have done it with an expression of enthusiasm and rapture on my face. Both signs look a bit like clapping, with “praise” looking more like “good job, way to go," and “school” looking more like “pay attention, class."

I knew "school" couldn't be right because it was a noun, positioned where a verb should be. And while a native ASL-user might not have found humor in the mistaken substitution (since school is always a noun in ASL), my native-English brain enjoyed the idea of "school" as a verb.

"Thank you God, and we school you."

It's slang, sure, but "to school" means …
to teach a lesson...
or to show better…
or to correct.

It‘s not much of an interpretive leap to: “Thank you, author of Ecclesiastes… and we’ll edit your text.”