This Sukkot, a new book gives a daring – and beautiful – reassessment of Ecclesiastes

We all know the famous line from the Book of Ecclesiastes, a.k.a. Kohelet: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” But what if we don’t know the line as well as we think? What if it means something else entirely — not “vanity of vanities” but “vapor of vapors”?

This is part of a daring reassessment of an ancient text — “Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living,” a collaboration between Israeli philosopher Menachem Fisch and American artist Debra Band. Published last year by Baylor University Press, it makes for timely reading on Sukkot, when Kohelet is traditionally recited in synagogue.

“It is not the case that all is vanity, meaningless,” Fisch said in a joint interview between the collaborators and The Times of Israel. “This is a radically different reading.”

Tel Aviv University professor Fisch, whose background is in philosophy of science, penned the philosophical commentary. Band contributed the illuminations — many of which were inspired by visiting that great Islamic monument to convivencia in medieval Spain, the Alhambra.

“The only problem I have, writing as a philosopher, is that philosophical books can’t be gorgeous,” Fisch quipped. “This one is.”

“It’s been great fun,” Band said. “It’s been a wonderfully meaningful deep inquisitive process for both of us.”

Consider how she illustrated chapter 12, verses 1-8, which conclude with Fisch’s reading of the text: “Vapour of vapours, says Qohelet: all is vapour.” In the foreground is a palace courtyard dominated by a fountain and pomegranate and almond trees, with pregnant women celebrating imminent births and courtiers gossiping. In the background, an old man heads off to join his peers in a dark inner chamber.

“Everything retreats back, courtyard after courtyard after courtyard, until you come to this sort of misty nothingness,” Band said, describing this as “the palace of human life.”

That’s what made the Alhambra a natural choice as a theme.

“There’s a very common metaphor used in Midrash of a palace,” Band said. “Heaven, which is God’s home, is compared to a grand palace and its gardens are the human world… I took that metaphor and played with it a little bit, and decided that the palace was going to be human life — capable of great grandeur but ultimately transient.”

As Band admired the mosaics, masonry and galleries of the Alhambra, she couldn’t help noticing the effects of time: “You walk around those rooms and the gardens, and the mosaics are starting to crumble a little bit, and the garden walls are starting to tumble.”

“Debra calls what she does ‘visual midrash,’” Fisch saluted. “It’s more than an illumination.”

Kohelet is a fit subject for a deep and multifaceted inquiry: A canonical work of Second Temple Judaism, written by an eponymous author whose name means “convener of an assembly” and whom tradition claims as King Solomon. Included among the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, it contains no references to the Torah, the covenant or Israel.

Regardless of the identity of Kohelet, the text contains many memorable phrases. In addition to “Vanity of vanities,” Kohelet observed there was nothing new “under the sun.” And that’s not even mentioning all the lines that so mesmerized Roger McGuinn and the Byrds in the ‘60s hit “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

When it came to giving parting advice, Kohelet kept it succinct: “Fear God and obey His commandments.” All in all, a dour message, no? Fisch and Band didn’t see it that way — especially after Fisch pondered Kohelet’s usage of the Hebrew word hevel.

“The translation is normally ‘vanity,’ ‘meaninglessness,’” Fisch said. “It could mean something else. The etymology of the word in Hebrew is a ‘mist’ or ‘vapor,’ which can connote not ‘meaninglessness,’ ‘nothingness,’ but ‘temporality.’”

What if, Fisch thought, Kohelet was referring to the temporality of human knowledge? Then the text would acquire a new, more hopeful ending.

“[If] what Kohelet is saying is that we are historical, and knowledge is tentative, and of course for the modern reader, this is the way we understand science,” Fisch said, “as a very, very rich undertaking… always evolving and yet always hypothetical.”

“Trying to factor God into that mix is Kohelet’s great undertaking,” he said, “and his moment of realization, according to our reading, is that he suddenly realizes that God has created us time-bound, and he knows very well that we can never breach that glass ceiling of tentative historical time-bound knowledge, and therefore what he expects of us is good, time-bound, hypothetical, historically situated readings and understandings, and for us to act accordingly. And we will not be judged according to his absolute standards, but according to the best of human standards, which is a very, very different issue.”

In this scenario, “He’s saying ‘Fear God and obey His command as you understand it, and that is all,’” Fisch said.

“At the end, there’s a genuine serenity,” Band said. “OK, this is simply the human condition but we can do great things… young man, young woman, go out and enjoy your life while you have it… live the good life, make your contingency plans for when things go wrong… then at the end, you’ll know you have done your best.”

“That is the only thing that God could possibly judge us on,” she added.

There’s a bittersweet quality to these words. The book was published last July, and there was a fall publicity tour in the United States, including an October 9 appearance at Princeton. Fisch and his wife left Israel on a midnight flight on October 7, as the Hamas-led invasion that claimed 1,200 lives and saw 251 people abducted to the Gaza Strip was still ongoing.

“Watching what’s gone on with all of this, not to mention American politics, the wisdom of Kohelet’s approach just becomes clearer and clearer to me,” Band said.

“Kohelet is a celebration of a Talmudic, non-zealous form of religiosity,” Fisch said, “which acknowledges diversity, it’s not people marching to the same drum … We could go in all kinds of directions.”

The collaborators — and second cousins — each have personal reasons for being moved by Kohelet.

For Band, it was the tragic loss of her beloved stepbrother many years ago, in a car accident on the night of Kol Nidrei. (A year earlier, she had nearly lost her infant son after his birth.) She flew from Berkeley to her parents’ house in Montreal for the funeral and shiva. At their home one night during Sukkot, she found a copy of Kohelet. Its message resonated.

“This guy gets it,” she recalled thinking. “He understands how arbitrary life and death can be, completely inexplicable.”

Fisch’s interest in Kohelet was sparked in 1988, by an invitation to present a paper in honor of the retirement of his father – Israeli academic Harold Fisch, the former rector of Bar-Ilan University. Running out of ideas and time, he happened upon a chapter on Kohelet in the elder Fisch’s book Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation. That chapter, “Qohelet: A Hebrew Ironist,” referenced a luminary in the philosophy of science, Karl Popper.

“I was taken in by Popper at the time,” Fisch said. “I’ve since created distance from him.”

Yet he was struck by a claim of Popper’s – “the very idea we cannot know anything for sure, no general statement about the world can ever be proven.” It inspired “an angle on Kohelet which turned out very quickly to be different from my father’s reading.”

About 10 years ago, Fisch and Band reconnected over Shabbat dinner at Fisch’s house during Band’s trip to the UK and Israel.

“Menachem casually asked me, ‘what are you planning to do next?’” Band remembered.

Her project at the time was an illustrated work on the Kabbalat Shabbat service. When she mentioned her lingering interest in Kohelet, there was a serendipitous moment: Fisch offered to share his article about the exact same text.

“I dropped him a note saying, ‘OK, we’re going to be doing this together,” Band said. “It took us a few years to clear our decks of other stuff and you have the products of that now.”

A few Kohelet-inspired last words about that product.

“I work on gorgeous calfskin vellum that I get from a sofer in Israel,” Band said. “Eventually, in one way or another, this manuscript won’t exist anymore … I designed it to last for hundreds of years, but it’s a time-bounded thing.”

“Every time I touch my materials, it won’t last forever,” she said, adding, “I can do my best.”

“So,” Fisch reflected, “we’re back in the sukkah again.”