By Sam Ben-Meir in New York
He took his walks by the river at dawn, when the fishermen were still flicking their lines to taste the mood of the current, and the first fruit sellers were bargaining with sleep. He liked the way mist lifted from the water as if the world were exhaling a secret it had no stake in keeping. He had a word for that sight, a small word that became a continent in his mouth: hevel—vapor, breath, smoke, the sheen on a bubble before it breaks. Later, when people asked what he meant by vanity, he would spread his hands over the river and say, “There. Watch. By the time you have named it, it is gone.”
He was not a king, though men called him one to flatter themselves that wisdom arrives only on a throne. He had been close enough to courts to dislike the smell of them—cedar and sweat and flattery—and he had known wealth enough to find it boring. Once, when he was still eager, he owned a vineyard that stretched like a paragraph across a slope, and he made the mistake of believing that a well-ordered harvest proved the benevolence of the universe. Then hail wrote a commentary, and mildew signed it, and he learned that seasons are arguments no man concludes.
He rented his rooms above a baker’s shop. The bread rose in the dark; the city rose after. He wrote on scraps between loaves and on scraps between thoughts, and sometimes, to the irritation of the baker, he wrote on the backs of account tablets, trusting that debt and insight would refuse each other’s company. He was not old, not yet, but the joints had begun to send their quiet announcements, and only in the first hour after waking did he feel entirely honest.
People in the market called him Qohelet, the Gatherer—the one who collects, sifts, and then heaps what is left into a single stubborn little mound. It was a name he accepted because it left him free to be nobody in particular. In the evenings he taught a small circle who paid in figs and questions. He did not flatter them; they returned for that novelty alone.
“Teacher,” one of the younger men said, “what is the point of study if a fool may inherit my library?”
“The point?” he said gently. “The point is a craving in your bones. You will study because you cannot not; and the fool will inherit because chance is the governor whose seal cannot be forged.” He paused. “Lock your books,” he added dryly, and the room laughed in relief that his melancholy could purchase practical advice.
He had married once, and that had been its own curriculum. The woman was cleverer than he was at the things that matter—bread, friendship, silence—and for a while they made a small, sturdy raft of days. In the third year, their child died before he could say Abba, and the raft, still sturdy, floated into a sea in which all shorelines appeared counterfeit. The marriage did not end; they simply held hands and watched the horizon teach them the correct syntax for loss. She died years later, and he moved into the room above the baker and began to write because even bread cannot be eaten for its own sake.
He liked to sit at the city gate and watch justice practiced by men who believed in it. He did not hate judges; he merely distrusted the economy of fairness. One afternoon he saw a poor man humiliate a prince with a parable so precise the bystanders cheered. The next morning the poor man was gone, and the prince’s steward had a new ring. “I saw under the sun,” he wrote that night, “the place of judgment, and wickedness was there. I saw the place of righteousness, and wickedness was there. I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked; for there is a time for every matter, and for every work.” He stopped. He crossed out will and left the sentence leaning forward, in present tense, like a man peering into a fog.
A friend from the south—a compositor of hymns and a lover of the liturgies of certainty—once accused him of treason against happiness. “Your words taste of ash,” the friend said. “If the people listen, who will keep festivals? Who will sing?”
“Whoever still eats bread,” he said. “Whoever still holds a hand. Whoever wipes a child’s face. I have not asked them to stop singing. I have asked them to sing without lying.”
“You are cruel,” the friend said, with the faint admiration that cruelty always earns when it is tidy.
“I am interrupting a performance,” Qohelet said. “There is a difference.”
When he wasn’t writing, he walked. He learned the habits of the sun: where it struck a wall in late morning so that blind beggars could warm their backs; where it made a small theater for cats in the afternoon; where it left the city to the mercy of candle sellers. He chased its path with childish loyalty and came to resent it for its fidelity. “The sun rises and the sun goes down,” he wrote, “and hastens to the place where it rises.” He loved the silence of that sentence, how it refused solace. He added, “All things are wearisome; more than one can express.” Then he crossed out wearisome and wrote full of labor, because weariness is an adjective and labor is a fact.
He built his little book out of what the world said when it was not addressing him. Wind, rivers, the hollow praise offered to dead kings, the handshakes of merchants, the sudden rich man falling from a ladder, the child born to a mother who had despaired: everything volunteered a line. He gathered proverbs like bread crusts and dipped them into a stew of contradictions. He wrote, “A good name is better than precious ointment,” and he wrote, “A living dog is better than a dead lion,” and he wrote, with the finality of winter, “The dead know nothing.” When a student protested that prophets had seen the dead in dreams, Qohelet replied, “So has wine. Dreams belong to those whose mouths have not learned to be silent.”
It was not despair; it was discipline. He refused two lies: that the world is a wholly just machine, and that the world is a wholly indifferent chaos. Between those lies stretched a road of human breadth: a man eats, a woman laughs, a child learns the word no, a judge looks away, a thief discovers he is generous to dogs. He had seen the righteous perish in their righteousness; he had watched scoundrels thrive on a diet of alibis. He had also seen small mercies: a lazy clerk who carried an old woman’s jar without noticing his own departure from character, a soldier who refused an order and later found a fig tree leaning over his narrow alley as if to apologize on behalf of the world.
“Go, then,” he wrote, “eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a glad heart; for God has already approved what you do.” He knew the daring of that sentence. It made approval a prior fact, not a future wage. It was the opposite of bribery. A student asked, horrified and thrilled, “All things?” Qohelet shrugged. “All that is simple enough to be honest.” He refused to specify. He did not think ethics was a menu. He thought it was a hand extended, or not, a mouth closed, or not.
One evening a woman came to the upper room, the baker’s wife, flour still ghosting her forearms. She had buried two infants and kept speaking kindly to the living. “Preacher,” she said in the awkward deference people accord to those who confess their ignorance publicly, “what do you mean by a time to weep, and a time to laugh? How will I know which is which?”
“You will not,” he said, without cruelty. “Most days will be both. Sometimes at the same table.”
She nodded as if he had confirmed a rumor she had endorsed long before. She brought him a heel of bread still warm, and he ate it with the gratitude of a man whose metaphysics kept failing more spectacularly than his body.
Once, he tried to write a prayer. It began in the accustomed manner—Guard my steps when I go to the house of God—and then degraded into a list of promises he could not keep and a stanza mocking people who were better at promising than he was at kneeling. He tore the scrap. He did not mock prayer again in public, but he did not attempt a second prayer. He could trust silence to do the work that language boasts of. In the morning, he bowed his head on the stair, neither supplicant nor cynic, and stood very still until the baker coughed politely to indicate that steps are for walking.
He did not shun festivals. He ate them the way a poor man eats everything: selectively, hungrily, aware that the plate is not the world. He watched the priests lift their hands and wag a blessing that belonged to one of his earliest memories, words his mother had sung while untying his sandals as if the leather were an argument worth winning gently: May the Lord bless you and guard you; may He shine His face upon you and be gracious to you. He did not write those words down, because they did not need him.
The man who sold coffins near the north gate once offered him a discount “for your eventual needs.” Qohelet laughed so hard the coffin maker crossed himself and backed away. “Do not hurry my vanity,” Qohelet said. “It knows the way.” He wrote, later, tasting the coarse humor that keeps us from breaking, “Better is the day of death than the day of birth.” He added, almost tenderly, “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men; and the living should take it to heart.” He did not mean that sorrow is holier than joy. He meant that grief is truthful, and truth is the only wine strong enough to carry joy without turning it into a lie.
They say he met a king once, a young one, ambitious as yeast. The king had heard of a sage who did not flatter and wanted to be seen listening to him. He asked for advice on governance. Qohelet kept his eyes on a grape lodged under the table. “Do not be very righteous,” he said. “Do not be very wicked. Why should you destroy yourself? Why should you die before your time?” The courtiers stared at their sandals. The king forced a laugh and imprisoned him for insolence. After three days the baker bribed a guard with two challot and carried Qohelet home. “You do not know how to talk to kings,” the baker said. “I do not know how to talk to fiction,” Qohelet answered. “Bring me figs.”
Imprisonment suited him for writing. He liked scarcity. In the cell, he finished one of his sharper parables about an old, foolish king and a poor but wise youth. He ended it with smoke: no applause, no reform, no moral evacuation. “This too is vapor,” he wrote, relieved that he had remembered his thesis in time.
His students grew older. They married, cheated, repented, cheated again, raised children who asked questions sharper than their parents’ and received answers duller. Some left him for more athletic doctrines—fasting programs and sacrifice plans with measurable returns. A few returned, chastened not by punishment but by boredom. Cures for the universal ache had turned out, predictably, to be flavored water.
He wrote the passage about time in a single sitting. It arrived as music, not opinion, and he had the sense to obey. A season for everything and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; to plant, and to uproot; to kill, and to heal; to break down, and to build up; to weep, and to laugh; to mourn, and to dance… The list made its own demands. He wanted to remove kill; the music refused. He wanted to soften hate; the rhythm slapped his hand away. When he read it to the room that night, a woman with a scar at the base of her throat closed her eyes and nodded, counting silently with her lips moving, as if confirming that the poem had not left out her particular hour.
“God has made everything beautiful in its time,” he added afterward, and then, more dangerous, “He has set eternity in their hearts, yet so that they cannot find out what God has done from beginning to end.” A student groaned. “That is cruel.” Qohelet shook his head. “That is protection. If we could see the whole, we would praise ourselves for looking. Better to live with a hunger that corrects us.”
Letters began to arrive from men who wanted him to decide for them whether there is an afterlife. He put them in a jar and used them to start cooking fires. He was not being rude. He was refusing to pretend that his ignorance differed from theirs except in its honesty. “The spirit of man rises?” he wrote. “The spirit of the beast goes down? Who knows?” He did not enjoy doubt; he respected it. He had seen certainty do more harm than drought.
When the city suffered a famine, he did not explain it. He helped the baker stretch flour with ground almonds and ground humility. He watched as thieves grew meticulous and pious men rearranged their theology to allow theft. He wrote, in a winter that tried to turn the bones of the poor into pipes for whining winds, “Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it.” He liked the absurdity of the image: wet bread floating back to shore as investment returns. He meant: Be generous. The world will not repay you reliably; be generous anyway. He added, “Give portions to seven, or even to eight, for you do not know what disaster may happen on earth.” He loved that or even. It was the most honest mathematics he knew.
In spring, when the almond trees made a snow emperors could not collect, Qohelet stood beneath their branches and dictated a poem about the body’s decline. He drew twilight where morning once lived. He wrote grinders that cease because they are few, windows that are dimmed, doors shut, the sound of the mill low, one rises at the sound of a bird and the daughters of song brought low. He set the silver cord snapping and the golden bowl breaking, the pitcher shattered at the spring and the wheel broken at the cistern. He sent dust back to the earth as it was and breath back to God who gave it. He ended as he had begun, the circle completed as a mercy against pretending: Vapor of vapors, says Qohelet, all is vapor.
That night he could not sleep. The honesty had been too exact, and exactness has a way of summoning visitors. He saw his son as if seated on the step—a mistake of sight he permitted to linger. He heard his wife in the clatter of the baker’s pans. He put his head on his arms and felt something like prayer move without words. He did not trap it. In the morning, he went to the river and watched mist rise as if the water, having considered returns, had decided to spend itself anyway.
A young scribe from the temple began to attend his evenings—earnest, tidy, faintly horrified. “Your book will need a seal,” the scribe said after a few weeks. “A conclusion. The people must be told what to do.”
Qohelet grimaced. He had hoped to avoid telling anyone to do anything. The scribe persisted. “Fear God and keep His commandments,” he suggested brightly. “For this is the whole duty of man.” He offered the line as one offers a cloak to a friend who insists on walking into weather without it. Qohelet weighed it and found no lie in it, only the familiar comfort of a sentence that had already been worn by many shoulders. He allowed the scribe his conclusion and kept his own ending intact, the almond poem’s brittle hush. He did not feel betrayed. He returned to the river and practiced breathing—the first commandment and the last.
On the day he died, the baker’s wife found him in the chair by the narrow window. His hands were folded not piously but neatly, as if he had been setting down a thought and chosen to do it without scarring the table. On the table lay a scrap with three lines only: Light is sweet. It is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun. If a man lives many years, let him rejoice in them all; yet let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many.
She wiped her hands on her apron and sat awhile before calling for help. She was not weeping; she was performing the arithmetic he had taught her. Sweet minus many equals enough. She kissed her thumb and pressed it to the scrap as a seal.
The city did not mourn him publicly. Some men quoted him wrongly; some men improved him; some men avoided his sentences because they interfered with their sleep. His students met once a week for a while and then less often, until memory itself did the sorting he had trusted more than argument. Children grew up repeating his lines without attribution, as children do with truth. Priests preached his phrases when funerals forced them to put aside victory for an hour. Lovers stole his imperatives—eat, drink, rejoice—and flavored them for their own purposes.
And the river went on lifting its veil at dawn like a woman who does not care to be looked at but has never been ashamed of her face. The mist rose and vanished, and so did grief, and so did laughter, and so did kings and their rings. Somewhere a young man stood by the water with a scrap of words in his hand and felt, for a moment, the dignity of futility: the peace that comes from laying one’s head on the shoulder of a universe that has not promised to remember one’s name and yet, inexplicably, offers fruit and light and the sound of women grinding grain.
He did as the Gatherer had commanded without commanding. He went home, ate his bread with joy, drank his wine with a glad heart, combed his hair, loved his wife, and in the middle of the night, when the child woke with a cry that startled the stars, he rose and carried the warm weight and whispered into a small, hungry ear the only benediction that never becomes a lie:
“Here. I am here.”
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San Ben-Meir is an assistant adjunct professor of philosophy at City University of New York, College of Technology.