As the calendar turns, turns, turns, and school is about to begin, you’ve become intrigued by a new class offered at your school.
“This course,” the catalogue says, “will expose the absurdity of some of your most common behaviors. While there will be more questions than answers as you make your way through the course’s twelve-chapter textbook, you’ll take up a series of profound questions such as, What’s the purpose of life?, What makes life worth living?, and Why work?
You see also that the class is taught by a world-renowned professor. The story around campus is that he’s wise, fabulously rich, from a royal family even. He’s seen it all, done it all, experienced it all. A riveting lecturer, like the course he teaches, it’s said that he is constantly in motion in class, turning, weighing antithetical propositions, speaking in poetic prose.
However, as you’re about to sign up, you see the course does come with a trigger warning.
Beware: The curriculum to be covered is not intended to give you confidence. Any superficial and false confidence you’ve managed to cobble together for yourself so far in life will be stripped away. The course will expose every arrogant and ignorant expectation you have that you can live life on your own terms.
The rollicking seminar is entitled Ecclesiastes and your teacher, should you decide to register, will be the captivating professor, Qoheleth, which means, more captivatingly still, The One Who Assembles. You read that you can always drop the class if it’s boring, so you proceed to sign up.
Then, on the first day of class before you’ve even found your seat, it crosses your mind that you may have made a mistake as the wisdom Professor Qoheleth has assembled for you and your new classmates begins strangely like this.
“Havel havelim.”
“Havel havelim to you too,” someone in the front responds.
“No. Not a greeting. Havel havelim,” he says again.
“I didn’t get that?” someone from the back says.
“Let me be clear,” the professor says.
Everyone sits up straighter at their desks.
“Vanity of vanities,” he says. “All is vanity.”
He’s met with quizzical looks not unlike last semester’s class or the one before that.
“Fleeting, vaporous, merest breath,” he goes on. “All is mere breath. Vapor. Havel havelim.”
“When’s the drop deadline for this?” the person next to you whispers.
“The word ‘hevel’ sounds like havel,” the professor goes on. “Hevel is the Hebrew spelling for ‘Abel.’ He was the first human to die. My invoking Abel here at the beginning should remind you that your death is, at any moment, a possibility. Don’t live foolishly. Don’t live unprepared. Havel havilem. All is vapor. Vanity. Vanity. All is vanity. I’ll take questions next week. Class dismissed.”
You leave class baffled, but the “vanity, vanity” bit, though pretty grim, sticks with you. In fact, turning it over all week in your mind has produced a kind of an epiphany. While struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, you’ve managed only to avoid being happy.
You decide not to drop. In fact, you’re now looking forward to next week’s class.
When it arrives, the first question in class for the enigmatic professor comes from the back.
“So, is there anything that does yield meaning?”
“All is Vanity,” the professor says again. “Nothing really matters.”
Everyone’s shoulders sag.
“Yet,” he says.
You and the rest of the class lean forward as one.
“Life is windfall.”
The professor goes on to say a person can do nothing better than to eat, drink, and find satisfaction in their own toil. There’s a nobility, a satisfaction, in work and marriage and in being present to one’s friends.
“All of this,” he concludes, “is from the hand of God.”
As the semester proceeds, each of the twelve chapters of the professor’s book prove fascinating.
“Rain,” he says, “falls on the righteous and the unrighteous alike.”
“There’s nothing new,” he says. “Nothing new under the sun.”
“God,” he says, “has implanted eternity inside every human heart.”
“Two are better than one,” he says. “How can one keep warm alone?”
“To everything,” he insists finally, “there is a season.”
By the time the last day of class arrives, just as you were warned, you’ve been humbled. He’s held up a mirror to you, and what you saw is that you’re restless for meaning. You’ve tried in vain to find fulfillment by your own devices. Ecclesiastes has fully exposed your incapacity to find meaning in life on your own.
“Go forth,” the professor said at the end of the final class. “Of books there is no end. Much chatter is weariness to the flesh. Fear God. Keep His commands. That is your whole duty.”
God—Thank you for schooling us. Amen.
