The end of Ecclesiastes
By RW Bro Rabbi Raymond Apple
The autumn of life This is an extract from the book Freemasonry: Studies, Speeches and Sensibilities written by RW Bro Rabbi Raymond Apple.
T
he year’s cycle turns to autumn, the brightness of summer darkens and winter cannot be held back. It is all rather depressing, but even autumn has its lessons, in particular the warning that life’s kaleidoscope has seriousness and sorrow as well as colour and frolic. In Freemasonry this is the theme of the third degree. The mason begins with a first degree where a burst of light promises hope and meaning, but by the third degree he finds that life is real and earnest, and there is solid work ahead. The third degree lesson is dramatized in the final chapter of Ecclesiastes, calling the young to make the most of their youth and the elders to recognise the finality of old age. The latter know that it is serious but smile to see how true to life is its description of the waning of human powers. Ecclesiastes (in Hebrew Kohelet) is one of the five short scriptural scrolls that also include Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations and Esther. The name Kohelet is from a verb that means, ‘To gather an assembly’. Some believe that Kohelet was the preacher in a congregation; other views apply the term to a convenor of a teaching convocation; still
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others see the name as indicating a gatherer of wisdom and even (connecting the word with an Arabic root) a sage old man. The word is feminine, as is Hokhmah, wisdom. Prolonged debate preceded the acceptance of Kohelet into the Biblical canon. It was argued that the book contradicted itself, its contents were not divine but human wisdom, and it had heretical tendencies. Some claim that the stamp of orthodoxy was earned by the pious epilogue, ‘The end of the matter, when all has been heard: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man’. S.R. Driver sums up Kohelet: ‘Life under all its aspects is dissatisfying and disappointing; the best that can be done with it is to enjoy – not in excess, but in a wise and well-considered moderation, and as a gift intended by God to be enjoyed – such pleasures as it brings with it.’ The reality is not nearly so syllogistic. The verses go this way and that. L.V. Snowman wrote: ‘The preacher was a pessimist, a sceptic, and a believer all in one.’ Jewish tradition attributed the book to Solomon, seeing Song of Songs as the work of his youth, Proverbs of his
adulthood and Kohelet of his old age. A.J. Grieve comments: ‘As the book most akin to it, Job discusses a perplexing moral problem in the person of a hero of antiquity, so here Solomon is taken as the type of a wise man who had thoroughly explored all human experience.’ Robert Gordis supports Solomonic authorship in that the creative activity of Wisdom teachers had its first flowering in Solomon’s reign. Masonic ritual lends its own drama and power to chapter 12, though without the final verses of chapter 11, we lose the full contrast between youth and age. The full impact of this extract from Ecclesiastes therefore begins a few verses before those which the ritual chooses to cite. Though verse 7 (The dust returns to the earth…the spirit returns to God) was not meant as a pious affirmation of the afterlife, but merely recognises that death is inevit able, Masonic thinking prefers the conventional view that the body decomposes but the spirit soars upward, suggesting that physical destruction can be defeated by life after death. The book is available from the Sydney Masonic library.
March 2022
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