Atar Hadari
Mosaic Magazine, Sept. 16, 2013
“The festivals of the Jewish year form a chain. Rosh Hashanah is a wake-up call: ten days later, on Yom Kippur, you will be required to account for yourself. And at the end of the long Yom Kippur fast, you are required not to rush off and stuff your face but rather to go and sink the first post of your sukkah into the ground.”
A sigh of air, says the Preacher, a sigh of air, all is air.
What does it profit a man, all his labor that he labors under the sun?
Generation goes and generation comes, and the earth forever stands.
I first looked at Kohelet—the Hebrew name of the biblical book known in English as Ecclesiastes—the year before my father died. My rabbi in London had given a series of talks on the poem during the run-up to the holiday of Sukkot, when it is read aloud in the synagogue. As I followed along with him, certain passages so intrigued me that I thought I might try my hand at a translation. After my father’s death, my wife and I moved to a religious kibbutz in Israel, where I would be within five minutes’ walk of a quorum for the three daily prayers at which the mourner’s kaddish is recited. In my spare time, I started looking seriously at the text, trying hard to avoid what I could recall of previous translations of it.
My father’s name was Solomon, just like the “son of David, king in Jerusalem” to whom the poem is usually ascribed. And in revisiting Kohelet, it was my father’s sly, cynical voice that I heard: the voice of a man whose wisdom has not come easily to him, but by way of bitter experience. My mother once said, “Everybody comes to Shlomo for business advice,” at which he smiled and answered, ruefully: “Because there isn’t a single stupid thing they could do that Shlomo hasn’t done already.”… source
