Every Day is New Beneath the Sun

Every day is new beneath the sun;

Ecclesiastes got it wrong.

His message I believe should be undone:

that is the message of my song.

Everybody needs a testing teacher,

but please remember teachers aren’t

infallible. Prune praises given to the Preacher,

is the message I now chant.

“Vanity of vanities,” which he

of life declared is an insanity

whenever it’s applied to what’s to be

and not to be of our humanity.

Not only is there for all earthly things,

as he himself declared. a season,

but the newness that their change then brings

is for each of them the reason.

Humanity is new beneath the sun

each day as it’s revealed as thus.

It’s will must, just like God’s, be duly done,

for reasons daily new to us.

Life’s meaning only can be dearly found

by finding new things that astound.

The world’s not floating, flat, or square, but round,

not high in heaven, on the ground,

a festival, to which the Hebrew word

called hag applies.  It is a dance

whose movement may appear to us absurd,

but is not choreographed by chance.

Martin Lockshin points out in “Kohelet: The Earth Versus Humanity” (thetorah.com”) that the NJPS adds two English words in its translation of Qoh. 1:4 that do not appear in the Hebrew.  Qoh. 1:3 states:

קהלת א:ג מַה יִּתְרוֹן לָאָדָם בְּכָל עֲמָלוֹ שֶׁיַּעֲמֹל תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ. Eccl 1:3 What real value is there for people in all the gains they make under the sun?

After expressing this grievance about the pointlessness of human toil, Qohelet continues:

קהלת א:ד דּוֹר הֹלֵךְ וְדוֹר בָּא וְהָאָרֶץ לְעוֹלָם עֹמָדֶת. Eccl 1:4 One generation goes, another comes, but the earth remains forever.

Lockshin points out that the unchangeability of the earth may not be implied by the words וְהָאָרֶץ לְעוֹלָם עֹמָדֶת which NJPS renders as “the earth remains the same forever.”  I share Lockshin’s objection to this translation, and would like to suggest that Qohelet is actually contrasting humanity unfavorably to the earth precisely because the earth remains the same despite its constant changes, as Qohelet points out in the beginning of chapter 3, which famously inspired the song by Simon and Garfinkel, “To Everything There is a Season.”

I would like to add a new explanation for why Rashbam composed a commentary to Qohelet. While many scholars question the attribution to him of a commentary on this book, I support the attribution on the suspicion that he composed it.  I think that one reason is that he approved of the way that he thought Qoh. 1:4 supports הפשטות המתחדשים בכל יום, daily revisions of contextual explanation of reality. Rashbam claims in his commentary to Gen. 37:2 that this is what his grandfather Rashi would have wished to do— if he had had the time!—while explaining  biblical texts, and both of them surely believed that the Torah remains the same forever despite any new contextual explanations provided by Rashi or himself, and that the Torah was not disrupted by them in the way that the world is disrupted by novel forms of ideology and conduct.