By sadness of countenance the heart is made glad?

I am finishing off my paper for the 2013 IOTS Conference to be held in just over two weeks. I will be speaking “On Exegetical Similarities between the Targumim of the Megilloth” and in the course of my research I was reading Tg Qohelet again. The Targum transforms this nihilistic text into a treatise on obedience to Torah and rabbinic virtues, but I was struck by this passage in the biblical text.

We light a candle for Mack at the Freiburger Münster. Third from left.Eccl. 7:2-4

2 It is better to go to the house of mourning

than to go to the house of feasting;

for this is the end of everyone,

and the living will lay it to heart.

3 Sorrow is better than laughter,

for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad.

4 The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning;

but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

Even before our son died, this sounded somewhat platitudinous to me; out of touch with the real depth of loss and grief that such loss brings. I know better, since one thing that a decade and a half of researching and writing on the Book of Lamentations, the rabbinic response, and ancient lament in general taught me was that loss of life and loved ones, hardship and deprivation were constants in antiquity. Even for those fortunate enough to have some power and position, they were not exactly living like the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (baby arriving even as I type). Yet to say “sorrow is better than laughter” suggests to me that the author hasn’t really experienced sorrow.

Unless they have. This is the paradox of loss such as ours. We would do just about anything to bring Mack back. One really cannot understand it unless you have been through it. And yet, going through this certainly does change you dramatically. Now the question is how we allow it to change us. I could, as I know others have, allow this to confirm that there is no justice in the world and thus no God, certainly not the God of the Bible. I know more than a few “foxhole atheists.”

Or we can take in the larger framework of life. While Mack lived, we were full of the joyous day-to-day of his and his sister’s activities. Now we continue to live in the joy of our daughter’s life, but our horizon has been extended. As my wife regularly says, our world is bigger now, our lives are larger. Mack has gotten there before us, but we will join him in life that is so much more than this time we have right now, in this mortal realm.

The Targumist takes this same perspective as he expanded upon verse two.

It is better for a man to go to the house of a mourner to comfort him than to go to a wine tavern of mockers. For it is the end of all men to go to the house of mourning. For against all of them the decree of death is decreed and because he goes to the house of mourning, the righteous will repent and take to heart the matters of death, and if he has anything evil in his hand, he will leave it and turn in repentance before Master of the World.

I think the Targumist is correct in saying that Qohelet is telling us that we must face our mortality if we are to find true contentedness. I don’t think we can call this “happiness” and I am not even sure that “glad” of verse 3 is the right sense (it is יִיטַב לֵב in MT). In confronting the fact that all of us will die we have to consider what is our ultimate end and goal. If we refuse to confront the horror and loss (running away to the “house of mirth”) then we will never grow, we will never overcome the loss, and we will be poorer for it. Our lives are bigger now because of Mack’s life and death. We would give anything if it were not.

A good friend shared Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament for a SonThe great theologian and his wife lost their son Eric in a mountain climbing accident when he was twenty-five. It is a good book in many ways. It is not a guide to grieving, other than what we can learn by watching and sharing in his lament. (I had not realized it until my friend gave the book to me and it was suggested that my blog is much the same. Apparently.) Regarding our need to confront our son’s death, to look fully upon this tragedy and not look away he wrote the following.

I skimmed some books on grief. They offered ways of not looking death and pain in the face, ways of turning away from death out there to one’s own inner “grief process” and then, on that, laying the heavy hand of rationality. I will not have it so. I will not look away. I will indeed remind myself that theres more to life than pain. I will accept joy. But I will not look away from Eric dead. Its demonic awfulness I will not ignore. I owe that—to him and to God.

Qohelet and I say, “Amen.”

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