Carry That Weight
For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief. Ecclesiastes 1:18 NIV
Grief – It’s the weight that hurts. The deep sense of sadness. Not just about the world’s mad dash toward destruction. Not just the unspeakable evil perpetrated upon the voiceless masses. Not just the moral inequity of economic and ethnic disparity. That would have been enough to produce an awareness of humanity’s crushing plight. No, this sadness, the kind that saps me of motivation, of joy, of zest for living, comes in another form, far more personal, more condemning. As the research shows, sadness is the root of guilt, shame, depression, loneliness, and boredom. When I feel guilty and ashamed because I have perpetrated a moral wound on myself or another, sadness gains a foothold in my soul. When I become aware of my lingering depression, a feeling that I’ve lost purpose and direction, sadness pushes its way into my consciousness. When I’m lonely despite social circles, when I’m bored surrounded by pointless affluence, when I’m tired to the bone, sadness crawls into bed with me. That’s the weight that hurts, the crushing reality of unworthiness, the despair of living another day in the hydraulic press of powerlessness.
I notice I’m becoming apathetic. I find myself isolating from others. My deepest regrets grow. I feel confused, or worse, inferior, incapable of taking up the simple task of living. I’m on moral autopilot; the least little windshear throws my sense of balance into a dive. And I don’t care.
But of course I care. If I really didn’t care I wouldn’t write these words. I’d quietly exit living. Too much to bear any longer. A friend of mine made that choice. I can imagine why, but it still seems senseless. Self-termination is still a choice and today I can’t imagine making any choices, especially eternal ones. I just want to pull up the covers and hide from myself. The mirrors must come down. Who wants to see the face of someone barely hanging on?
Qohelet closed the book on the self-examination answer. “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief” (Ecclesiastes 1:18 NIV). He’s right. The more we think about the tragedy and futility of our lives, the more we seek answers, the less we understand, the greater our sorrow grows. Oh, for that simple, blind faith that never needed anything more than hand-holding comfort. I’m pretty sure that’s what Yeshua had in mind when he talked about the attitude of a child in Kingdom citizens. Do you really need to know? I have never met a child who asked for an explanation of the physics of a swing before delighting in the experience of moving through the air. A child trusts the physics long before asking why. Maybe that’s my real problem: I have grown up to become sad.
“Much wisdom – much sorrow.” What exactly does that mean? You would imagine the equation would be just the opposite. At least that’s what we’re told. The more you learn, the more life will be under your control. Or, perhaps, understanding brings insight and insight brings power. Or something like that. Then we arrive at the school of hard knocks and realize that all our wisdom, all our understanding, all those insights only demonstrated how truly powerless we are, how little we actually know, how great is our self-deception.
Maybe that’s what Qohelet had in mind. If we look at the Hebrew, we see that he equates wisdom with grief (kaʿas) and knowledge with pain (mǎḵ·ʾōḇ). The NIV doesn’t get it quite right even though it uses synonyms. Like many Hebrew terms, kaʿas is relational. It describes man’s condition before God. Generally the term is used when men provoke God to anger or when men act in ways that frustrate others. Sin, of course, is the primary vehicle of this anger and frustration. But we might ask, “How does wisdom, which is a good thing, lead to kaʿas, which is certainly not a good thing?” Qohelet’s perspective seems to be that ḥākam (wisdom) leads to a growing awareness of the gap between uprightness and the lived world.
The essential idea of ḥākam represents a manner of thinking and attitude concerning life’s experiences; including matters of general interest and basic morality. These concerns relate to prudence in secular affairs, skills in the arts, moral sensitivity, and experience in the ways of the Lord.[1]
I concur. With Solomonic insight, I notice that the more I observe in this world, the greater the disparity between righteousness and practice. Scott Peck wrote that famous line, “Life is difficult.” We could probably add the footnote: “Life sucks!” It’s more than just difficult. It often seems hopeless, full of despair, empty. Difficult is something arduous but obtainable. But the death of a child, the experience of a parent with Alzheimer’s, or racial hatred is more than difficult. It is unconscionable. In the broken world we occupy, what was good becomes evil. Qohelet resigns himself to the utter pointlessness of life because death always wins. After Yeshua, we may believe something else, but it hasn’t yet changed our experience. And sometimes hope isn’t quite enough. Heschel said, “Despair is forbidden,” but he also wrote, “Giving birth to one child is a mystery; bringing death to millions is but a skill.”[2]
Maybe we need to look beyond the biblical cynic. What about the early writings? What do they say about sadness? Perhaps Genesis 40:6-7 can help.
Genesis 40:6-7
“When Joseph came to them in the morning and observed them, behold, they were dejected. He asked Pharaoh’s officials who were with him in confinement in his master’s house, ‘Why are your faces so sad today?’”
“So sad” is the Hebrew râʿimʿ. Since the sentence is about “faces,” this is the plural of râʿaʿ, to match grammatically. The root word means “to spoil, to break into pieces, to be made good for nothing.” Since Hebrew is a very visual, tactile language (not inclined toward abstract concepts), sadness is directly related to the physical expression of the face, and, in this case, an expression of fractured emotions, of falling apart, of being worthless. All of which is bad news. It’s not too surprising that this root is also connected with the Hebrew word raʿ, the word for evil, distress, affliction, adversity, and calamity. In Hebrew thought, sadness is opposite of well-being. In emotional research, sadness is the opposite of joy. râʿaʿ or rānan. By the way, rānan (joy) is also a behavioral word, a shout of jubilation. Westerners may have adopted the Greek idea of emotions as internal states of being, but in the Semitic world, emotions are first and foremost outward expressions. It’s hard to stay sad when you’re shouting praises to God. Try it and see what happens.
Topical Index: sad, grief, feelings, Ecclesiastes 1:18
[1] Goldberg, L. (1999). 647 חָכַם. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 282). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] Abraham Heschel Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 83.
