The following is a quote from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. I hope it speaks to someone just as it spoke to me. May Adonai bless you!
“Which brings me back to Ecclesiastes, his search for happiness, and
mine. I spoke in chapter 4 about my first meeting, as a student, with
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Lubavitcher Rebbe. As I was
waiting to go in, one of his disciples told me the following story. A
man had recently written to the Rebbe on something of these lines: ‘I
need the Rebbe’s help. I am deeply depressed. I pray and find no
comfort. I perform the commands but feel nothing. I find it hard to
carry on.’ The Rebbe, so I was told, sent a compelling reply without
writing a single word. He simply ringed the first word in every sentence
of the letter: the word ‘I’. It was, he was hinting, the man’s
self-preoccupation that was at the root of his depression. It was as if
the Rebbe were saying, as Viktor Frankl used to say in the name of
Kierkegaard, ‘The door to happiness opens outward.’ It was this
insight that helped me solve the riddle of Ecclesiastes. The word ‘I’
does not appear very often in the Hebrew Bible, but it dominates
Ecclesiastes’ opening chapters. “I enlarged my works: I built houses for
myself, I planted vineyards for myself; I made gardens and parks for
myself and I planted in them all kinds of fruit trees; I made ponds of
water for myself from which to irrigate a forest of growing trees. I
bought male and female slaves and I had homeborn slaves. Also I
possessed flocks and herds larger than all who preceded me in Jerusalem.
Also, I collected for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings
and provinces.” (Kohelet/ Ecclesiastes 2:4–8) Nowhere else in the Bible is the
first-person singular used so relentlessly and repetitively. In the
original Hebrew the effect is doubled because of the chiming of the
verbal suffix and the pronoun: Baniti li, asiti li, kaniti li, ‘I built
for myself, I made for myself, I bought for myself.’ The source of
Ecclesiastes’ unhappiness is obvious and was spelled out many centuries
later by the great sage Hillel: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be?
But if I am only for myself, what am I?’ Happiness in the Bible is not
something we find in self-gratification. Hence the significance of the
word simchah. I translated it earlier as ‘joy’, but really it has no
precise translation into English, since all our emotion words refer to
states of mind we can experience alone. Simchah is something we cannot
experience alone. Simchah is joy shared.”
―
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks,
The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
