According to the most plausible reading of this taxing work, Qohelet encourages his readers to understand that much can be known by the powers of human observation. Yet this potent capacity of studying how things work here ‘under the sun’ cannot relieve us of our despair.
By these lights, Ecclesiastes represents a subset of the human condition: we are glorious knowers indeed, yet even vanity threads its despairing weave through our lives’ intelligence so long as our perspective fails to access Yahweh’s deeper purpose. That achievement is in truth a gift. It depends upon a relationship with one’s Creator that cannot be instigated or managed by the natural means available to women and men who crash against the sour limits of life here below.
If this is how we ought to read the book, then the wisdom versets of its tenth chapter ought to be harvested for the considerable fruit they bear rather than despised for the undeniable partiality of their view. One of them penetrates the dynamics of the ruler-assistant relationship with uncommon clarity:
If the anger of the ruler rises against you, do not leave your post,
for calmness will undo great offenses.
The young, who have not yet learned how well one can live with scar tissue, are quick to flee from the conflict that inheres in the atmosphere of influence and responsibility. Yet not only the young suffer this vulnerability, for poise is an evasive quality even for those who’ve had sufficient years to track it down. The proverbial word of Ecclesiastes 10.4 invites its hearer to take a long view of this day’s struggle and to live through this conflictive moment—drunk with fight-or-flight provocation—with a view towards surviving it intact and living to see another day in the king’s graces.
It understands that self-preservation is best accomplished when the long view seasons the heart’s response. He who stays calm the longest wins.
Such calm under fire is rare. It distinguishes those leaders whose influence persists across decades and beyond the life cycle of the current roster of players. This discipline of serenity is first glimpsed, then apprehended, then chosen in a moment when one feels that little choice is available but knows that this is not so. It marks off the man who has mastered his emotions without denying them from the one who is enslaved by them and therefore predetermined to express them in the public light.
Such poise distinguishes the North Star from the spectacular shooters that fly past it and in a moment are extinguished.
One can know such steely practice even here, under the sun. It can turn a man into a terrible thing, a Machiavellian monster manipulator. Or it can extend the influence of a good man beyond the current, bleeding, conflictive moment. One chooses.
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