Daniel Greenberg - 07/10/26

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Good morning. As Antonio says in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose”. I thought of this last week when synagogues around the world were reciting the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes as part of the culmination of the Jewish festival season, including the famous passage beginning “There is a time for everything” followed by a list including “A time to plant and a time to uproot”; “a time to cry and a time to laugh”; “a time for war and a time for peace”; and so on. This is quoted frequently as support for seeing the world through a binary lens: “Now is not the time for peace, it’s the time for war”; or the reverse. “Now is not the time for talking, it’s the time for action”, or the reverse. But I read this passage rather differently. The whole of Ecclesiastes paints a world view of enigma, paradox, and apparent confusion. By rabbinic tradition it is attributed to King Solomon, who is portrayed as a paradigm of wisdom. For me, the profundity of his wisdom consists primarily in this insistence on viewing the world as a mass of complicated and contradictory contrasts. If it is a time for war, it is also a time for peace; if it is a time for joy, it is also a time for tears. A simple and self-centred binary perspective inevitably overlooks someone else’s grief, or someone else’s happiness. In the world of social media it is difficult to convey nuance or subtlety; and the primary danger is therefore that it polarises thought. Hence the increasingly common shout from a variety of religious, political or other ideological commentators: “on which side of history are you?”, the clear implication being that there are two sides to every story: one right and one wrong. Ignoring the complexity of the world is superficially satisfying, but not satisfactory. In the Talmudic laws regulating the Jewish Sanhedrin or Supreme Court, if all 71 judges reach the same conclusion about a person’s guilt, the defendant is found not guilty; on the grounds that if not one single member of the court has any doubt about the matter then the court as a whole has clearly not considered the case sufficiently carefully. Complete certainty is a sign not of accuracy but of oversimplification. So I left the synagogue after our reading of Ecclesiastes this year renewing my determination not to see the world through the simple lens of belief in my own rectitude, but by searching for how it might appear through the eyes and experience of others.