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Wednesday, December 18, 2024 at 8 pm Eastern via Zoom
Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living
Menachem Fisch and Debra Band
How does one live a life of wisdom and fulfillment in a far-from-perfect world? This lecture is an inquiry into the value of life “under the sun” as recorded in the text of the Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes by Qohelet.
Modern readers have been influenced by the famous declaration from the 1611 King James Bible version, “vanity, vanity, all is vanity,” and have commonly understood that Qohelet found only futility and hopelessness in human life. Instead, Fisch uncovers Qohelet’s twin concerns: that life is short, that we can never be assured of comprehending our world or understanding divine will and intent.
In sixty immersive, and discursive illuminated paintings of the entire text, Band creates a visual midrash, drawing out the relationship of Qohelet’s thought to other biblical texts and Jewish lore and its reverberations across the centuries and cultures of western civilization, from ancient Israel to today’s America.
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Menachem Fisch - Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science at Tel Aviv University
Debra Band - Author and Illuminator of Biblical texts
