Russell L. Meek - Ecclesiastes and the Search for Meaning in an Upside-Down World

My folks split when I was six years old. Dad, a serial adulterer, finally left my mom to make an honest woman of his mistress. My older brother took me on a drive just before my dad moved out of our house, and our paths crossed on the two-lane road that led out of town.

Wheres Dad going? I asked my brother.

Hell be back.

He wouldnt.

That sort of pain is hard to verbalize. If youve experienced it, then you know how I felt. Im grateful if you dont know. Half a decade later, my grandmother passed away. Shed stepped into the gaping hole my father left, which made her death all the more devastating. In those years of my life, I somehow missed a crucial lesson: Its important to express your emotions, to give voice to your heartache and rage, to let it all out in some way. A year or so after my grandmother died, though, I found several voices I could relate to.

Blacks arent like us, my dad once told me, with a seriousness that only a deep-South racist could muster. He went on to tell me that, while it was fine to work alongside Black Americans, there must be a clear separation in all other areas of life. Were just different, he would say. Were made different. We think different.

So you can imagine my dads surprise upon learning that the only thing keeping his young son sane was some cassette tapes of N.W.A., Eazy-E, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and later Jay-Z, Eminem, and Dr. Dre. Now, my students laugh when I tell them gangsta rap saved my life. But it did. It gave me the language I needed at the time to express the anger boiling inside of me.

In the years since I first passed money to my older brother so he could buy me the tapes labeled Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics , Ive learned quite a bit more about the value of hip hop. One of its significant features is that it relies heavily on allusion to connect with listeners and to communicate a whole world of cultural context needed to really get what the artist is saying.

Take the Jay-Z song Moment of Clarity, for example. Its filled with clever wordplay, rhymes, and allusions to Jay-Zs previous work, other hip-hop artists, his own life story, the war on drugs, prison culture, and music industry awards. Its a masterpiece of songwriting and cultural commentary. When I play the song for students in my classes, they are familiar enough with popular culture that they have no problem pointing out the songs allusions and describing the backstory, which is necessary for fully understanding what Jay-Z is getting at in the song. Can I listen to and appreciate the song without knowing who Common or Biggie Smalls are, or what platinum refers to, or even what four scores and seven years ago evokes, or noticing that in one stanza he moves from squares to circles to triangles? Sure. But my understanding will be severely truncated, and I definitely wont appreciate the songwriting genius that went into those four minutes and twenty-four seconds.

Some years after I discovered rap, I was introduced to Ecclesiastes. That book, more than gangsta rap ever could, showed me how to navigate the grief and anguish life brings. And the author of that book, Qohelet (rendered Teacher or Preacher by some English translations), does the very same thing as Jay-Z, or rather Jay-Z does the same thing as Qohelet. Ecclesiastes (from the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word Qohelet, both of which seem to mean member of an assembly or assembly, respectively) is filled with allusionsspecifically, to the book of Genesisand if we dont pick up on those allusions, then well miss what Qohelet is trying to do with what he is saying. Just as my students are so steeped in popular culture that they cant help but notice the allusions in Jay-Zs Moment of Clarity, Qohelets original readers were so steeped in their own culturea large part of which included the Torah (the Pentateuch), or first five books of the Old Testamentthat they couldnt help but pick up on the connections he was making to Genesis. So, in order for us to be ideal readers, we must likewise spend time in the book of Genesis.