“This also have I
seen as wisdom under the sun, and it seemed great unto me: There was a little
city and few men within it, and there came a great king against it, and
besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it. Now there was found in it a
man poor and wise, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man
remembered that same poor man. Then I said that wisdom is better than strength,
nevertheless the poor man’s wisdom is despised and his words are not heard.”
(Ecclesiastes 9:13-16)
This story illustrates in its allegories the
central message of Kohelet. We can understand the city as our consciousness,
frequently besieged by the power that negative traits and trends can have over
us, all coming from ego’s driving force which is represented by the invading
king. The deliverer of the city is goodness that is its natural ruler, for both
belong to each other.
Interestingly, Kohelet presents “poor” and “wise”
as complementing traits, understanding the former as the humbleness inherent in
goodness. Our sages consider humbleness an intellectual quality, necessary to
acquire wisdom as the means to grasp God’s Torah for humankind in general, and
Israel in particular as the chosen inheritor to disseminate such instruction.
The main question in the story is how the poor
wise man delivered the city from the king and his army. The answer is
persuasion. The story makes evident that the poor wise man didn’t have an army
or weapons to defeat the king, so the power of wisdom causes the deliverance.
Wisdom
usually unfolds by contrasting itself from ignorance in order to bring it back
to understanding, as the light dissipates darkness and turn it into part of the
light.
Thus we understand that darkness is the previous
condition that makes sense to light. The same works for good and evil, for the
latter is the reason for the former to exist.
The purpose of goodness is to
transform evil by extracting the goodness concealed in it, for evil can’t exist
without goodness.
Once we are exposed to the effects and
consequences of the negative traits and trends of ego’s fantasies and
illusions, we come to the realization that evil is not a choice but a reference
to choose goodness. In this awareness we realize that the “persuasion” of the
poor wise man is the educational process that takes modifying or transforming
the negative traits and trends that submit our consciousness to their
destroying effects and consequences.
The story tells us that ultimately the poor wise
man was forgotten, ignored and even despised. Such is the fate of goodness in
the playing ground of ego’s fantasies and illusions.
As soon as we realize that
coming back to goodness brings us the long yearned freedom, and return
momentarily to its ways and attributes, we go back to the addictive nature of negative
trends and trends.
Hence Kohelet concludes that living in such vicious circle
is vanity and vexation of the spirit that sustains life.
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