Shlomo HaMelech: His Words Have Truly Inspired

It is not the Temple, nor anything physical Shlomo HaMelech built, that is his defining legacy, to me. This week we mourn the Beit HaMikdash he built, and this Shabbat, Shabbat Nachamu, we begin to comfort ourselves. Yet the Temple is gone. His palace is gone. His wealth is gone. The kingdom split within a generation of his death. Shlomo lived a vast and complex physical life, and almost none of it survived.

What survived is something else entirely, and it is the real reason I have chosen him. Three works, attributed to him across the three stages of a life: one written in his youth, one in his middle years, one in his old age. Shir HaShirim, Mishlei and Kohelet. Between them they reveal the wisdom, the creativity, the complexity and his sheer brilliance. And more than that, they pushed the boundaries of how we are able to think about the Torah, about our relationship with G-d, and about our relationship with ourselves. I cannot point to anyone else, in anything I have ever read, who did that. It is for this reason, and not for the Temple, that Shlomo is my Role Model this week.

The tradition itself frames the three books as the arc of a single life:

כשאדם נער אומר דברי זמר הגדיל אומר דברי משלות הזקין אומר דברי הבלים

When a man is young, he speaks words of song; when he matures, words of parable; when he grows old, words of futility. (Shir HaShirim Rabbah 1:1)

Youth sings. Maturity instructs. Old age reckons. Three ages, three books, one soul laid bare.

In his youth he wrote Shir HaShirim, love poetry so intense and so human that you could reasonably ask what it is doing in Tanach at all. And yet the tradition reads it as the truest picture we possess of the love between G-d and His people. When some questioned whether it even belonged among the sacred writings, Rabbi Akiva ended the argument:

שכל הכתובים קדש ושיר השירים קדש קדשים

All the Writings are holy, but Shir HaShirim is the holy of holies. (Mishnah Yadayim 3:5)

Of everything in Writing, the holiest book is a love song. Centuries later the Rambam, in the middle of a code of law, reached for that same book to define what it actually means to love G-d. Real love of G-d, he writes, is the state of someone lovesick, whose mind is never free of the one he loves, whether sitting or rising, eating or drinking. And he proves it from Shlomo’s own words, ki cholat ahavah ani, I am sick with love, adding that the whole of Shir HaShirim is a parable for exactly this (Hilchot Teshuva 10:3, on Shir HaShirim 2:5). A young king’s love song became the legal definition of loving G-d. That is what it means to push a boundary. No one else gave us that.

In his middle years came Mishlei (attributed in large part to him), the distilled wisdom of a man who actually had to rule, judge and live in the world as it is. Melachim credits him with three thousand proverbs (I Melachim 5:12). It is still the book a parent teaches a child, about how to speak, how to work, how to choose, how to carry yourself. If Shir HaShirim is how we love G-d, Mishlei is how we walk through the world without losing ourselves.

And then, in old age, he wrote Kohelet, and here the brilliance turns almost unbearable. This is the book of a person’s relationship with himself, and it was written by the one man in history least able to blame his troubles on not having enough.

Because Shlomo did not write Kohelet from a position of lacking. He wrote it from a position of everything. The Torah had warned the king, long before, not to multiply horses, wives or wealth (Devarim 17:16 to 17), not because these things are evil, but because success has a way of convincing us we are growing stronger when we are quietly drifting from who we meant to be. Shlomo did not abandon G-d in a single dramatic moment. He drifted. He accumulated. In the end his heart was led astray (I Melachim 11). The Beit HaMikdash took seven years to build; his own palace took thirteen (I Melachim 6:38 to 7:1), and the commentators noticed the arithmetic centuries before I did. He built the career, the house, the reputation, the fortune, the name, everything our own age is taught to chase. He built all of it. And then, at the very end, he wrote the truest account we have of what all of it is worth.

A neighbour and dear friend wrote to me recently. More than 40 years ago an accident left him paralysed. He described watching healthy people stand, walk across a room, or simply keep their balance, and he called each movement a פלא, a wonder, because once you lose something ordinary you discover it was never ordinary at all. He ended with a verse from Kohelet:

ועמק `deep; who can find it? (Kohelet 7:24)

I have read those words before. This time they read me. I used to think Kohelet was the diary of an old king turning cynical. I now think it is the confession of the wisest man who ever lived. Only someone who possessed everything could tell us honestly that everything is not enough. Not because life is empty, but because life is fragile. There is an enormous difference.

The book opens with a word struck like a drumbeat:

הבל הבלים אמר קהלת הבל הבלים הכל הבל

Futility of futilities, said Kohelet; futility of futilities, all is futile. (Kohelet 1:2)

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks suggested that hevel is better understood not as futility but as a breath. A breath is real, essential, beautiful, and impossible to hold onto. Perhaps that is exactly Shlomo’s point. Stop trying to own life. Start learning to treasure it. And it is why the book that sounds most like despair ends where it does:

סוף דבר הכל נשמע את האלהים ירא ואת מצותיו שמור כי זה כל האדם

The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear G-d and keep His commandments, for this is the whole of man. (Kohelet 12:13)

That is our relationship with ourselves resolved in a single line. Strip everything away, and what remains is not nothing. What remains is the whole of a person.

Now stand back and look at the two halves of his life. Everything Shlomo built disappeared. His kingdom. His palace. His riches. Even the Temple itself. Yet every Friday night, somewhere in the Jewish world, Shir HaShirim is still sung. Every Sukkot, Jews still open Kohelet. Parents still teach Mishlei to their children. His greatest achievements were never made of cedar or gold. They were made of words.

Which is precisely what the haftarah of Shabbat Nachamu concludes:

יבש חציר נבל ציץ ודבר אלהינו יקום לעולם

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our G-d shall stand forever. (Yeshayahu 40:8)

Yeshayahu was speaking about far more than flowers. Buildings do not last. Empires do not last. Fortunes do not last. Words do. Truth does. Wisdom does. That is why Shlomo remains one of my greatest role models. Not because he built the Temple we mourned this week, but because, having built everything a human being could dream of building and watched it turn to dust, he left us three works we could not have received from anyone else, and in them taught us how to love G-d, how to live in His world, and what a human life is finally for.