Sometimes you feel like cursing it, like the devil that might have spawned it; other times you want to hold it dear, like a cherished travel companion who instills in the threshold of our consciousness the agony and bewilderment we feel at the idea of nothingness.

What are these ‘vanities of vanities’ of which Qohelet speaks supposed to be? Is this a message of desperation or an appeal to Lady Liberty?

For millennia this enigmatic Bible book has been seen as an exception, or perhaps even a contradiction or an outrage, among the Hebrew and Christian messianic texts, that teach us not to despair, for history has a meaning and that meaning will lead us to the ‘fullness of time’. But in the meantime, are we supposed to annihilate ourselves, suffer in maddening desperation and fill our days with vain, unreasonable and fleeting pleasures, just so we won’t crumble under the weight of awareness at our own meaninglessness? It would be better never to have been born: is this the lesson? But why should we chastise for being delusional any attempt at building something of substance, both on the individual and on the collective level?

Zagrebelsky’s nonconformist book tries to shed new light into the powerful poetry of this apocalyptic text.