This King, blessed with transcendent wisdom, declares: I have tried to make sense of it all, and yet it remains beyond me as Camus might say: Absurdity of Absurdities, what’s the point of it all. Finally, Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, with its anguished cries of “ Hevel Havalim haKol Havel” - “all is vanity” - is the work of the quill of a King reflecting upon his life with the realization that he is firmly in the twilight of it, in the valley of the shadow of death. Mishlei, Proverbs, is a product of middle age, an attempt to gather the wisdom of his experiences as King of the unified Jewish people, adorned with the glory of the Temple in Jerusalem. Shir ha-Shirim, Song of Songs, with its odes to love, passion, and desire represents the enthusiasm and potential of King Solomon’s younger years. Our Sages relate in Midrash Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah that the evolution of each of these books can be traced to different times in the life of “ the wisest of all men”. I think about Camus and this question during Sukkot, especially on Shabbat Hol Hamoed - when I recall another famous writer, one who I think also would have rejected the designation “existentialist.” Traditionally, Ashkenazim reserve today for the reading of Megillat Kohelet, the last of King Solomon’s three books of wisdom. Everything else … is child’s play we must first of all answer the question. To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy. In what may be the most famous words of his great literary career, Camus posed the following in the opening lines of his “Myth of Sisyphus:” Shortly after learning of the honor, Camus wrote to his mother - “Maman, I miss you now more than ever.” For him, the great recognition that the award signaled also triggered a sense that his career was somehow over, and the resulting feeling of the triviality of it all left a void which he tried to fill with activities like yoga. Parenthetically, and most timely, Camus’ erstwhile friend Jean-Paul Sartre famously rejected the great prize, and scorned Camus for not doing the same. So then, at the height of his career, with many of his works beginning to gain wide interest and acceptance, Camus won the Nobel, and fell into a deep depression.

There is even scholarly speculation that Camus covertly participated in the rescue and hiding of Jewish children in Chambon, France organized by the righteous Pastor, André Trocmé, in 1942.Įven when world opinion, especially in so-called polite European society began to turn against Israel in the wake of the ‘57 Suez crisis, Camus wrote publicly to affirm his support for the Jewish state, earning him the ire of his intellectual peers. Camus was a man of principle, resigning from his human rights work at some opaque group called UNESCO (perhaps you have heard of them of late), when the United Nations accepted the Dictator General Franco with open arms. He was a dedicated lifelong activist, throwing his energies to movements he felt were doing their best to achieve equality and justice, first as a revolutionary against French Colonialism in Algeria, then as a Marxist, then as an Anarchist.

The French-Algerian author of unique classics like “The Plague” and “The Stranger” was obsessed with the question of why we are here, and the absurd predicament of humanity in a world of suffering and apparent meaninglessness.Ĭamus was not content to relegate himself to just writing. He remains the second-youngest Nobel Laureate for Literature. a champion of imaginative literature as a vehicle of philosophical insight and moral truth.” “illuminate the problem of the human conscience in our time.

At just 44, two years before his untimely and tragic death, Camus was cited by the Nobel committee for his work to: Although he actively denied the label of existentialism, the great existentialist writer and thinker Albert Camus had a great deal to teach us about the human condition.

Shadows of doubt youtube