Going back to Kohelet for a minute because I just had to throw this out there:
I was watching Youtube videos and found a series called "World's Strictest Parents" in which rebellious British teens go to different places around the world to spend a week with a family and, hopefully, change their outlook on life.
Anyway, I was amazed and also kinda taken aback by the attitudes and perspectives most of the kids have at the beginning. They're all about partying and getting drunk and/or high, most of them have dropped out of school, and one girl even said something along the lines of "I don't tend to think about the future. What if I die tomorrow? Just live for now."
It made me think of the נהנה once he became a hardcore hedonist. I wasn't surprised so much by the fact that people do have this viewpoint on life as I was by the fact that so many had it. We kept saying when we were working on Kohelet that most of the world is a mixture of the נהנה and the חכם, but I didn't quite realize how much that is... It's really hard to wrap my head around!
Reading back over this after having posted it, I'm not sure how much sense it actually makes, especially considering that I'm trying to read over it at 12am, but I hope I got across what I was trying to say!
ReplyDeleteInteresting post, Mirel. I also had a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that a lot of people live for the physical pleasures in life. From an evolutionary and biological perspective, this would make sense, seeing as humans are programmed to get physical pleasure from things that help us survive. At the same time, other people are Chacham's in that they think they can or want to understand everything in life. Now that you've finished Kohelet, I can see that it's tough to go back to "not knowing" how to find meaning in life.
ReplyDeleteWait.. so this has nothing to do with Eicha and is completely Koehelet?
ReplyDeleteAnyways, this is also like that 'breaking amish' thing. When people were once under a lot of restrictions, they kind've go crazy once they find/are given freedom. Who knows if you can really trust anything that they say. As for the girl who says "what if we die tomorrow?" Well.. it's true. We're not in control of the world; we don't know what will happen to us at any given moment. That being said, if she dies tomorrow because she ODs on something or was drinking and driving, that was completely in her control. So, yeah, I'm not going to take anything that girl says to heart.