Solomon Who Bent the Knee and Tasted Wisdom in Wine

Solomon said something in Ecclesiastes that generations of readers have found troubling: "I searched in my heart to tempt my flesh with wine, and my heart conducting itself with wisdom, to grasp folly, until I will see which is best for the sons of man" (Ecclesiastes 2:3). Wine and folly and wisdom together, in an experiment conducted by the wisest man who ever lived. Was he simply indulging himself? Was he falling? Or was he doing something else entirely?

Rabbi Yudan brought this question to Rabbi Aha, asking what the word sikhlut means in this passage. The common translation is folly, but Rabbi Aha reads it as sukhlenuta, wisdom, a related root in Aramaic. The reading preserved in Midrash Rabbah, the great collection of homiletical midrash that took shape in the academies of the Land of Israel during the fifth and sixth centuries, understands Solomon not as a man experimenting with excess but as a man who was using the wine of Torah and the wisdom of Torah together to understand something about the human condition that neither alone could reveal.

This reading sits alongside a very different image of Solomon from the Kabbalistic tradition. In the mystical texts that emerged in thirteenth-century Spain, Solomon is associated with a specific gesture: one bends the knee in relation to Adonai, and one stands up straight in relation to the four-letter divine name, and in the joining of those two gestures the two divine qualities are united. The name Adonai, meaning Lord, refers to the Shekhinah, the divine presence as it rests in the world. The four-letter name refers to the transcendent aspect of divinity, the quality that is above and beyond all created things. Solomon, who built the Temple as the dwelling place of the Shekhinah on earth, understood both postures. He knew when to kneel and when to stand.

The Temple itself was an expression of this knowledge. The mystical tradition holds that when Solomon prayed at the Temple dedication, saying "And King Solomon is blessed" (1 Kings 2:45), he was enacting the joining of the two divine names in physical space. The Temple was not merely a house for divine presence. It was the place on earth where the posture of the divine could be most perfectly mirrored in human action: kneeling toward the presence that dwells below, standing toward the transcendence that dwells above.

The souls who ascend through proper prayer follow a specific path. The Kabbalistic text describes it with architectural precision. When their souls rise, many angels receive them on wings and carry them upward to the gate of the King's chamber. At the gate, they knock. The angels who greet them instruct merit before the King on their behalf. The King instructs that the gate be opened. These souls speak their requests silently before the King, in the manner of individuals before royalty. The King grants their requests. This is not the outer gate where unfit offerings are received and sent back. This is the inner chamber, the place where Solomon bent the knee before one name and stood before the other.

Now read Ecclesiastes again through this frame. Solomon, who knew the inner chamber better than any person alive, who had built the structure in which the Shekhinah herself came to dwell, wanted to understand what the sons of man actually experience under heaven in the limited days of their lives. The wine he tested his flesh with was the wine of Torah, meaning the most intoxicating depth of divine knowledge. The wisdom his heart conducted itself with was the discipline of that knowledge, the balance of knowing when to bend and when to stand. The folly he grasped was not folly at all but the apparent contradiction between the two: why would the wisest man need wine? Why would a man who had the inner chamber need to test himself at all?

The answer is that Solomon was not testing himself against a standard he had not yet reached. He was describing the experience of having reached it and finding that from within the experience, the distinction between wine and wisdom, between joy and knowledge, between the material and the spiritual, dissolves. "O taste and see that the Lord is good" (Psalms 34:9). "Come, eat of my bread" (Proverbs 9:5). The invitation is to discover through experience what cannot be learned through description.

The Shekhinah instructs merit on behalf of souls who approach correctly. She does this from her position at the interface between human prayer and divine response, between the knee that bends toward the immanent presence and the spine that straightens toward the transcendent name. Solomon built the house where this could happen most perfectly on earth. Then he wrote a book about what it was like to have done so, and called the experience of the wine of Torah and the wisdom of Torah together by a word that means both folly and understanding, because from inside the experience, you cannot separate them.