We often hear of the power of stories, but sometimes it is good to see a specific example of how stories can help us make sense of what could be difficult to grasp in the abstract. They can also stimulate our imagination through their style, play on words, humor, cleverness, ambiguity, etc.

For this reason, I have often wondered what it would be like to transform Qohelet into a narrative. If you think that such a task is impossible or even ludicrous, the Rabbis didn’t think so. Let me show you an example. In chapter 3 Qohelet starts his “catalogue of times” and in verse 6 he says:

[a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away (ESV)]

Now, how would you turn that into a story or an anecdote?

First of all, one may ask what it means that there is a time to lose and cast away. Michael Fox says that Qohelet “begins with this postulate that there is a time for everything and applies this rule not only to clearly useful actions, but even to the ones that may seem useless and even deleterious (Fox, A Time to Tear Down, p. 208). He gives two possible examples of this: Qoh. Rabbah v. 6b and the disappearance of the asses of Saul’s father in 1 Samuel 9:3. Many may be familiar with Saul’s story, but most, including me, would not have a clue what Midrash Qohelet Rabbah has to say about it.
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There are two resources this week that reminded me of the role of “stories” in shaping our worldviews. The first one is from a new blog by students at Princeton Theological Seminary that focuses on Tom Wright and his writings called N. T. Wright Project. The particular post on story is Tell Me a Story in which Laura quotes a thought-provoking paragraph from The New Testament and the People of God which I would like to reproduce here in full:

“Stories are, actually, peculiarly good at modifying or subverting other stories and their worldviews. Where head-on attack would certainly fail, the parable hides the wisdom of the serpent behind the innocence of the dove, gaining entrance and favour which can then be used to change assumptions which the hearer would otherwise keep hidden away for safety. Nathan tells David a story about a rich man, a poor man, and a little lamb; David is enraged; and Nathan springs the trap. Tell someone to do something, and you change their life-for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life. Stories, in having this effect, function as complex metaphors. Metaphor consists in bringing two set of ideas close together, close enough for a spark to jump, but not too close, so that the spark, in jumping, illuminates for a moment the whole area around, changing perceptions as it does so. Even so, the subversive story comes close enough to the story already believed by the hearer for a spark to jump between them; and nothing will ever be quite the same again” (NTPG, p. 40).

Laura emphasized the line “Tell someone to do something, and you change their life-for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.” This is a strong statement and, had I not read elsewhere about stories functioning as “complex metaphors,” this statement would not make much sense to me. This brings me to my second resource, a lecture by Dan Taylor, an English Teacher, entitled The Life-Shaping Power of Story: God’s and Ours. This is one of the lectures in the 2008 National Conference by Desiring God Ministries which would seem like an unlikely source for lectures on story-telling, and maybe this is why the lecture stood out to me. His main thesis is the following:

“The single best way of conceiving of faith and the life of faith is as a story in which you are a character.”

He continues on to say, “your task is to be a character in the greatest story ever told, that’s what you are created for. If you want to know why you are here, that’s one way of expressing the answer to that.”

The lecture goes through twelve reasons supporting this thesis. There is something fresh about his approach and he gives us lots of things to think about in terms of stories and their roles in our lives.