“Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living” with Prof. Menachem Fisch & Debra Band

Qohelet: Searching for a Life Worth Living, by Debra Band and Menachem Fisch.  How to live a life of wisdom and fulfillment in a far-from-perfect world? Philosopher Menachem Fisch and artist Debra Band together probe Qohelet’s inquiry into the value of life “under the sun” in this brilliant work—the first illuminated manuscript of the entire biblical text, the first philosophical analysis tracing the coherent path of this biblical thinker’s full argument. 

Debra Band draws upon her love of both the manuscript arts and the Jewish textual tradition in her acclaimed illuminated manuscripts. She is the author and illuminator of The Song of Songs: The Honeybee in the Garden (JPS, 2005), I Will Wake the Dawn: Illuminated Psalms (with Arnold J. Band) (JPS, 2007), Arise! Arise! Deborah, Ruth and Hannah (with Arnold J. Band) (Honeybee in the Garden, 2012), and Kabbalat Shabbat: The Grand Unification (with Raymond P. Scheindlin) (Honeybee in the Garden, 2016), among other works. Her paintings have been widely exhibited across the United States and Canada. She resides in Potomac, Maryland, with her husband, Michael Diamond, MD, and menagerie.

Menachem Fisch is Joseph and Ceil Mazer Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science at Tel Aviv University, TAU codirector of the Frankfurt–Tel Aviv Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies, and senior fellow of the Goethe University Frankfurt’s Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften. He is author of The View from Within: Normativity and the Limits of Self-Criticism (with Y. Benbaji) (Notre Dame, 2011), Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific Agency (Chicago, 2017), and Covenant of Confrontation: A Study of Non-Submissive Religiosity in Rabbinic Literature (Hebrew) (Bar-Ilan, 2019).