Tradition identifies the author of Ecclesiastes as King Solomon. He was the man who had it all and discovered it was not enough. Palaces, gardens, wives, wealth – all promised happiness, but none delivered. The more wealth, the more worry.

In the end all he could say was, 'Vain, Vain, everything is Vain.'

We recognize Ecclesiastes as the billionaire with the private jet, the apartment on Fifth Avenue, the holiday home in Cap Ferrat and the Armani suits, who discovers that it all adds up to less than the sum of the parts.

Many years ago I visited the Lubavitcher Rebbe, one of the great religious leaders of the twentieth century. As I waited to see him, I talked to some of his followers. Among other things, they told me this story.

Someone had written to the Rebbe in a state of deep depression. The letter went something like this. 'I would like the Rebbe's help. I wake up each day sad and apprehensive. I can't concentrate. I find it hard to pray. I keep the commandments, but I find no spiritual satisfaction. I go to the synagogue but I feel alone. I begin to wonder what life is about. I need help."

The Rebbe's brilliant reply did not use a single word. The Rebbe simply circled the first word of every sentence in the letter and sent it back. The disciple understood. The Rebbe had answered his question and set him on the path to recovery.

The circled word was 'I'.

It is hard to translate a biblical text from classical Hebrew into contemporary English and still preserve the nuances of the original, but Ecclesiastes' problem was the same as that of the above mentioned letter-writer. 'I built for myself...'

In Hebrew the insistence on the first person singular is striking, reiterated, discordant. No other book in the Bible uses the word 'I' so many times as do those first chapters of Ecclesiastes.

The problem was that he kept thinking about himself. It made him rich, powerful, a great success. As for happiness, though, he did not have a chance. Happiness lives elsewhere, in the realm called Not-I.

There is a lovely story about the great Victorian Anglo-Jew, Sir Moses Montefiore, an outstanding figure of the nineteenth century. A close friend of Queen Victoria and knighted by her, he was the first Jew to attain high office in the City of London. He became President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, in effect the lay leader of the Jewish community, a role he held with distinction for many decades.

The wealthy Montefiore retired at the age of 40 and devoted the rest of his long life – he lived to be 101 – to serving Jewish people throughout the world as an international diplomat and philanthropist. He built the first almshouses in Jerusalem and the windmill overlooking the Old City.

They are still there today. Yemin Moshe, Jerusalem's artists' quarter, is named after him.

Someone once asked him, 'Sir Moses, how much are you worth?' Moses thought for a while and named a figure. The other asked, 'That can't be right. By my calculation you must be worth 10 times that amount!'

Sir Moses replied wisely. 'You didn't ask me how much I own. You asked me how much I'm worth. So I calculated the amount I gave to charity this year, and that is the figure I gave. We are worth only what we are willing to share with others.'

Happiness is not made by what we own. It is what we share.

I've tried to say what happiness is, how we make it, how we lose it, and how we sometimes walk past it without recognizing it. Happiness isn't somewhere else; it's right where we are. Happiness isn't something we don't yet have -- we do. It isn't fantasy; it's reality experienced in a certain way.

Dr. Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of Britain, is author of The Politics of Hope.