Book of Job

The Book Of Job is very strange.

Job calls Ha’Shem to account for the injustice of the world, and the Voice From The Whirlwind delivers a glorious rant that spans all of space and time, which starts off like this:

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the Earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements? Surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk?
Or who laid its cornerstone
When the morning stars sang together
And all the Sons Of Elohim shouted for joy?
38:4-7

That’s not an answer, Dad.

But the King James translation has Job respond with goveling humility:

I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes
42:6

I fell in love with the Book Of Job through a different translation by Stephen Mitchell, a Jewish and Zen Buddhist scholar of Hebrew. He said he was inspired to do his new transation by then-recent scholarship which suggested that the Hebrew word נחם was better understood not as I repent but as I take consolation, which unlocked for him a whole other side of the book. In the introduction to his translation, Mitchell says:

This is partly a matter of translation. The King James and most other versions present us with a Job who, in his last words, “abhor[s] [him]self / and repent[s] in dust and ashes.” They do this on the shakiest of philological grounds; though understandably, because they are thinking with orthodox Christian ideas and expecting to find penitence and self-abasement as the appropriate response to the righteous, ill-tempered god they expect to find. Nor is this only a Christian mind-set. (For example, the joke about the rabbi who on Yom Kippur walks to the front of his congregation, pounds his chest, and shouts, “I am worthless, Lord, I am worthless.” Then the president of the synagogue walks to the front, pounds his chest, and shouts, “I am worthless, Lord, I am worthless.” Next, to the surprise and scandal of everyone, the wimpy little beadle walks to the front, pounds his chest, and shouts, “I am worthless, Lord, I am worthless.” The rabbi turns to the president and sneers, “Look who’s saying he’s worthless!”)

But self-abasement is just inverted egoism. Anyone who acts with genuine humility will be as far from humiliation as from arrogance. Wherefore I abhor myself indeed! How could this poet, after a venture of unprecedented daring, end with a hero merely beaten into submission? Thereby proving that the friends’ degraded opinion is correct after all, since Job, by acknowledging that he is a vermin among vermin, acknowledges the god who mistrusts his angels and in whose nose heaven stinks.

Job’s response will not accommodate such whimpering. He has received his answer, and can only remain awe-stricken in the face of overwhelming beauty and dread. At Alamogordo on July 16, 1945, Robert Oppenheimer responded to another kind of vision by remembering a verse from the Bhagavad Gita: “I [God] am death, the shatterer of worlds.” And indeed, the only scriptural analogy to God’s answer (the other Biblical examples, except for the biting bush, are of a lesser god) is the vision granted to Arjuna in chapter 11 of the Gita, in which that prince experiences, down to the marrow of his bones, the glory and the terror of the universe, all creation and all destruction, embraced in the blissful play of the Supreme Lord. The manifestations there are more cosmic than in Job and the realization of God as “the Self seated in the heart of all creatures” is far clearer. But Job’s vision is the more vivid, I think, because its imagination is so deeply rooted in the things of this world. Reading the two together, we are likely to feel even more powerfully the earthliness that moved the author of Job to write in such magnificent, loving detail of the lioness and the wild ass and the horse, those creatures as radiant in their pure being as the light that is “brighter than a thousand suns.”

Job’s final words issue from surrender; not from submission, which even at its purest, in the “Naked I came…” of the prologue, is a gesture in a power transaction, between slave and master or defeated and conqueror, and is always a mode of spiritual depression. Surrender, on the contrary, means the wholehearted giving-up of oneself. It is both the ultimate generosity and the ultimate poverty, because in it the giver becomes the gift. When Job says, “I had heard of you with my ears; / but now my eyes have seen you,” he is no longer a servant, who fears god and avoids evil. He has faced evil, has looked straight into its face and through it, into a vast wonder and love.

Instead of bursting into fervid adoration as Arjuna does, Job remains a hairsbreadth away from silence. His words are a miracle of tact. We are not told the details of his realization; that isn’t necessary; everything is present in the serenity of his tone. All we know is that his grief and accusations, his ideas about God and pity for man, arose from utter ignorance. But we can intuit more than that. A man who hungers and thirsts after justice is not satisfied with a menu. It is not enough for him to hope or believe or know that there is absolute justice in the universe: he must taste and see it. It is not enough that there may be justice someday in the golden haze of the future: it must be now; must always have been now.

So in his rendering, Mitchell gives Job’s response as:

I had heard of you with my ears;
but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I will be quiet,
comforted that I am dust.

A while back, I found myself musing on the Voice From The Whirlwind asking Job, “Where were you?”

I had always taken this as Ha’Shem pulling rank as a Cranky Old Timer: “What do you know? Back when I was setting Planck’s Constant with my Divine Calipers, just to get to work I had to create snow before walking through it barefoot because I had not yet created shoes.”

But decades after I read Mitchell’s translation and commentary, it finally occurred to me to take the question directly. Where was Job when Ha’Shem laid the foundations of the world?

And I thought of the Zen kōan which asks, “What was your face before you were born?” And then the one which asks, “Who is the Master who makes the grass green?” Or if that is too oblique, consider Dan Bern’s American folk kōan “God Said No”.

Invitations to finding the root of suffering. With that, one might feel comforted that one is dust.

Or perhaps Job was fed up.