Job disruption

The lecture course on Job and the arts met today after a two week hiatus (Presidents' Day) and in the first day of the campus-wide Climate Injustice Disruption - not that many of the students knew about the campaign, or about climate injustice for that matter. The "disruption" idea is that if every class across the university sets aside its usual concerns to address a shared topic, we might accomplish some big interdisciplinary breakthroughs, and certainly the climate crisis and its differential toll on different communities is a "wicked problem" which could use whatever resources we can muster.

My resources are the Book of Job and its interpreters - not the obvious place to begin thinking about these issues - but I think we made a contribution of sorts. The week's readings were two texts, one ancient and one modern, which add to the text - hearing the voices which the authorized edition doesn't let speak. Our focus was Job's wife, reduced to a walk-on role in the version canonical for Jews and Western Christians, but given more voice in every effort to illustrate or dramatize the story. Well, maybe not every effort: we started by noticing her absence in this crowded coloring book image I found online

- or is that her with the (other) servants at the left? (That the artist forgot her, and nobody noticed, is rather shocking!) I suggested that the usual image is of her shrewishly enjoining Job to give up, but that there's always been a countertradition in which she suffers with him,

clear in Blake's Illustrations. (The other is from the Lego Bible.) I told the class that filling in the story was not doing violence to but part of making a home in it, and that they should feel free to do so. In fact, why doesn't each of you take a piece of paper and spend a few minutes adding a speech to the story, for any character whose voice you'd like to hear - Job's wife, children, servants, animals...

I was planning to repeat this for the context of climate injustice, but had time only to point to the value of doing so. Because people's responses to this invitation were amazing. I heard from a Job heartbroken at his wife's turning on him, from servants chagrined to see Job's wealth doubled in the restoration, from his wife rejecting the new life offered after their trial, and another who let on that she was the narrator of the story, from a Job explaining his life on his deathbed, and another who went mad trying to understand how to live, even from a ha-satan who promises to continue tormenting Job. I invited the rest of the class to send me theirs... a remarkable lode of quite stunningly deep responses. Will it help them see in Job, in wrestling with his story, a resource for thinking about wicked problems?

Incidentally, as in other cases where I ask students to do something in class, I did the assignment, too, as ever ("I could beat myself in chess," I quipped) surprising myself with that I came up with.

I'm one of Job's second generation of children, the third son. I am confused about how to understand my heritage. I am haunted by the children Job and his first wife lost, and feel unsafe all the time. Job's equanimity then, and his very ability to move on to have a new life with us now freaks me out, to be honest. We kids don't talk about it, mostly, although I sometimes almost talk about it with my twin sister, the oldest of the girls… it comes up when we're taking care of the younger children, like when one of them wondered why Job is so much older than our mother and we had to tell her that she's Job's second wife. I wouldn't dare talk about it with my mother, or with Job, though I sometimes think I see something in his eyes that is looking past us to the family he lost, especially at times of what is otherwise great family happiness. Of course people come from far and wide to admire the virtue of our household and I want to be part of that, but I'm not sure how to… so I mainly don't think about it. When I'm older I might find the grave of the first children and take my own children there, though I don't know what I'll say to them.