One of the most exciting moments in my course on the Book of Job and the arts is when I invite students to add a speech to the text. The model is a pair of texts, one ancient (Testament of Job) and the other modern (Frost's Masque of Reason), but the point is that adding to the text is what people have been doing with it from the get-go. I have everyone write a speech for a character named or not, and where in the story it appear - and then to share it with a neighbor, before collecting some for the class as a whole. The exercise never fails to generate remarkable ideas, and the sharing of them always succeeds in giving a sense of the text as one whose potential we are far from exhausting. (One could do this with other texts too, of course.) Later I tell them we're doing a kind of midrash, filling out or filling in - and that each intervention identifies a place in the text or story where a question might arise.
Today there were the obligatory (and necessary) speeches by Job's wife, though pointing in quite different directions and appearing at different points in the story - one after Job, having heard the divine speeches, is reconciled; she is not. God and the satan got speeches too, clarifying things to each other: God in ch 2, "I have my reasons for what I'm doing, I'm not just being provoked by you"; and the satan at the end, "you think you're different from me but you're not!" Elihu was given an additional speech, telling Job that because God is merciful any sinner can be redeemed. A servant reported on the unremarked and unredeemed destruction of his whole world. New were several hauntings - the spirits of Job's first daughters, killed in chapter 2, appearing at different points in the unfolding story. Another student imagined one of Job's new daughters resisting being a replacement: "Are we just tools to prove you are just? Are we just cattle?"
For my part, I did the exercise too, as I always do, and, as always happens, I surprised myself by writing something I didn't know was in me. (So was I surprised or not?) This comes after Job's last recorded words, before his life is restored.
Job doesn’t speak at the end, not to others. But to himself? As he conducts the sacrifice for his friends.
"I’m not sure I know what is going on. Perhaps I should be gratified that God, having shown His magnificent back to me, has undertaken to restore my image among my friends, gives me a role as a priest. You have not spoken rightly of me as has my servant Job, he said (they told me). Not spoken rightly. So I spoke rightly? I don’t even know what I said, I was beside myself, I was hardly myself, I said things I didn’t know until I said them. Yes, my friends' efforts to help – not so different from what I would have said, I own – bothered me (in part because they’re what I would have said). Did I misspeak? Is it what I said or how I said it that was right – that I was always talking also to God, a God I thought refused to hear me? They (as I said) talk like they’re worried God will punish them as he was punishing me – I can understand their worry, since they weren’t paragons either. But I was speaking to God. It wasn’t right that I demanded he meet God in court, was it? Or maybe it was right in its way: it’s an impossibility, if not for the reasons I thought (he wouldn’t deign). But maybe it’s right for me to think that, if he were human, he should meet me. And He did meet me. Not as a human, because he’s so different from that, so. So. But I’m praying for my friends so they don't have to learn as I did, nobody should have to. (And did I need to lose all that to learn, all my heart, my love, my trust in people?) Oh, oh. Trust in people. In having me do this God is forcing me – inviting me, letting me – trust my friends again, trust that they will be my friends again, that our friendship can survive this. I don’t quite know how we can, I don’t know how they can trust themselves. So we conduct the sacrifice. See what happens. Perhaps that’s my future, as a priest. No family, the solitude of those God calls to Himself. Not alone, but no longer part of the family-based world. Is God my family? The mountain goats are..."
As in the Talmud, as in the history of art, these interventions have expanded our sense of the text, not distended it. That they're conjectural and mutually incompatible doesn't matter in the slightest. The more, in fact, the better. We've added a depth dimension to the text, and an appreciation of a history of interpretive interventions which includes us.
Today there were the obligatory (and necessary) speeches by Job's wife, though pointing in quite different directions and appearing at different points in the story - one after Job, having heard the divine speeches, is reconciled; she is not. God and the satan got speeches too, clarifying things to each other: God in ch 2, "I have my reasons for what I'm doing, I'm not just being provoked by you"; and the satan at the end, "you think you're different from me but you're not!" Elihu was given an additional speech, telling Job that because God is merciful any sinner can be redeemed. A servant reported on the unremarked and unredeemed destruction of his whole world. New were several hauntings - the spirits of Job's first daughters, killed in chapter 2, appearing at different points in the unfolding story. Another student imagined one of Job's new daughters resisting being a replacement: "Are we just tools to prove you are just? Are we just cattle?"
For my part, I did the exercise too, as I always do, and, as always happens, I surprised myself by writing something I didn't know was in me. (So was I surprised or not?) This comes after Job's last recorded words, before his life is restored.
Job doesn’t speak at the end, not to others. But to himself? As he conducts the sacrifice for his friends.
"I’m not sure I know what is going on. Perhaps I should be gratified that God, having shown His magnificent back to me, has undertaken to restore my image among my friends, gives me a role as a priest. You have not spoken rightly of me as has my servant Job, he said (they told me). Not spoken rightly. So I spoke rightly? I don’t even know what I said, I was beside myself, I was hardly myself, I said things I didn’t know until I said them. Yes, my friends' efforts to help – not so different from what I would have said, I own – bothered me (in part because they’re what I would have said). Did I misspeak? Is it what I said or how I said it that was right – that I was always talking also to God, a God I thought refused to hear me? They (as I said) talk like they’re worried God will punish them as he was punishing me – I can understand their worry, since they weren’t paragons either. But I was speaking to God. It wasn’t right that I demanded he meet God in court, was it? Or maybe it was right in its way: it’s an impossibility, if not for the reasons I thought (he wouldn’t deign). But maybe it’s right for me to think that, if he were human, he should meet me. And He did meet me. Not as a human, because he’s so different from that, so. So. But I’m praying for my friends so they don't have to learn as I did, nobody should have to. (And did I need to lose all that to learn, all my heart, my love, my trust in people?) Oh, oh. Trust in people. In having me do this God is forcing me – inviting me, letting me – trust my friends again, trust that they will be my friends again, that our friendship can survive this. I don’t quite know how we can, I don’t know how they can trust themselves. So we conduct the sacrifice. See what happens. Perhaps that’s my future, as a priest. No family, the solitude of those God calls to Himself. Not alone, but no longer part of the family-based world. Is God my family? The mountain goats are..."
As in the Talmud, as in the history of art, these interventions have expanded our sense of the text, not distended it. That they're conjectural and mutually incompatible doesn't matter in the slightest. The more, in fact, the better. We've added a depth dimension to the text, and an appreciation of a history of interpretive interventions which includes us.
