Amnesty for Job

My lecture course on the Book of Job and the Arts transitioned online today, and I think we did alright. More than alright: our guest speaker Brian Phillips, the founder of the Journal of Human Rights Practice, was at once mesmerizing and accessible - and wonderfully good-humored about the changed format, too. The thirty-nine students tuned remotely biz Zoom in may well have had a more direct experience with his passion and generosity than they could have in a lecture hall.

And what amazing ideas he introduced us to! I can't summarize all he did, but can highlight two particularly powerful insights. Brian was speaking about ways the Book of Job articulates things he encountered during a decade's work for Amnesty International in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Job is just like so many people he met who obsessively tell their story of loss and injustice to anyone who will listen, and have indeed in some way become their story. He cited for us Job 19:23-24:

“O that my words were written down!
    O that they were inscribed in a book!

O that with an iron pen and with lead

    they were engraved on a rock forever!"

As a human rights worker one is like a "porter" for such stories, he told us, taking them to governmental and intergovernmental bodies. (One has delicately to lower witnesses' expectations of what the human rights workers themselves can do, though, and must resist the temptation to become like Job's friends, seeking salvation in theology - in their case that of the international human rights regime.) But Brian's also seen that these witnesses, whose identities have become so closely associated with their stories, can be exploited. Others might help fix you as that story. He described a meeting with a Croatian government official hoping Amnesty might take their side, bringing out a series of women to tell of lost or missing fathers, husbands, sons; "you see," the official said, "they are crying." (I thought of the reality TV show of the State of the Union Address.)

From Brian's description I learned to hear Job's words in a new way - but also those of Job's friends. While it won't work to tell someone who has identity has fused with a story of misfortune and injustice to snap out of it, one can see why a friend might be tempted to try. Perhaps the friends, in their better moments, were trying to remind Job that he was, and could be, more than the story of the loss of all his world which he had become.

The second set of insights involved the mystery of someone like Job's continued life, in conversation with the several ways Elie Wiesel had made sense of it over decades. (Brian found me because he read my book, particularly appreciating the chapter on Wiesel.) Somehow, in their own time, some of the Jobs a human rights practitioner encounters do manage to live on. Brian told us about the Bosnian Muslim Kemal Pervanic, a survivor of the ethnic cleansing camp at Omarska, whom he got to know over several years, and whom he helped publish a book about his experience, The Killing Days: My Journey through the Bosnian War (1999). Brian read to us from his preface to the book (xiii):

He added another anecdote, describing a dinner with Kemal one beautiful summer night some years later, on a deck overlooking a river in Bosnia. Kemal recognized a woman a few tables away: she'd been the public face of the Omarska camp, brazenly denying its atrocities to international authorities. Like most people involved in the genocide she had never been, and was not likely ever to be, punished. Kemal thought of going over to her, just to say "I know who you are." But then he thought better of it. In Brian's telling, which invoked Wiesel's idea that Job in the end of his book had not capitulated but rather engaged in a "revolutionary silence," this was a moment of freedom, of healing. He didn't explain how Kemal had arrived at this freedom - he didn't pretend to know. But Kemal's journey resonated with Job's, even in its ending.

Brian thinks the Book of Job is inexhaustible, a remarkable resource for people suffering some of the most traumatizing kinds of experiences, and is writing up an account of it to share with other human rights practitioners. We were so fortunate to hear it!