Foundations of the earth

My Job book is coming out in paperback! They've commissioned new covers for the paperback series (the book's somewhat larger format, too, chunkier) and mine's a sort of muddy color. Can't say I love it.

Illuminations

In other news, someone just told me that the illuminated Byzantine Bible from which I took the cover picture for my Job book Has been digitized! There are many more scenes than Paul Huber was able to reproduce in the book where I found them at UCLA. Above, messengers bring Job news of the destruction of his world; through it you can make out shapes from the scene on the page before: the death of his children.

Giobbe

Look what arrived in the mail today: yours truly in italiano!

Minutiae

For Alumni Day, faculty were invited to give brief presentations of our work - and by brief they meant one minute! A sort of variety show, the "New School Minute" was introduced last year to great acclaim. And no wonder. The variety of topics and styles of presentation is dazzling, and at a minute (or two or three...) there's few chances to get bored.

Of course there's also something absurd about asking for such brief presentations of research but that was the key to the pleasure of it all. Everyone's in the same situation... and it turns out to be rather fun to find something you could say in so few words and hear your colleagues doing the same. My sixty seconds of fame came between a professor from Design & Management on "Empathetic Creativity – Transforming Challenges to Opportunities" and one from the Mannes School of Music on "Does Music Matter?" I spoke, of course, on Job. If you exclude the opener (cheating a little, but at least I didn't restate the obvious absurdity of what was going on), I kept to the assigned time, too:

I’ve just published a book on interpretations of the book of Job which came out of a seminar at Eugene Lang. Here’s a taste: 

Most people know the Book of Job through a single line: “the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away” [1:21] or “He destroys the perfect with the wicked” [9:22] or “I will maintain mine own ways before him” [13:15]. My favorite: “Have pity upon me, o my friends; for the hand of God has touched me” [19:21].

The story of Job’s devastation and restoration is basically a one-liner, too. But most of the book isn’t about what happens. It’s a discussion among friends trying to get beyond the one-liners to make sense of what’s happened.

As you might have heard, it’s not the best discussion ever. People don’t listen. They get angry. They go all ad hominem on each other. God condemns Job’s friends - but he also has Job rehabilitate them. Job’s friendships are the first part of his life to be restored.

People often describe Job as “the book of God and man,” but in fact Job is never alone with his God. For the most painful and powerful questions we wrestle with, the challenge and comfort of human discussion is beyond price. If you have no friends near, read the Book of Job. It’s a discussion, and you can enter into it.

(OK, it was 1:15.) It's a quixotic assignment, and one you don't entirely want to succeed at. Can what you've worked on really be digested into such a little nub? On the other hand, it was great fun to be part of a kaleidoscope of such nubs. And who knows, someone might be intrigued enough by one of these nubs to follow up. Or to come study with us!

This is chalk drawing one of our students drew in the Welcome Center. The monument at far left is, of course, the new University Center!

Across two thousand years

It's been a little while since anyone's mentioned my poor little Job biography. (It feels like more - attention is addictive, and/but its thrills are short-lived!) So these reviews I just learned about are nice, one from the Church Times (Church of England), the other from the Association of Jewish Libraries (US). It seems I succeeded in writing a crossover book!

Helping professions

In last week's radio interview I was asked if it's really true that I learn something new from every conversation I have about Job, as I claim. It is. As fractal confirmation, here's a lovely email I got today from someone who heard the podcast. You might remember the policeman from Rockaway whose confession at "Job in Red Hook" that he was "ashamed" to feel like Job so stunned me (¶¶10-11 here). I answered the radio interviewer's question by recounting this again, stating that I still wasn't sure I understood - but had no doubt that there was a profound truth in what he said. I understand a little better now:

I just listened to your interview on RadioWest about the book of Job... very interesting. You were puzzled by the report of a Hurricane Sandy firefighter feeling ashamed to lose his home and identifying with Job. I have worked with healthcare providers dealing with a drug addicted population, and I think I understand this kind of thinking on the part of those in the helping professions. Like the addiction medicine doctor, the firefighter has undoubtedly seen many terrible things happen to many people, and such suffering is almost always "undeserved." I believe that the firefighter feels ashamed because he thinks it is self-indulgent for him to think that he has received a personal punishment from God because he has seen the suffering of so many others. He knows from experience that suffering is widespread, random, and generally undeserved, and he feels ashamed because he can't help but feel personally affronted by God when he himself is a victim. This type of thinking puts himself in a separate category (why me?) from others who have suffered and have every right to ask the same question.
Just a thought. Thanks for starting a rich and important dialogue.

Thanks for listening!

Twitter!

Just discovered that my conversation with Doug Fabrizio at RadioWest was being tweeted as we spoke. Their tweeter does pretty well, I think!

But for the Grace

I gave a talk about the Book of Job and my own book at Grace Church (Episcopal) in Manhattan this morning. I planned to cover roughly the same terrain as my talk two weeks ago at St. Michael's, but of course it went its own way. Where the emphasis a fortnight ago was on the way the complicated congeries which is the biblical text forces us to "make a book of Job" even as it resists even our best efforts, this time I kept returning to the value of staging the story, which forces you to decide what words are addressed to whom and also reminds you that Job was perhaps never alone. Perhaps because of this stress on the social dimension, I spoke more eloquently about Job's friends - how they represented his earlier life, values and indeed self (which is why their failure to recognize him precipitated him into such an existential crisis), and how the restoration of the friendships is the frame and foundation for Job's renewed life at the book's end.

There was a nice discussion but at the end of it I was also asked one of the two questions I've been dreading. No, not the question about my qualifications as a Hebraist and Biblical scholar. The other one: what business I have writing this book. That's not quite how it was asked but close. Could I say something about my own view of the nature of suffering in the Book of Job and beyond and its relationship to suffering in my own life. I gave the only answer I could, which was that I do not come at this out of a deep experience of suffering or loss (see my way of making that point in the book at right). I have learned from the Book of Job not to pretend otherwise, certainly not to think that I have vicariously experienced the wrenching and perhaps exalting effects of affliction through working with this book and its interpreters. I have encountered people, past and present, who have learned powerful things from adversity, but I wasn't sure I wanted to learn those things. (Don't give me children and then take them away, I said, a bit maudlin.) In any case, we should perhaps be exploring if there are ways of learning those things without such pain. I'm not sure I like the way that sounded - a little glib, a little unserious - but I suppose that's the point. I wasn't pretending to an authority I don't think I have, or that I think doesn't matter. Did I sound callow? Perhaps it's because I am. I'm willing to face that, for what it's worth. The questioner didn't look satisfied and I felt exposed and a little deflated: a good thing.

Quinzaine de Job

Today was the first day of a fifteen-day flurry of Job-related activity, which all told will include three talks, a sermon, a radio interview, and a performance (not by me). This morning saw my first talk on the book - at St. Michael's Episcopal Church on the Upper West Side. And this afternoon, I attended a second performance of Outside the Wire's Superstorm Sandy-Job project - this one hosted by the JASA (Jewish

Association Serving the Aged) in Long Beach, Long Island. (That's LB's newly rebuilt boardwalk above, its partly frozen beach below.) I don't have time to give you details right now, as the new semester begins tomorrow morning, 8 am, and a syllabus needs finalizing before then. But I took copious notes, so I'm sure I'll give some report eventually! Suffice it to say I am once again filled with gratitude at all I learned.

Okay (it's Monday night now), something from each.

In the talk at St. Michael's (below) I surprised myself by gathering together all the bits of the book that are actually my ideas. I wasn't going to do that - all messenger, all the time - but somehow it came together that way as I finalized my notes in the subway on the way over. So after framing things in terms of how Job makes every reader or interpreter or user "make a book" of it, I offered two images I'd found helpful for understanding the Book of Job, and two morals of the story:

1. a mobile, different parts of which are in the foreground at any given time (and some perhaps hidden), but whose life and role in people's lives involves just that movement; 
2. a mousetrap, tempting people to try to fix its meaning and then challenging that meaning with some other part which just doesn't fit - a little naughty, perhaps, for a book that demands that we make a book of it! 

1. the "patience of Job" shouldn't be thought to refer only to the Job of the frame story, but to all of the book, showing that "patience" doesn't exclude protest; 
2. the importance of Job's friends - but that you know! 

I'm not sure why this proved my focus (there were, of course, cameos from Jerome to the Midrash to Aquinas to Calvin to Simone Weil to contemporary interpreters like Zuckerman and Newsom); people usually ask for my reading of Job but I usually change the subject. Maybe in the non-academic setting it's easier to own one's voice.

And at "Job in Long Beach," stories of real devastation (far more than we heard in Red Hook): houses, cars, boats lost, and the terrifying sound of a dislodged wooden deck knocking farther and farther into your house with each wave as you cower upstairs. These people have been struggling daily for the last year, some still living with family far away or in substandard rental apartments, frustrated by insurance and other bureaucracies, but also moved by strangers' outpouring of care from the time of Sandy on. For many, the last year has brought new hardships - family members diagnosed with cancer, deaths in the family - and many recounted the moments when they'd felt like Job. (One told of a man behind her in the line for gas who, when her car couldn't make the curve, rolled his eyes and looked heavenward and said, loudly, "Really?!" to which she replied "You tell him!") Many can't trust the ocean, their

erstwhile friend. Ever expecting the next devastating storm, some are still afraid to put things away.

But the reflection which really blew me away came from a rabbi who works in health and human services. Job is different from her clients, she said, because he knows he's innocent. But we mortals are not, all of us are flawed. We all have histories. And when terrible things happen, these histories come back. We wonder if it's because of particular things we did. "We live not just today's traumas." This was a revelation to me - something that makes perfect sense when stated this way, but something I'd not heard anywhere else. (And of course even Job, with a little help from his friends, is doing this, too.) I should add that the Long Beach community is home to many children of Holocaust survivors. The rabbi observed that for survivors she worked with, Sandy brought all that back, too: "Did I fail there too?" People were "overwhelmed, almost to the point of cursing the day they were born."    (Above picture from here)

Bryan, the director and moderator, barely had to ask people to talk about the story of Job. It happened by itself, and not just the woman who said she'd read Job "at least eleven times" since superstorm Sandy. The Book of Job is part of the culture of this community, offering recognition as much as - perhaps more than - comfort. Nobody's waiting for twice the flocks and a new lineup of children. This is very simplistic, said one octogenarian, but the way to move on is to put one foot in front of the other. "Where there's life there's hope," she added.

Again, what a humbling honor to be present for the discussion.

Chopped and diced

My book's most improbable distributor yet? But I suppose Job knows all about Household Blenders - Centrifugal and Masticating Juicers, too!

Launched!

Last night's book launch was a dusey. Thirty seven people showed up! The four speakers - Nic Birns, Jerry Schneewind, Leong Seow and Fran Snyder - gave exquisite 5-minute talklets, each of them worth the price of admission. I learned tons about the Book of Job from them, so I suspect it will have been informative for others present, too! (Nic also took the pictures below.) In attendance depite the busy season were current and past students (Job seminar veterans!), colleagues, folks from church, my editor, a venerable librarian, old friends, and three of four of my recent housemates! Six copies of the book were sold and more signed, and the wine didn't run out. I dare say... a success!

New Yorker minute

 

You know the famous Andy Warhol line... well, my quarter hour seems to have arrived! No less august a magazine than The New Yorker has seen fit to publish a review of my book - indeed, quite a long one (5 pages!). I haven't actually read it yet (you can, here). Why? Well, I learned of it from my editor, who sent an email saying

a fulsome treatment of your book in The New Yorker – did you see it? I don’t think you come across as Mr Rodgers, personally, but as they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Mister Rogers? It was Fred's Will Rogers reference made me a little uneasy. Usually you note that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about when pretty bad things are being said. So all I've done is checked the Mister Rogers reference:

In all this, Larrimore maintains a supremely tolerant position. He approves of the wealth of “interpretative openings and opportunities.” Everything is O.K. with him, and he thinks that whatever disagreements there are may lead to community. (This is interesting, since an absolutely crucial aspect of Job’s trial is that he suffers alone.) Such a latitudinarian approach is perhaps appropriate to a reception study, telling who thought what, and who, after them, thought something else, but eventually it comes to seem anti-intellectual. At times, Larrimore sounds like a kindly Unitarian minister, or like Mister Rogers.

That would hurt if I didn't make the same point about Job's solitary suffering in the book - admittedly among many points and in the context of medieval liturgies and Books of Hours, and again in the admittedly quite involved interpretation of Margarete Susman. It's true that I condemn those who too quickly condemn Job's friends... Just sayin'.

What also doesn't really hurt, though I think it's supposed to, is the reference to Mister Rogers. So I come across as nice? How, well, um, true! I can't remember when it was, but someone likened me to Mister Rogers once before; I rather liked it.

I'm wearing my red cardigan to school tomorrow!

Hear smart people talk about the Book of Job!

Launch!

The Book of Job: A Biography will officially launch next week - Thursday, December 12th, in the Hirshon Suite at The New School (55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor), 8:00-9:30 pm. Wine and cheese served!
I'm very honored that there'll also be a few words from C. L Seow of Princeton Theological Seminary and J. B. Schneewind of Johns Hopkins, as well as from my Lang colleagues Nic Birns and Fran Snyder.

Lives of Great Religious Books

The happy family of which my book is one of the newest members!

Zounds

Yesterday was the official launch of the print and e-book versions of my book - rather moot since Amazon's been disbursing copies for weeks. But nobody told me there's an audiobook, too. Well, there is. (Actually it was there in something I signed, but I didn't think it would come out with the book.) Listening to it - the sample is more than enough for me;

the whole book takes the reader 5 hours 42 minutes - is profoundly strange. That's not me!! Is that what my writing sounds like? It's a little pedantic. Oh well, I suppose it's still better than the computer-generated "video" of the book description, with one of those voices you can choose for your GPS - and which pronounces Job to rhyme with Bob!

Job, a life

I did not, when I accepted the task of doing the Job volume for the "Lives of Great Religious Texts" series, think very much about audience. To the extent I thought about it at all (as an ordinary academic I don't imagine anyone much will actually read what I write), I imagined some undergraduate classes, and some of the kind of folks The New School sought in "educating the educated," that elusive but exquisite beast the "educated lay reader." During the writing, I realized it might also be read in seminaries, and perhaps in religious reading groups. But I should have known better - especially given the argument of my book! I should have remembered that Job is the truest friend and witness of many who suffer, that the Book of Job offers a voice, a framework, a vindication for people enduring terrible afflictions but unable to find a sympathetic hearing, who share the biblical hero's fervent wish (and the frame of my book) 

Oh, that my words were written down!
O that they were inscribed in a book! (Job 19:23)

Today I got what probably won't be the last message from a stranger entitled Job: my biography. The writer (who heard me "On Point") has been housebound for two decades with an undiagnosable disease but consoled by mystical experiences in the way Job was consoled by the voice from the whirlwind. He's written several book manuscripts about his experiences but publishers aren't interested: can I help? Can I?

Making waves

A day after my date with radio destiny I'm settling back into ordinary life, but it's been a weird day. I think it's the strange sensory dislocation involved. In that solitary studio I was responding to voices I heard only over headphones - voices in my head! - along with my own voice, but I realized later that people far away, some known to me and others not, had been hearing me, some live and others later. It was intoxicating, my first real experience of the remote action made possible by, well, the age of mechanical reproducibility. To be honest, I wasn't quite willing just to be here, in this body with its physical limits - as if I'd found I was secretly capable of telekenesis or being in two places at the same time. Of course I was just one segment of a weekly chat show, but I think can see how people get carried away by the scale difference of fame.

In the meantime, the segment has produced 178 responses on the program website. The first to comment were haters, saying sadly predictable things which, also sadly, always produce enough responses to keep them at it - even as there's no evidence they actually listened to the program. For instance:

Please, next time you talk about the bible, please label it the Book of Hooey. Non-believers don't need readings from the bible to tell them about the stark reality of living today. And you and most interviewers on NPR rarely interview the famous atheists about these very things. And we don't need any "Sky God" to guide us or save our lives.

It always amazes me that anyone would worship the despicable deity of the Book of Job. A god that makes a bet, and part of the bet involves the death of innocent people and the suffering of an innocent man. For a bet! But, and here's the kicker, all is well folks, don't you feel sorry for poor Job having lost all his children because, are you ready for it... he has MORE children. And since children as we all know are interchangeable, they all lived happily ever after. One needs to wonder about the mental competence of anyone who thinks that is a stellar example of divine goodness and love. I could introduce you to plenty of human beings who are much better people than this god. And they don't demand to be worshipped either.

Others are a bit better informed, and a few even reference the program! (The subtler points I made were missed, at least by some.) But why do they let themselves get sucked into exchanges with the sad haters? Why bother? I suppose they're all experiencing action at a distance, too.

I should include some of the helpful, indeed illuminating comments too.

I sometimes teach Job in the Judaism section of my humanities class, and it provides a very necessary moral statement to the Tanakh, encouraging a deontological ethic when so much of the Torah demonstrates a teleological ethic. If stories like Adam and Eve demonstrate that it's important to obey God for the potential reward or punishment, Job shows that reward and punishment are irrelevant, that being good is important for its own sake. The frame story of the bet is only morally problematic if taken literally & obscures the much more important moral lesson at the center, that being good must have no relationship with reward. In humanities, we parallel it with the Bhagavad Gita where the importance for today's world is not that killing one's cousins is okay but that karma is only a function of dharma. One must first do his/her moral duty without self interest and not consider the "fruits of action."

All this research and discussion, and no mention that Job is also a prophet in Islam, and his story is mentioned in the Quran? It's not only 'two faiths' that have this story. (I don't think there's any wager in the Islamic version.)

It's fascinating that so many ignore all the people who've died and come back. The research shows how consistent the experiences are, and what they discover is that WE CHOSE THIS LIFE with all its potential for negative experiences, so we might grow. WE achieve goals thru suffering, and thinking of God as an external being that tortures is incorrect. No more whining - you chose it. Listen to their accounts on YouTube (Gordon Allen , Joe Geraci). They have learned some of the secrets, and it's mind-blowing, and it feels right.

Job is from the East? There is clearly a Buddhist connection here. Job's patience can be seen as acceptance and acceptance leads to Enlightenment, or what God perceived to be better than S/He.

I'm a lifelong believing Catholic. My faith has seen me through some tough times and as a physician who understands the definition of stress as a situation where we're not in control, I believe that without my faith and the sacraments (the same as grace) I would be dead. I read the book of Job years ago when I was every bit as blessed as Job. That was due to my family and the tremendous faith of my Irish mom and old world Prussian father. Evil comes into the world as a result of our free will. We make the choices and in a just world suffer the consequences either in this world or in the next. None of that rules out the possibility of reincarnation as an underlying truth. I can see how we might be in purgatory (a matter of semantics) now. The world goes it's way with the wheat growing with the chaff until that final trumpet sounds and we are judged by our deeds in the cold light where "nothing" is hidden. Every action, good or bad, begins at the level of intention. That is an ultimate abstract (either intellectual or spiritual) thing which makes mankind unique among creatures. We are the only creatures who regularly die for some abstract idea. It's very important for the world and mankind as a whole that "good" intentions are at the root and beginning of every action. Faith hope and charity and "the greatest of these is charity". Ultimately the best of "humanism", science and religion must come together.

The tribulations Job goes through are part of his journey and relationship with God. His steadfast faith enables him to experience God within the end of the text. Like Thich Nhat Han states "No Mud, No Lotus".

My fifteen minutes

I was live on a nationally syndicated radio show today! The show is out of Boston, so I had to go to a radio studio in the Flatiron, and was pretty much alone with my mike and my notes. (A kind technician brought me a cup of lemon ginger tea, and indulged my request for a photo!)

The experience was a little strange. The host was busy (mine was the second half of his program) so all my communication had been with an assistant; a second assistant greeted me when we were about to go live. I had assumed there would be a brief hello from the host before the program, but no - we dove right in, live, without so much as a how-do-you-do. I probably was like the sound equivalent of a deer in the headlights, at least for the first segment... It didn't flow. This isn't going well, I thought.

But once I settled into it, after a brilliantly apposite sound clip from the Police's "Wrapped around your finger," it was fun! I'd started out a little cross because it seemed we weren't going to talk about my book, but about the Book of Job itself, and "the modern age." Here's the opener:

[Host:] The Book of Job is a brutal corner of the Bible.  A good man, Job, thrown arbitrarily, suddenly, into a life of absolute agony.  Stripped of his wealth.  His children killed.  Plagued and hounded and showered with misery.  His only consolation sounds like none: “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.” Deal with it.  The Book of Job is so harsh.  It’s about unrelieved injustice and the suffering of innocent humans.  About grief and rage and the human condition.  And maybe about wisdom that goes right beyond the Bible.  Up next On Point:  The Book of Job, and life right now.

I thought I'd insulated myself from all such questions by writing about other people's (indeed people in the past's) takes on the book - how naive! I've had my head in books about books too long: these aren't just academic or historical question for most folks (my line when it's just professors talking...!). So I had to speak, at least some of the time, in my own voice! It was a learning experience. I'm that E. M. Forster character who doesn't know what she thinks till she hears what she says.

The author of The Book of Job: A Biography apparently buys Bruce Zuckerman's theory of Job as a parody the authorities coopted since they couldn't suppress it, as well as David Cline's speculation that the story is the nightmare of a rich person, and thinks that the wager is the most awful part of the Book of Job, that God ignores human concerns in his speeches, that Job seems to be the moral winner over God... but also that the Book of Job empowers those whose worlds have collapsed around them, has been a comfort to the disenfranchised, describes what true patience looks like in a world like ours, presents a grand God, and affirms the reality - as no human source perhaps can - of truly innocent suffering. Oh, and a faltering theist outted himself by using (however inconsistently) the word "Godself" to avoid the masculine pronoun!

By the second half, when a somewhat formulaic second guest was brought in, I think I was getting the hang of it. But it's definitely a good thing I didn't do any research on the program, which I know I've heard referred to, before the broadcast. It's syndicated to over two hundred NPR stations across the land! Yoicks. Much better to think it was just me and the cup of tea on the phone with some folks in Massachusetts...

Page 99 Test

I got to contribute to another blog! Check it out in larger print here.

For some less carefully honed words about the book, here's an interview I gave the school paper. The student who interviewed me had not, she told me afterwards, heard of the Book of Job before being assigned the interview, but she was glad to have learned about it. She added that she'd done some research on it (she didn't have access to my book) and reassured me that everything I'd said squared with what she'd found out! The next day I happened to see her and asked, a little apologetically, if she'd been up all night transcribing (I talked her ear off). No, she said, she'd written it out from memory, and only then gone back to the tape for details. Just sayin'.