Job's children

"Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts" wrapped up today, with a festival of student creative projects. I was touched by several which mourn Job's lost family, who vanish as collateral damage in most tellings. (Students may have been responding to a scene of burial in Diane Glancy's Island of the Innocent.) 

Especially exquisite was a hand-printed booklet with a "Liturgy for Sleep and Survival," the prayers Jehorah, wife of Job, said each night for each of her lost children as if nothing had happened, tucking each child into bed as she had the night before, and the night before, and the night before that. Each prayer is a kind of dance evoking the personality of the child, the movements described like ritual instructions, and often illustrated with a long exposure of the artist performing it. Here are a few:

What a pleasure, what a privilege, to be able to teach such students.

Worry dolls

It's time for the final show of student projects in my course on the Book of Job and the Arts. As in years past, projects run the gamut from intense to whimsical and operate in a plethora of media. One evocative project was a non-religious student's desire to make for her friends analogs to the small totem-like objects she's always handled when stressed. I guess having the tokens with me is an act of religious practice on my end, she muses. Making wishes to the tokens and praying to them makes me feel stronger and safe. So I created worry dolls for myself and my friends. Sometimes sharing pain with others helps letting it go. She asked some friends what causes them stress and what they do when overcome with worry and got to work. 

This "worry doll" is for a friend who says she fidgets with her fingers when under stress and seeks out water for consolation for sorrow. Not quite Job's potsherd, but somehow it scratches a kindred itch.

Job well done

My course on Job and the Arts is almost done. Students are presenting final projects in the discussion sections this week, highlights from which weill be shared with the whole class in next week's final session. So today was my last time to lecture. As I've done before I let a collage remind them of all we've worked through together, and instead ran a final google.doc and discussed three "new frontiers" in Job reception, in biblical studies, political theory and literature. 

The first was Edward Greenstein's stark new translation of the Book of Job - the one which ends with a non-plussed Job declaring 

As a hearing by the ear I have heard you. / And now my eye has seen you. // That is why I am fed up; / I take pity on "dust and ashes." 

The second was William Connolly's framing of his new politics for the Anthropocene in terms of a Jobian "myth" which might accommodate even secularists under its banner of a "dissonant world of multiple forces that do not carry special entitlements or guarantees for any beings" and yet merits a nihilism-defying attachment: 

Its energies solicit our embrace in part because we and it are made of the same stuff.

The last was the scene from NoViolet Bulawayo's novel We Need New Names where the protagonist is reconciled with her father (dying of AIDS, timely on World AIDS day) as children dance a song about the suffering of Job with him:  

Jobho makes you call out to heaven even though you know God is occupied with better things and will not even look your way. Jobho makes you point your forefinger to the sky and sing at the top of your voice. We itch and we scratch and we point and we itch again and we fill the shack with song.

"Performing the problem of suffering" indeed! 

Saecula saeculorum

My old friend and colleague C came to the "Job and the Arts" class yesterday to help us think about Shakespeare's King Lear - a story sufficently like and unlike Job's to raise lots of interesting questions. She showed clips from two very different productions, and we had students break out and compare them and reflect on what actors and directors bring to this or other plays concerned with human suffering. Lots of issues came up, but I was floored by an aside in C's response to a group which had pointed to the questions of aging posed by Lear. In affirming the importance of that theme she said getting old before we are wise was only more relevant a concern today and for them, considering that many of you will live into your hundreds.

I'm not sure why but this aside took my breath away. I guess I've accepted that changes in lifestyle and environment mean that human lifespans have topped out... but when you consider that there are people living into their hundreds right now, there are surely young people I know now who will do the same. One folks I know will certainly see the twenty-second century. This is obvious when you think about it but somehow I had not thought about it. This seems a massive sort of failing given that I work with young people - and supposedly think about the Anthropocene. What's so unthinkable about this? C has college age children; I felt exposed as a part of the "childless left." (But when I told two students about C's remark today and asked if they expected to live into their hundreds they balked too.) 

As it happens, thinking in terms of 100 year Liberian lifespans is encouraged also by a passage in Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses, which I am reading with gusto. In a section reprinted in the Guardian Solnit writes

There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about 100 years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish civil war or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. 

Solnit mentions this in the context of reflecting on the different ways of experiencing time which trees afford us - and the ways they also connect us to to people who lived before or will live after us. Someone may have planted the tree under which we find shelter today - and someone may find solace under a tree whose seed we plant today. Solnit's rhapsodizing on an observation of Orwell's in a similar register: every time you commit an antisocial act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate season, push an acorn into the ground.

But today I was thinking about the human acorns all around me and the blighted world they will be inhabiting long after I am gone. (Long?) Those whose lives will be rendered precarious by global heating, ecological collapse and the rest aren't strangers in the future - not that strangers in the future should have less claim on our concern. For that matter, just like those already centenarian today, this precarity isn't just a thing of the future but a present reality for many. These are all things I know, or thought I knew. Anthropocene apocalypses are not just notional events in the future but present and, indeed, have happened already manu times to the people of indigenous worlds. C's comment made me realize I haven't really taken in the enormity of it. 

FOOL: 

            Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise. 

King Lear Act 1, Scene 5

Burning bright

Visited one of the discussion sections of "Book of Job and the Arts" today, where the discussion leader led into Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job through this perhaps most famous of Blake's poems.

The poem was familiar to several students, but all could enjoy its canny combination of simple rhythm and the fearful power it can barely contain. The discussion leader related this to the divine speeches in Job, especially about Behemoth, where God seems moved by His own language. Was Blake here reflecting also on his own own poetry, we were asked? In the background lay the particular sublimity thought to reside in unanswerable rhetorical questions...

Why do bad things happen to good people?

I asked the students in my "Job and the Arts" class to come up with at least three answers commonly given to the question "why do bad things happen to good people?" Some interesting responses emerged...

1. God does not control the good things or bad things that happen to people, god is not here to fix or make better, he simply brought everything here 

2. All actions have reactions, the most horrible things to happen to people can domino into the most glorious wonderful things, any one moment or action is not a complete action, it continues onward forever 

3. There is true randomness in the world, good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people, there is no reason only chaos. 

1. Karma, but multidimensional: you could have done something in another life that justifies something bad happening to you in this one. 

 2. The purpose of life is to experience everything, the joy and the suffering. It’s all part of living life, no matter if you’re a good or a bad person. 

3. God is a concept, not an entity. Things happen to people, there is no God at fault necessarily. 

1. Setting some kind of cosmic example for others to view and avoid 

2. There is no higher power in control of these occurrences, simply chance 

3. A well rounded, thoughtful existence cannot be achieved in the absence of suffering combated by joy 

1. Good and bad are subjective… with this label, one cuts short the meaning that could be derived from a circumstance. They are incomplete stories. 

2. Entropy, good and bad things happen at random. This also explains so many other things. 

3. People do bad things to good people because the doers are bad people. It is not as personal as something just happening to a good person. 

4. A buddhist would say an answer to this question would take years and years to answer and it would not get you any closer to enlightenment. 

5. God is human too, I mean he has a part of Jesus in him.

1. Cause and Effect 

2. God likes to have fun sometimes 

3. You get what you put out into the world 

4. God picks Her favorites (holy people?) 

5. Chance! Absolute chaos and luck 

1. Coincidence 

2. For lessons to be learned 

3. There is no happiness without suffering

1. Manifestation but, like, in a bad way - sometimes we convince ourselves we’ve willed something into reality 

2. Sometimes things just happen - chaos - nothing anyone can really do 

3. Our perspective on suffering as punishment - often times people explain suffering as some kind of lesson or test 

1. Nihilism (GOTT IST TOT) 

2. Progress! (Techno Exceptionalism) (the spoils of manifest Destiny) 

3. Biological Nature, Survival of the Fittest 

4. Deep Time (Cosmic Awareness) 

5. Good and Bad do not exist only laws/rules (the Social Contract) 

1. Bad things happen to everyone we just put more emphasis on what happens to good people. Bad things already happened to bad people why do you think they are the way they are? It broke them. 

2. What one might see as good another might see as bad 

 3. Probability and fate are real things that i believe affect everyone. 

1. The world works as a series of coincidences 

2. Mercury is in retrograde 

3. There are no actual good people or bad things - everything lies on a “spectrum” and people’s experiences dictate how they see the world and where they’d place themselves and the things that happen to them on this spectrum

1. There is no such thing as an absolute “goodness” 

2. Things happen for a reason. The bad thing might lead you to a good thing. 

3. It’s a mistake to think that you are the only one who goes through bad things -> God is “just” so I guess he makes it happen to everyone 

4. Because God doesn’t exist. 

5. God might have a different perspective on what is good and what is bad 

6. Because you relied too much on God... he is tired of you 

42:6

In the Job class today I spent a fair - but not inordinate - amount of time enthusing about one element in the brilliant way Carol Newsom represents her understanding of the Book of Job as if it were a piece of theater. We've been thinking about stagings for a while, a very effective way to get students to try to make sense of the book as a whole, and Newsom's take is the gold standard. It involves two separate teams of actors in different costume and manner, as well as disembodied voices from above and even the intrusion of an audience member - very avant garde! But at its heart is the moment highlit above, where Job, having heard the two speeches from the whirlwind, says ... something.  

The final words uttered before this so very vocal person subsides into silence are, I gather, among the most difficult to translate in a text full of opaque and unparalleled formulations. The King James Version's penitential translation is familiar 

I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. 

but there is as much textual warrant for something quite different, like Stephen Mitchell's blissed out

I will be quiet, comforted that I am but dust.

and maybe even also for Ed Greenstein's iconoclastic rendering (which we'll come to at the end of the class) 

I am fed up; I take pity on dust and ashes.

Newsom makes the indeterminacy of this a feature, not a bug - though the audience may not know it. Consistent with her understanding of the Book of Job as a "dialogic" text whose last word is never spoken - passing the mic to us, whether we want it or not - the audience has to guess what Job said. What they guess will be shaped by the things they were able to hear and see, but the multiple voices they heard make it uncertain. It's frustrating, and generative. 

Newsom's stage direction is also, I found myself rhapsodizing, deeply respectful of the privacy of Job, the intimacy of his experience. The words are not addressed to us, and the experience they report isn't one we can have just by hearing about it. My students may have heard that as the familar comforting platitude that "everything's subjective" but in this case perhaps it is, whether one understand the encounter Job had to have been deeply and unfathomably personal, or the opposite. He's earned that insight; we haven't.

Everybody's a director

As part of today's lecture on "Job and the Arts" I had students break out into groups of 3 and spend 10 minutes thinking about how they might stage the Book of Job. This is an activity I planned last time I taught the class but, running short on time, dropped. I nearly dropped it again this year, as it was planned for the end of last week's class (about Theatre of War's Book of Job project), and time again ran out. But I'm glad to have tried it today - and not just because it's the perfect set-up for Carol Newsom's dramatization of her interpretation of Job as a piece of avant garde theater.

Here are some of the ideas the students came up with. Who knew many of them see Job as some kind of dark comedy?

Experimental theater, modern clothing, Job is constantly bathed in red light

Midsummer Night’s Dream inspired, casting job as a fairy, God as head spirit of the forest

New York Jewish community setting; big rotating lazy susan, each friend has section of circle; set rotates between city (reality) and nature/mystical

Job as a woman, God played by multiple people/a collective of voices speaking to Job 

One man show: Job has to make the sets himself, do all the costume changes, suffering through having to change all the scenes himself; especially funny that he is asking “why me! What has happened!” after he sets it all up himself; have the friends of Job in the crowd, give the script to the entire audience 

God speaks to himself as God/Satan

Live improv sketch; actors should bring in their own grievances to the sketch to make it their own 

Set in a suburban high school; friends are all stoners skipping class getting very existential; God is cast as very cartoonish principal with walkie talkie and dangling keys 

Musical comedy set in an office; watercooler talk every week, Job complains about life and fear of being fired; boss is Elihu 

Each friend is in a different room

Brechtian or “epic” theatre style. Very artificial feels almost sit-com like… alienating the audience from Job asking the audience to think objectively about the material rather than empathetically

Comedy of Q Anon believers, suffer and experience horrible situations all the while blaming the world for their issues not aware of their own absurdity (believing obama is a satan worshiper)

Over-the-top debate style; all of the actors sitting at a table in “Job’s home”; God is the “moderator” 

We would put the audience in Job's position and have them play Job. Somehow puts the audience through pain and suffering. Hire actors that are good at improvising. Interact with the audience and make them feel as though they've had something taken from them. Give the audience an experience of loss and replace their loss with something “better” at the end

Elihu as an actual child

I'm not sure how all of these would work but many seem to me quite inspired! The prevalence of comedy may have something to do with the fact that the class began with one of the TA's giving a mini-lecture of comedy as a performance of the problem of suffering, linking "A Serious Man" and Job, but I also suspect that being thrown together with strangers in a zoom breakout room may have made comic settings easier to propose. I told the class I thought these were terrific but that if, in the impossible task of agreeing on something with people they didn't know they found themselves thinking of different stagings of their own - so much the better. 

After a short lecture on interpretations which take Job apart and those which put it back together again, I sent them on their way with the imaginary staging of Carol Newsom (some of whose work was assigned this week). Newsom thinks every component of Job plays its part, not in producing a seamless production but rather in ensuring a jarringly "polyphonic" experience which "shifts to the audience much of the work" of grappling with the problems being explored. 

We have work to do... but the work has commenced!

These questions that are bothering you, Larry

We're still on the approach in the Job course - the Book of Job is assigned for next (third) week. Today's assigned materials were the Coen Brothers' "A Serious Man" and the text of a talk-meditation given by Alice Walker at a meeting of African American Buddhists. I used these already last time, but that was in person. Today, on zoom, I decided to forgo screening clips from the movie and instead read from the screenplay, hoping it would bring back the images of the film. The scene was the end of protagonist Larry Gopnik's conversation with Rabbi Nachtner, the second of the three rabbis he consults, a sort of film within the film which might be called "The Goy's Teeth." Much gets lost without the cinematography, the jagged electric guitar soundtrack, and bravura scenes mixing shuffling voices and faces - but that's all to the good. Next week we confront the Book of Job as a text, and I'd like students to come at it with a sense that there's much that even this superlative piece of writing cannot convey.

First classes

So I've had my first in-person class since we moved to zoom last March, and my first zoom class since we moved back to in-person this week. For the first year seminar, 18 of us in a favorite old classroom (and one in dorm quarantine, joining us through my laptop) yesterday morning early - 8am! For the Job lecture, 43 of us at my dining table this morning, at the rather more civilized 10:15. The commute is rather less stressful than the one to school, too! Each format has its pleasures, though the nostalgic charm of being in a zoom gallery may just be a passing phenomenon. 

In person is definitely more dynamic, and not just because we're moving through shared space, fully embodied (though masked!). You never have to shush a class in zoom! Indeed zoom has all sorts of delays built into it, like it or not, with people frozen in their usually muted squares, so you can't get the joy of repartee. But there is the tumbling cascade of the chat! And you see people's faces! And more interactions among students are possible than in a large lecture hall. Good to be amphibian!

Job and the Arts 2020

As promised, some final projects from the Job and the Arts course.

 

Job's wife by Serina Clemente

Untitled by Rhea Mehta

 

A scene from "Home, Father, and Disease" by Rain Sheng

Untitled by Nathaniel Leshem

 

Untitled by Mino Shih

 

Pinchpots made, smashed and put back together by Juno Stilley

 

A wind chime by Joana Liu; Job in brass, friends frosted glass 

A fashion collection called "Destruction" by Isaac Robertson

 

A hand-made book by Gou Lee Kim

Two scenes from "八苦/The Eight Sufferings" by Freeze Shih

"Space between triangles" by Beatriz Cifuentes

 

"Job Confronts God," a scarf by Asa Sanon-Jules

These are only a few from among those willing to let me share their work with the wider class. (Yes, we zoomed it!) There were plenty of others, including powerful stories and essays and some truly remarkable work in sound. It's amazing and humbling that students put so much thought and effort and feeling into a class which was outside their majors - and put such work into final projects in a semester when everyone's guaranteed an A or A-. But of cours this is also the semester things came apart at the seams; the Book of Job witnessed it with us.

Job in the time of COVID-19

The academic year is rapidly coming to a close - next week is the last week of the semester! For the lecture course on the Book of Job and the Arts, that meant today was the last class of lecture, since next week's class is given over to a festival of students' remarkable final projects. But I decided to keep the lecturing to minimum. In lieu of the retrospective I usually give at a class's end, I put together a collage* (students have access to my powerpoints, as well as recordings of the class) and offered four very general conclusions:

Some problems cannot be solved but need to be performed.

Nobody hears a story like Job’s for the first time.

More versions are better.

You are part of the tradition. 

But most of the class - 50 of our 75 minutes - was devoted to discussion. Discussion in a zoom lecture class, you ask? Yes! I'm getting a better understanding of the constraints and opportunities of being online. A few weeks ago I started asking students to contribute to a class google.doc in lieu of taking attendance, each time with a prompt keyed to the week's reading. Students had two days after lecture to do it. Participation was remarkably serious: students were clearly happy to have a chance to do something, to say something. Their responses were thoughtful, often profound - I'm hoping they took advantage of the chance to read through them all, too. Starting two weeks ago, I incorporated the google.doc in the class time. It's an exciting thing to see a bunch of people working simultaneously on the same document!

Today I decided to include two google doc'ing opportunities. (So 15 minutes of lecture, 10 of google doc, 10 more lecture, 10 more google doc, then 30 minutes for an open discussion spearheaded by the TAs.) I told them I'd decided to cut back my lecturing to make time for a second google doc experience because of what I'd learned from last week's, where students had given a remarkable set of stories of bad experiences which wound up bearing blessings - twelve single-spaced pages' worth! Remarkable - but not quite what I'd asked for. The prompt followed the template of Saiweng:

SAIWENG LOST HIS HORSE
Describe - from art, history, your own experience or your imagination - a series of events like those described in the story of the old frontiersman. It could be a bad thing which turns out to be a good thing, which however turns out to be even worse... or something good which turns out to be something bad, until that leads to something even better...

Their stories all had happy or at least hopeful outcomes! But then, it occurred to me (and I told them this morning), in April 2020, where we are beset by calamities and nobody knows what the future will look like, we don't need to be reminded that bad things can come on unexpectedly. We need to believe that suffering and evil are not the end of the story. To talk about the Book of Job and the arts as if we were not in a moment of general dislocation and fear would be irresponsible. So two in-class google.docs:

JOB IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 
In just a few months, the world has been turned on its head by the novel coronavirus. The stories we think powerful and relevant have changed, as have the places we find ourselves within them. How has your take on the story of Job changed? 

WHAT STAYED WITH YOU?
Describe one planned and one unplanned thing that will stay with you from this class. 

Responses are still coming in but they've amply confirmed my sense that they afforded more significant lessons than anything I could have said. More on these responses, as well as the final projects, next week!

*Georges de la Tour, "Job and his wife"; Anna Ruth Henriques, The Book of Mechtilde; drama students reading Job; old print of Purim players; the different voices of the Book of Job's 42 chapters; Rev. Leslie Callahan; Theater of War's Bryan Doerries; The Tree of Life; Rube Goldberg machine used in a TA's mini-lecture on Dostoevsky; drama student in a production of Steven Adley Guirgis' Last Days of Judas Iscariot; poet Diane Glancy; 19th century print of King Lear on the heath; Alice Walker; you know what; human rights theorist Brian Phillips; old English text of the Matins of the Office of the Dead; Carol Newsom's mapping of the arch of the story of Job; Joni Mitchell; theater director Cecilia Rubino; Groundhog Day; Archibald MacLeish's J. B.; whirlwind from Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job; image from shooting of A Serious Man; Fugui's ox from Yu Hua's To Live.

Tenebrae 2020

Today is Wednesday of Holy Week when, for decades, the Church of the Holy Apostles used to offer a service called Tenebrae, "a service of darkness." As readings were offered, the candles in the church were progressively extinguished, issuing in an overwhelming dark stillness. I told the students in my Job and the arts class about it this morning, and that it had been started during the AIDS pandemic, by a music director who would himself later die of it. I mentioned it as one of our texts today - Archibald MacLeish's J. B. - is its own kind of Tenebrae, the stage dimming steadily into darkness. Only after the last words - when

most plays fade to black - does some "plain white daylight" arrive, through a humble door from which no light had shone before. Even reading about it makes for powerful theater. J. B. has been part of my course from the start, indeed it's been with me since high school, when I was a series of hapless "First Messengers" delivering the news of the deaths of J. B. and his wife Sarah's children, one by one. I've discussed the closing scene with students before, too. But on April 8, 2020, I said, I had to say something more. The devastated world at the end of J.B. is all too resonant as the covid-19 pandemic destroys lives and worlds around us. (806 deaths reported in New York City just yesterday. Unfathomable; 10 days ago the mind already short circuited at 222.) 

Sarah's words The candles in churches are out. / The lights have gone out in the sky. resonate in a different way when churches are shuttered - no candles will be lit this Easter in many churches - and when the universe seems implacable and indifferent to the horror and heartbreak in every part of the world. I ended with the zoom Powerpoint equivalent of Tenebrae, whiting out all but these words from the texts final pages. I think my voice had fallen to a hush, too. I mumbled something about the audience and actors alone together in the dark, hearing as much as seeing the halting, caring movements of Sarah and J.B. finding their way back together on the stage, blow[ing] on the coal of the heart.

Old Testament Indian

A new book on Job came in the mail today, and what a book! Poet Diane Glancy's Island of the Innocent: A Consideration of the Book of Job is a book-length engagement with Job, refracted through Glancy's experience as a Cherokee and the Job-like history of Native Americans. She gave a "craft talk" on Job and the Cherokee ballad tradition for Poets House just last night - or would have, had technical difficulties not intervened.

But students in my class had already heard Glancy talking about the book. In the alternate reality in which everything were not shut down, she would in fact have visited our class last week! Instead she kindly agreed to a recorded zoom conversation last Friday, which was immensely enjoyable. An edited set of excerpts from the conversation, expertly stitched together by one of my teaching assistants, was one of the course materials assigned to our students this week, along with a selection of poems from the book chosen for us by the author.

And in lieu of taking attendance, I asked students to select some lines from Island of the Innocent that affected them and tell us why on a google.doc. So many insights! Doubtless many of the students also delighted in seeing Glancy's language refracted in so many ways.

What about the book itself? Above are its two prefaces, explanations of the project - one which, we learned, extends back years, even decades - and of the title. She told us she often drives long distances listening to audiobooks, including the Bible, across the prairie, the Book of Job from early on a favorite. (William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job, too, have accompanied her for decades - the text assigned to students along with Glancy's.) As ideas come to her - like wind turbines on a hill in the distance - she jots them down, and some end up in poems. Also from early on she felt compelled to bring Jobs wife's view to speech, giving her a remarkable voice, and a name: Jehora (which spellcheck corrects to Jehova!). Here are two of the shorter poems.

It's a magnificent effort, moving through many genres and moods. The "fissures" Glancy finds in the Book of Job as she reads (listens) and considers it open up exquisite worlds of loss and care, speechlessness and song, lament and, also, faith. So grateful to have been able to share it with my class, and to see them, too, respond to it.

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!

Next year in Jerusalem

I had a guest speaker in the Job and the Arts class today, a Baptist preacher who occasionally preaches on Job. She insisted we start our conversation by describing how we knew each other. Long long ago, when I had just started teaching, she was my TA for REL 222 “Approaches to the Study of Religion.” A historian she feared it would be drily theoretical but it turned out, thankfully, not to be! She said she still remembers my lecture on Mendelssohn; indeed she was telling someone about it just last week.

Moses Mendelssohn! A name I haven’t heard in ages! But it’s true, I had students in "Approaches" read Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, which I used to anchor an argument about the meaning and value of ritual in religion. What my erstwhile TA remembered was Mendelssohn's observation that you can’t make yourself believe something, something I reprised for this class (without its subtle polemic against Christianity) as a basic but largely unacknowledged fact about human beings. (The only thing more absurd is the idea that you choose your beliefs.) Any tradition that demands belief can’t but make intolerant hypocrites of its devotees.

That’s why, Mendelssohn wrote, ritual is so important, especially ritual whose meaning is never fixed or final. It offers us a way to be religious without pretending. We came back to this after a wide-ranging discussion of how the Book of Job interrupts pious certainties, enjoining us to revere good questions over bad answers. Mendelssohn doesn't (I dimly recall) have anything to say about Job but thee views resonate deeply with the sense I've been inviting students to make of it. I told my guest (and the class) that my course is called “Performing the problem of suffering” because this is a problem we could never satisfactorily answer. Instead of throwing up our hands, we are invited by texts like the Book of Job us to study and interpret and reinterpret, tell and retell... and so abide with those questions we can neither answer nor leave off asking. Perhaps my whole approach owes to Mendelssohn!

Midrash

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.

Connecting the dots

Meanwhile in the Job course, building on last week's riveting experience of hearing the words of Job, today I had students speak words of Job themselves. First, as part of explaining the pros and cons of separating the "impatient Job" of the poetic center from the "patient Job" of the frame story, I had them read aloud David Rosenberg's version of Job 3 in the style of William Carlos Williams and John Coltrane. Later, as we explored further textual complexities, they got to read aloud the King James Version translation of Job 28, first as the sort of disembodied "interlude" as which it is usually marked in Bibles today, and then again, with a lead-in from the end of Job 27, as the continuation of the words of the person speaking before (there's not indication in the text itself of a change of speaker) - which would be Job himself. How the story changes, how the character of Job changes, how the dialectic of patience and impatience changes!

This left us ready, I thought, to try to formulate some words of our own. Carol Newsom, our guide through the texts' perfectly calibrated challenges, suggests that the Book of Job works its magic as a "polyphonic" text because its different parts keep each other in a kind of constant check. Far from forcing us to choose one as authentic, they are incommensurable, operating simultaneously to remarkable dialogic effect. She introduces this way of approaching the text with a better take on the contrast between the folk tale-like frame story and the jagged brilliance of the poetic speeches. The frame story leads us to expect a certain kind of story, an expectation which is shaken but not replaced when the dialogue intervenes. The speeches don't offer an alternative narrative shape, and in fact rely for their continued shock value on their continued pushing against the frame's story expectations.
 

Newsom illustrates this with a cool illustration (The New Interpreters Bible, IV:324). The frame story continues in the background even as the poetic dialogue grabs the mike. But - and this is where it gets really fun - there must have been a dialogue between Job and his friends displaced by the poetic dialogue, and we can, with a little effort, reconstruct what kind of dialogue it must have been. So I asked the class to try to do just that, giving them for orientation Job's last words before the intrusion of the poetic dialogue

Shall we receive the good at the hand of God,

and not receive the bad? (2:7)

and the God's works after the intrusion ends

My wrath is kindled against you [Eliphaz] and your two friends;

for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. (42:7)

I'm not sure everyone understand what we were doing but enough got it so we could have a useful discussion afterwards. This Job is more like chapter 28. He doesn't complain that things don't make sense, and certainly does not protest or wish he had never lived. As Newsom and other intepreters have pointed out, the Job of the frame story doesn't have a retributive view of divine justice, where good behavior is rewarded and bad punished. This is the Job, rather, of 1:21's “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” He could easily have said wisdom is inaccessible to mortals except as the fear of the Lord and leading a good life (28:28). It makes perfect sense that God should, in the aftermath, commend this way of speaking which, when you think of it, even squares with the divine speeches.

But what, then, might Job's friends have said - something God instead condemns in anger? To perform this exercise we had to take seriously what the text tells us but people routinely dismiss, that they were truly friends. (You know this is an old refrain of mine.) A student nailed it: "what's happening to you isn't fair!" and we were off. We didn't have as much time as last time I tried all this but I think I explained Newsom'e argument better today...

Greta of Uz

We had some powerful theater in the course on the Book of Job and the Arts today! As in the first iteration of the course, Bryan Doerries, director of Theater of War Productions (earlier name: Outside the Wire), was with us, telling us about their experience performing the Book of Job for communities who had been devastated by natural disasters in Missouri, New York, Japan, Mississippi. But this time we were also again able to recreate the experience with a performance of the version of Job Theater of War uses, a condensed version of Stephen Mitchell's poetic rendition, read powerfully by four gifted students from our own School of Drama, and seamlessly integrated into a far-reaching discussion by Doerries. The young woman who read the part of Job, Sophia Rizzulo, was especially compelling. Watch this:

In the discussion which Doerries led afterward, one of the students articulated what many were surely feeling. Seeing and hearing Job as a young person, a woman, utterly transformed the Book of Job, whom the student had of course pictured as an old man. The founding premise of Theater of War is that, if we but encounter them in the right way - not in a theater but in a place that's already part of our lives and together with others in our community - the words of ancient plays will speak directly to us across gulfs of time and culture. That's what happened today. Job wasn't from Uz but our contemporary, her anger and pain that of the generations who find a world in ruins, while those who should have taken care of it deflect and equivocate and cynically blame her for her own suffering. One of the teaching assistants told me he was reminded of the transformative anger of Greta Thunberg. How dare you?

It lives!

Speaking of the Spring 2020 iteration of "Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts," here's the working schedule.

A remarkable roster of guest speakers, and some new readings too - including Yu Hua's To Live, thanks to the course's travels in China.