I’ll never forget the experience of teaching the Book of Job at Finchley Progressive Synagogue. Specifically, no matter how we dealt with the biblical material, the narrative and theology, we could not get past a challenge that a member of the class kept raising: The start of the book, in which the devastating events are framed, sees Job’s experience as part of some challenge between God and HaSatan (the accuser). This backdrop to the book, which is veiled from the characters, but revealed to its readers, subverts every possible theological argument – because ultimately, God appears manipulative and far from benevolent. We were left, as many scholars of the Bible have suggested, with the impression that the Book of Job is more a book about how we react to the grief of our fellow human beings and treat them in their time of distress, than a text from which any clear theology can be built.
It certainly chimed with a session I ran at Shavuot some years ago about theological protest texts in rabbinic literature. As we grappled with material that even the sages from nearly 2000 years ago struggled to utter,(1) one member of the group said the unspeakable – only hinted at within the text – perhaps God is not all good.
We often hear and teach about God as all-present (omnipresent), all-knowing (omniscient), all-powerful (omnipotent) and wholly good (beneficent). When trying to understand how evil can exist in the world with a God with these attributes (theodicy), one usually resorts to limiting, in some way, one of these attributes; without this limitation we would be forced to ask, ‘Why does God let it happen?’. The often favoured resolutions to this dilemma are either: to limit God’s knowledge: God does not know everything about each individual life and the thoughts and actions of individuals, but perhaps only has knowledge of the grand history of the world from past to future. Alternatively, God’s power is limited: God has created a world in which there is free-will for every person and therefore it is impossible for God to intervene and annul this human trait (regardless of the evil being perpetrated).
The problem is, the Book of Job is scandalous. It seems as if no response is possible except one (unless one follows the rather complex paths of the medieval philosophers): God knows about Job, God is present everywhere (using the forces of nature and different peoples to accomplish the tasks), God is all powerful (able to destroy and bring to life in a miraculous way). But is God beneficent – we struggle to find the goodness in the destruction of one pious man’s entire life.
For me, then, we reach a point of understanding God in the book of Job not as God, but as a human portrayal of God, a character. The book does not reflect a ‘true’ story in the historical meaning of the word ‘true’. The book is a reflection of the human experience of this world in which dreadful, appalling and scandalous things happen to our fellow human beings at the hands of others and it feels like there is little or no explanation for this. No explanation except for ones like the imagined tragic comedy of two super-natural beings trying to outdo one another at the cost of human life, as in the Book of Job.
In this portrayal of God by an author, perhaps we see more of the human than of the divine – just as all works of art suggest at least as much about their creator as their subject. We then learn that to be human is to be jealous, to be insecure and fearful, to be able and willing to commit atrocities and to be wholly incapable of comforting our fellow women and men at times of loss.
I have a strong memory of a visit at university of a Forensic Psychologist who roundly criticised society’s response to the violent acts which people perpetrate against one another. He said it is too easy to resort to the view that these acts are the acts of the insane or mad. In claiming that someone is ‘mad’ when they murder and rape, society conveniently escapes a confrontation with what it can mean to be human – perfectly sane people, he argued, commit horrendous crimes and that does not make them suddenly insane, but it might magnify the truth that we might all be capable of similar acts – something that is nothing short of terrifying. In fact, the visiting lecturer preferred the term evil to insane – as if a word so laden with religious meaning was preferable to illness.
Last week, an atrocity was committed in the settlement town of Itamar. A family, including just a baby, were brutally murdered. The political background to this story is that the town of Itamar is in the Occupied Territories in the West Bank and that this was a terror attack – but this ‘background’ is fundamentally irrelevant to the perpetration of an act of such disturbing violence by one person against another.
And then, after Shabbat, I sat with someone on the bus in Haifa who described the anger he experienced in his office that day because of the attack. He then went on to say that whoever committed this crime was ‘an animal, they’re all animals’.(2) No less than the shock I felt with the ease with which he said these words to me, they still trouble me three days later.
First, dehumanising the perpetrator is the same as the escapism that labels criminals as mad. We ignore at our peril the reality that this horrific crime was committed by a human being. Secondly, dehumanising a people (in this case the Palestinians) is also an act of violence – to deny a human being their essential humanity is as scandalous as the theodicy in the Book of Job. We cannot, for one minute, deny the humanness of either an individual or of individuals who identify with a particular people, because in doing so we undermine the complex and contradictory attributes of what it means just to be. We can chose whether we murder or save life – one without the other leaves us with nothing and steals away too lightly the burden for our actions which we all must carry on our shoulders.(3)
So we turn to the Festival of Purim and the Book of Esther, which will be upon us in just a couple of days. For years, Jews have struggled with the substance and meaning of the Book of Esther. A book that lays claim to historical truth, yet is undoubtedly a work of fiction. A book that is more akin to pantomime and farce than most biblical literature. It is a book that magnifies the human, until the divine is eclipsed.(4) A book that magnifies the human, until we become mere caricatures of real human beings – with distorted attributes and actions for comedic and calamitous effect. In the Book of Esther we discover what it means when we lose sight of humanity. Perhaps Purim is the Jewish escapism from what it means to be human, but there is no truth to this escapism. Tomorrow we return to reality and must continue to uphold the highest ideals of being human, whilst never easing the burden of responsibility from anyone else on this tiny planet.
_____
(1) Specifically including a famous rabbinic text about the murder of Abel by Cain in which God is portrayed as a character who could have stopped the murder like a king watching gladiators.
(2) In the Haaretz article linked to this post you’ll notice that the IDF Chief of Staff describes the men as animals.
(3) Again thinking of Cain who says his sin is too much to bear (Genesis 4:13).
(4) God’s name is not mentioned once in the Book of Esther – something that has prompted much discussion.
