Job, Jobs And Jobs: Turning The Page (Jewish Week)

by Rabbi Joshua Hammerman

Special to the Jewish Week

I’ve been thinking about Job lately. Not “job” as in “employment,” though the rate of joblessness keeps rising to staggering proportions, or Jobs, the Apple CEO who defied death this year, while keeping his liver transplant a secret from his stockholders, but Job the biblical figure and inspiration for the Coen brothers’ much-discussed film, “A Serious Man.”

Or maybe I’ve been thinking about all three. Because those who are suffering, whether Job, Jobs or jobless, all share the same need to turn the page, to move on, to emerge from the shadow of death renewed and refreshed, back and better than ever.

That is precisely what happens at the end of the book of Job. God appears in a whirlwind to inform Job that it is pointless for humans to seek discernible moral patterns in God’s ways. The skies clear, and at the book’s end we find our hero thriving once again. He is blessed with thousands of sheep, camels, oxen and she-asses, seven sons and three beautiful daughters. Job lives 140 additional years, sees four generations of progeny and dies old and contented.

I’ve always been bothered by that ending. It may work as a fitting bookend to the fractured fairytale prologue, but it denies the existence of everything in between. When we first meet Job, he also has seven sons and three daughters. Then God makes the Faustian bargain and everything is wiped out, meaning that the sons and daughters of the last chapter are different sons and daughters. The happily-ever-after Job must have had at least seven yahrtzeits for that first set, plus a body and psyche ravaged by the scars of victimhood. How could he recover so effortlessly? How could he have been able to leave it all behind?

I recently had the privilege of hearing Elie Wiesel discuss Job at the 92nd Street Y. In addressing the end of the book, Wiesel spoke of the fine line separating faith from insanity, suggesting that a little madness might be required in order to maintain a posture of belief in the face of an unjust world. He postulated that Job did not fear an unjust God so much as an apathetic one. Once he heard from God directly, he could regain his balance, knowing that even if no divine reward were coming, at least God was there.

The Jewish experience has been such that the book of Job has not only been read from generation to generation, it has been lived. And, at the end of each trial, in the face of each encounter with absurdity, each generation has gotten up from the dung heap and chosen life.

As Wiesel put it, in recalling Deuteronomy’s call to “choose life,” the word for life, chayim, also means “the living.” For him, and for all survivors since Job, the only real choice has been to choose the living — as illogical as it that choice might at times appear. It may seem like madness to move on, but it is also the secret of Jewish survival. So Job had to move beyond mourning his dead kids to celebrate life with the living ones, just as so many Holocaust survivors have astonished us with their ability to embrace life and build new families.

So now I understand Job’s motives better, but I’m still troubled. Does turning the page require a self-imposed amnesia? The Torah, after all, commands us to remember, zachor, rather than simply to get over it. Wiesel’s life’s work has been built on the basis of fostering memory. And now, with events bombarding us at a frenetic pace, we are often too quick to put yesterday’s news behind us.

One gets the impression that, with this year’s stock market’s rebound, we are living out the Wall Street version of that epilogue to Job. The recession is far from over, but once unemployment figures begin to decline, I’ve a feeling that we’ll be celebrating like it’s 2007 — as if the intervening horrible two years never happened. Already we are seeing the return of exorbitant bonuses, astronomical bank profits and a relaxation of the pressure for regulation and reform.

Jewish organizations, too, seem to have learned little from the cataclysm that we’ve just endured. They’ve been chastened, but have they really changed the way they do business? Too many are trying simply to turn the page.

We may be the people of the book, but we are not the people of the page. Our most sacred text is in the form of a scroll, not a book, and scrolls have no pages. The beginning, middle and end are all interconnected, the one flowing into the next seamlessly — and when there are seams, they are hand woven together, without the slightest gap or tear. Jews don’t turn pages; we scroll with the punches.

Ironically, the next stage of literary technology is taking us back from the printed page to the seamless flow of words and stories. The journey from scroll to book to Kindle is, in reality, a round trip.

Rumor has it that Steve Jobs was dismissive of the Kindle when Amazon.com first released it in 2007, saying, “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.” But now, with the Apple Tablet set to appear, the master futurist may have been humbled by his recent brush with death. Instead of turning the page, he too is scrolling down as he scrambles to catch up.

Elie Wiesel believes that when we hear the story of a witness, we too become witnesses. The story lives on; a living scroll ever unfolding. All that is must flow from all that came before, no matter how painful those memories can be.

“Because I remember, I despair,” Wiesel says, then adding, “Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.”

Which is why we can never really turn the page.

Rabbi Joshua Hammerman is spiritual leader of Temple Beth-El in Stamford, Conn.

Seriously Funny - Or Flawed?

Here's my challenge - to write some serious reflections about "A Serious Man," a film that seems to try very hard not to take itself seriously. But when, I think about it, the biblical book after which it was modeled, Job, was itself the Woody Allen flick of its day. I mean, what else can you say about a book that begins with an absurd wager between God and Satan, carries the gag through a sequence of inane encounters with three clueless advisers and then ends with God's ways being revealed as unknowable, roaring away in the midst of a tornado?


Wait a minute. Am I talking about the book... or the movie?


If there is a serious message at all to the film, and I have to assume that because I really didn't find it to be laugh-out-loud-early-Woody Allen - earlier-Philip Roth funny, it is that God's ways are unknowable in an unjust, absurd world. In the end, the only one laughing is God.

As the saying goes, מענטש טראַכט, גאָט לאַכט. Man plans, God laughs.


That's a key message of Job, where the friends try to explain Job's predicament in conventional ways that never stray from the box. They never fully understand that the times are a changin' and old theological formulas just don't cut it. Meanwhile, Job senses that he's just a pawn in some celestial game of chess, saying in verse 20:3 "Why should man be born to wander blindly, hedged in by God on every side?" Job, hardly the passive sufferer of lore, rails against the darkness of his plight, screaming out in chapter 20, verse 11, "Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not perish at birth?

Job the sufferer has it all over Job the "serious man."

Larry Gopnik never goes Joban, or even postal, in the movie. His wife is unfaithful, his kids are unredeemable brats more concerned with hair and TV reception than their parent' failing marriage; his job is tedious and unrewarding, his neighbor is a Jew-hater and his other neighbor a nymphomaniac, and his synagogue is an empty shell. The teachers can't teach and the rabbis can't empathize. The services are boring, the bar mitzvahs meaningless.

In some interviews, the Coen brothers alluded to their "nostalgic" look at the Minneapolis suburb of their childhood. This is hardly the nurturing shtetl fireplace, the "Oyfn Pripitchek"of Yiddish lore, where the elderly mentor slowly taught the wide-eyed child the "alef-beis." In this landscape, in fact, the rabbis are Satan, right from the very start of the movie, where, in an otherwise inexplicable prologue, a shtetl wife mistakes (we think) a saintly old man for a dybbuk. (On one level, the prologue works as an indictment of religious fundamentalism and superstition, which creates moral blinders so powerful as to allow good people to murder innocents out of a dream-provoked fear - but that's only if the strange visitor wasn't in fact, a dybbuk, something that is not firmly established).


I grew up in a community that had similar types, at a similar time. We had Hebrew School teachers that were utterly clueless to the ways of assimilated American baby boomers (though, unlike the kids of this movie, my passion was more for baseball cards than smoking pot, unlike the bar mitzvah students of this film. But, like them, I did sneak a transistor radio into Hebrew School during the 1967 World Series to hear the Red Sox). Our rabbis were not shallow idiots, however pedesteled ( see The Problem With Pedestal Rabbis) and pedestrian they were. I followed my muse to Allen, Roth, loved "The Graduate," and viewed rabbis and religion with a healthy skepticism, if not at times an unhealthy cynicism. At times I saw them as emblematic of the plastic culture we were railing against.

In college, I wrote scathing critiques of those clueless Hebrew teachers, essays and stories that would make even the Coens cringe. But I also was able to lift them off the page and give them some humanity. There was Abraham Solomon Schindler (we kids loved his initials) - who was jolly, until someone stuck gum on his chair. There were the teachers who taught only in Hebrew, admiring their work on the blackboard, even as the Woodstock sky was falling and the late '60s teenage hormones raging behind them.

I once wrote a poem about rabbis called "Painted Plastic." You can guess where that one was going. It bemoaned those half-baked handshakes and the banal advice:

"Hello dear friend," he's say, and walk away....

But there was a counterculture Judaism that I also grew up with, and that Judaism was exciting and vibrant and meaningful - and it had a home in the very same synagogue, my synagogue, that also housed the creaky - crumbling Judaism of the Coens' film. It is sad to think that the Coens had one but not the other. This might be the difference between Minneapolis, where they lived, and Boston, which was at the time churning with new ideas. They had the conformity and conventionality, a synagogue as cold as that church at the end of "The Graduate," but none of the juice of the early Havurah movement. They had A.S.S. but none of the teachers with the long hair who hummed "The Times They are a Changin.'" I had both.

They had snot spitting, phlegm-y walking corpses. I had the disciples of Heschel and Buber.

That's what saddened me about the film, them lack of appreciation for the life that was being injected into Jewish communities at that time, and while there were scenes that hinted at authenticity, the lack of humanity in any of the characters left me gasping.

When Larry moved out of the house at the request of his wife and her lover, that's where he stopped being Job and morphed into Bontsha the Silent, the I.L. Peretz character (see notes here) whose passivity crosses that fine line from goodness to madness. Passivity is not good - nor is the biblical Job passive (or "patient," as the Christian stereotype suggests). Turning the other cheek is not a Jewish idea, especially with a guy who is making off - and out - with your wife. So Larry stopped being a serious Joban character at that moment for me, and this ceased being a serious attempt to grapple with Job.

As for God's place in all this. God only knows. The message seems to be a Joban one, that we have no idea what are God's ways, so as Archibald MacLeish wrote in his Joban midrash, J.B., "Blow on the coal of your heart. and we'll know..." The idea is simply to live and love and make the most of an absurd world.

Abraham Joshua Heschel put it best in his last serious (and only known) TV interview, recorded shortly before his death:

The interviewer Carl Stern asked him, “What message have you for young people?”

Heschel's reply: “Let them remember that there is a meaning beyond absurdity. Let them be sure that every deed counts, that every word has power, and that we can all do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments. And, above all, [let them] remember…to build a life as if it were a work of art.”

At the end of the movie (spoiler alert), Larry finally succumbs to the temptations facing him, and either because of or despite his moral lapse, a tornado is bearing down on his son's class and the doctor alludes to some bad news regarding his health. There is no rhyme or reason, no rhythm to this world spinning out of control, save for the tunes on the boy's coveted transistor radio.

It's hard to find the meaning beyond absurdity in this kind of resolution. God gets the last laugh, but only if there is a God. Sort of reminds me of something I saw in a men's room stall in my sophomore year at Brown, on the third floor of the Rockefeller Library:

"God is dead." - Nietzsche

"Nietzsche is dead." - God

God always has the last laugh.

Did you hear the one about the tornado that decimated the Hebrew School?