Eli Herb
Times of Israel, July 29, 2022
“From a mythic perspective, the book of Job is not even trying to answer a theological question. As a text, it leaves us with the same age-old problem: we don’t know why there is suffering but we know it sucks.”
How did the book of Job make it into the TaNaKh, anyway?
It’s a very strange book.
Robert Alter writes:
“The book of Job is in several ways the most mysterious book of the Hebrew Bible. Formally, as a sustained debate in poetry, it resembles no other text in the canon. Theologically, as a radical challenge to the doctrine of reward for the righteous and punishment for the wicked, it dissents from a consensus view of biblical writers – a dissent compounded by its equally radical rejection of the anthropocentric conception of creation that is expressed in biblical texts from Genesis onward.”
In the Talmud, our rabbis wrestle with the reality of the tzaddik v’ra lo – a righteous person who suffers despite the biblical promises of other books of TaNaKh that if you are pious you will flourish.
The TaNaKh is not uniform in this theology. In many places in TaNaKh, the authors wonder why it is that wickedness flourishes while righteousness is squashed.
Throughout TaNaKh there is a conflation of individual and nation; this appears to be an acknowledgment of karma. Your individual righteousness can not protect you from suffering because you are, inevitably, born into an interconnected web of karma. There is almost no way, realistically, for a nation to be completely righteous because a nation is made of individuals. How bizarre that our TaNaKh often speaks of an entire nation as a singular individual! Surely this can be little more than aspiration; an expression of the author’s ideological hope for Jewish unity. Conversely, the actions of individuals, the TaNaKh wisely understands, can affect the entire nation. In this way, addressing Israel in the 2nd person singular is an impressive means of expressing the potential of each person to be either a blessing or a curse as well as a device for conveying moral responsibility onto a whole nation.
In the Shulchan Aruch, 554:1-3, Yosef Karo brings a tradition that it is permitted to study Job on Tisha B’Av.
“On Tisha b’Av it is forbidden to wash, anoint, wear leather shoes, or have marital relations. It is also forbidden to read from the Torah, Nevi’im, and Ktuvim and to learn mishna, midrash, gemara, halacha and aggada, because it says, “The precepts of God are right, gladdening the heart” (Tehillim 19:9). Schoolchildren are idle on [Tisha B’Av]. One may read Job and the awful passages which are in Yirmiyah, but if there are between them passages of consolation, one must skip them. It is permitted to learn the exegesis of Eichah and Perek Ein Megalchin (third and final perek of Moed Katan). Likewise, one may learn the interpretations of Eichah and Iyov.” ….SOURCE