In his reflections on Job and Kafka, Scholem formulates a vision of modernity that is as bleak as it is definitive: it is a world in which “the great deceit” has now been “consummated” (SM, 153). However, the very form of Scholem’s poem not only undermines such finality but repeats and radicalizes the central paradox of the Book of Job: his description of a godforsaken world, his protest against the lack of justice, and his explicit declaration of God’s silence are formulated as a direct address to God. This address is permeated with unans-wered and unanswerable questions, and, counter to its conclusive, and conclu-sively negative, content, presents traces of what Scholem, in his earlier writ-ings, had described as the idea and nature of lament. These traces are found in the poem’s daunting string of questions, which, in the final verse – “Can such a question be raised?” (SM, 154) – culminates in the mise en abîme of questioning the act of questioning. This single yet highly significant sentence in this particular exchange with Benjamin hints at texts written in Scholem’s youth, albeit without mentioning lament as such. These earlier reflections on Job and lament not only prefigure Benjamin’s thinking about Kafka; they are also closer to Kafka’s actual prose than Scholem’s later writings. His subse-quent theological interpretation of Kafka insists on a negativity that becomes a kind of closure; these early texts, however, are concerned with a language of deferral that shares key characteristics with Kafka’s prose, which not only postpones accomplishment, resists change and progression, and thwarts any message or conclusion, but also, ultimately, refuses meaning altogether, even as it correlates this deferral with a logic of ethics, care and justice.
Immediately following his advice that Benjamin should take Job as a point of departure in reading Kafka, Scholem notes “the thoughts I formulated many years ago in my theses on justice which you know and which, in their relation to language, would be the leading thread of my reflections on Kafka” (BK, 64).
Scholem refers here to his “Twelve Theses on the Order of Justice,” a text he wrote in 1918, more than two decades before he composed his commentaries on Kafka.30 These theses are derived directly from, and sometimes quote, Scholem’s “On Jonah and the Concept of Justice,” written earlier the same year.
In the latter text, he compares the biblical prophet Jonah with Job and argues that Job, unlike Jonah, has “an inner relation to lament” (SD, 525) because Job
30Scholem read these theses, probably written in 1918, to Benjamin and his wife during a stay in Switzerland in October of the same year. Scholem, Gershom,Tagebücher 1917–1923, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 2000, 533–535. Following references to this book are quoted as (SD, page number).
asks questions man is not entitled to pose, primarily the question of divine justice. These questions are not only unanswerable but also subvert the estab-lished order and the very language subtending the system of communication.
In a similar context, Job also figures prominently in several of Scholem’s diary entries from the same period, a time when he was exchanging lengthy letters with Benjamin about his work on Hebrew Scriptures.31In one such entry Scholem sketches the outline for an argument that seems to have been intend-ed for a future and more thorough analysis of the Book of Job (SD, 376–378).
For Scholem, the book contains an ironic, inverted message yet does not make this doctrine explicit; instead, it is conveyedex negativo, for it concerns the legitimacy of questioning divine justice. Job initially seems guilty of asking this question, but, as his question proves neither answerable nor refutable, he is shown to be in the right (“Hiob ist im Recht” (SD, 377)). The very form of the book – its endlessly circular dialogues – conveys the sense that the search for divine justice is not a legitimate concern: God does not reply to Job’s ethical question and instead shows him the magnificence of His creation. In refusing any answer, God invalidates Job’s question (and questioning) and extracts him-self from the human idea of justice. What remains for man to do in the face of this withdrawal is to lament – indeed, it is his only appropriate response. “And so [Job] legitimately laments,” Scholem writes, “and this lament is infinite in all its dimensions, it is of a higher infinity than life itself” (SD, 378). His conclu-sion comes strikingly close to one of Kafka’s central themes, especially when Scholem compares the Book of Job with a “court in front of which an accusa-tion is continuously being repeated … without the judge ever appearing” (SD, 378).
Scholem’s references to Job in his early writings culminate in a short text amended to his translation of the third chapter of the Book of Job. This text, likely written in late 1918, is part of a series of comments to his German transla-tions of Hebrew laments and dirges as well as the more general, theoretical text “On Lament and Dirges” (SD, 544–547). In these texts Scholem reflects on the nature and language of lament and regards Job’s monologues as a paradig-matic instance of the genre. In the comment to his translation of Job’s mono-logue – in which Job curses the day he was born – Scholem distinguishes lament from accusation: accusation always targets a particular addressee, whereas lament “accuses language itself” as a carrier of meaning, as goal-oriented mode of communication that transports a message (SD, 545). Scholem defines the characteristic of lament, and Job’s lamentation in particular, as “an
31 See Walter Benjamin,Sämtliche BriefeBand I, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. 2000, 422.
Kafka’s Other Job 139 infinite and cyclical annihilation” (SD, 546) that occurs not from the outside (as a meaning bestowed upon its construction), but rather from within the lan-guage of lament. What occurs in this lanlan-guage, Scholem writes, “is an extraor-dinary internal liquefaction of the poem, inextricably interconnected with the law of recurrence, which shows this to be the lamentation. In the proper mean-ing of the poem, the question ‘why does He give light to the sufferer?’ is not given in order to receive a response … rather, there is no response to this infi-nite plaintively recurring question. Everything in this song recurs” (SD, 546).
And the recurrence, in fact, is endless.
This ongoing questioning – which expects no answer and is intrinsically infinite – can, as Scholem notes about Job’s lament, “never turn into a final verdict” (SD, 546) or even into a conclusive indictment of God, as his later Kafka poem suggests. Its nature, situated at the limits between language and silence, is deferral itself. In a brief note Scholem writes: “Deferral in the word, the linguistic principle of lament” (Verstummen: Aufschub im Worte, das sprachliche Prinzip der Klage) (SD, 365). It is precisely because lament is an endless and infinite expression, or rather a gesture (eine Gebärde), that it anni-hilates its object in a monotonous repetition – as Scholem notes, “all monoto-nous things have relation to lament” (SD, 148) – and that it absorbs impending destruction into language itself. In referring to the question of suicide – which, in the Book of Job, is raised by Job’s wife – Scholem writes: “Lamenting over one’s birth signifies the desire for death, but not the act of bringing it about.
But Judaism doesn’t know more than the lament about being born. If it knew more, suicide would have a legitimate place in it. In lament, however, suicide is eliminated through a medium (Mittleres), the suicide of language can be reached (and may even be a source of reconciliation?)” (SD, 564). Yet it is not just suicide that is deferred by lament. As Scholem notes in his “Twelve Theses on the Order of Justice”: “Acting in deferral saves from death” (Im Aufschub handeln erettet vom Tod) (SD, 534). Scholem’s idea that lament postpones the execution of suicide and defers death is structured similar to his more general idea about justice. He calls lament, rather enigmatically, “the language that is just in its very principle” (SD, 362). This statement becomes more transparent when considered in the context of the relation he establishes between justice and deferral. Scholem’s most succinct statement about justice is found in his
“Twelve Theses”: “Justice means: that one may judge, but that the executive power must remain radically independent of it ... The actual legal order (Rechtsordnung) is sublated in the deferral of the executive” (SD, 533). Scholem illustrates this definition of justice with a verse from the Book of Jonah: “And he reflected upon the judgment that he announced that he would execute upon them, and executed it not.” Scholem’s (SD, 528) very definition of justice in
action, to which he adds the Hebrew z’dakah (justice), lies in the gesture of deferral: “Deferral turned into deed is justice in action” (Der zur Handlung ge-wordene Aufschub ist Gerechtigkeit als Tat). That this deferral is achieved in language, a language of endless recurrence, entails that it cannot be trans-formed or translated into another language. It is precisely the language of la-ment that achieves this deferral of the end (SD, 128).
Nothing could be closer to Kafka’s “stehender Sturmlauf,” this intense movement that does not progress and stays itself and leaves everything un-changed, than Scholem’s description of the language of lament that, “as far as it is lament, remains always the same” (SD, 129). Indeed, it is in Scholem’s understanding of the language of lament, rather than in his interpretation of Kafka, that his greatest affinity to Kafka’s writing, and to Benjamin’s idea of deferral (Aufschub), is found. Unlike his interpretation of Kafka that dates from the 1930’s, and in which the infinity of questions that remain without answers resonates with a negative theology, these early comments on Job prefigure Ben-jamin’s interpretation of Kafka’s “infinite” writing as an avoidance of closure.
The aptness of Benjamin’s insight into Kafka and Scholem’s comments on Job’s lament can be illustrated and specified through a reading of a particular short text by Kafka, one that allows the reader to imagine how Kafka would have read the Book of Job.