Job’s initial statement laid before his consoling friends captures the kernel of the mourner’s response to evil. When his friends arrive, Job begins his lament with a death wish. “Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night that said, ‘A man-child is conceived.’ Let that day be darkness! May God above not seek it, or light shine on it” (Job 3:4). He laments further, “Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire? Why were there knees to re-ceive me, or breasts for me to suck?” (Job 3:11–12). Because of his suffering and outrage Job the mourner loses interest in the world and in his own existence.
He curses that existence and expresses anger that he did not die in his mother’s womb.
The death wish expressed in Job’s initial reaction is intimately connected to the state of mourning. The nature of such a state of mourning must be exam-ined closely in order to appreciate the meaning of Job’s predicament in full. A central feature of mourning, and one essential to Job’s predicament, is revealed in the surprising way by which the Talmud equates the mourner’s condition
Job, the Mourner 41 with that of the outcast and banned. A Talmudic discussion2on mourning de-scribes the structure of mourning rituals as follows: During the seven days after the funeral the mourner is not allowed to wash himself; wash his clothes;
shave himself or cut his hair; wear shoes; show his face (he must cover it);
anoint his head; greet anyone; study Torah; work; have sexual intercourse. In the first seven of these prohibitions (from shaving to offering greetings) the Talmud compares the mourner with the outcast. Like the outcast, the mourner loses his social persona: he cannot show interest in his surroundings via greet-ing people, and he is unwashed, unshaved, shoeless, and in dirty clothes.3The mourner becomes an asocial being, like the outcast.
Why is the mourner compared to the outcast? At the roots of this compari-son are two deep issues that concern the existential consciousness of the mourner. The first is that the mourner feels excluded. The mourner has de-tached himself from the world, as that world does not reflect his inner condi-tion. The sun rises after each painful night, and the busy day-to-day life of the workers and the noises from the street continue as if nothing has happened.
The gap between the world of the mourner that has halted and the cruel, blind continuity of life and the cosmos isolates the mourner from his environment and makes him, in his own view, an outcast. Moreover, in our relation with the world, the bond with those we love serves as our link with the world. Love is our umbilical cord with reality and always takes the form of a particular attach-ment and bond. Thus, loss of the beloved person results automatically in our detachment from reality. In principle we are strangers in our environment, and the hand that is offered to us from the world is the hand of those we love. With the loss of a loved one, we lose that stretched-out hand. The rules of mourning, structured as a ritual acting out of that sense of exclusion, reflect the basic existential condition of the mourner in relation to his environment.
However, there is an important difference between the mourner and the outcast that must be noted. The mourner feels excluded, though society tries to include him again. This is reversed for the outcast, who is punished via the severing of all bonds and contact with society. The mourner is – or should be – comforted by friends and family who come with food and drink to console him.
2I refer to the discussion in the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Moad Katan, folio 14b–16a.
3The prohibitions imposed on the mourner in no circumstance reflect attempts to inflict pain or suffering upon him. The prohibition on sexual intercourse, washing, anointing, and wearing footwear correspond to the rules for Yom Kippur, save that the mourner is not required to chastise himself. Mourning is not an expression of pain; the mourner is allowed to eat meat and drink wine. In fact, there are many stories about excessive consummation of food and drink (to ease the pain and the suffering) occurring in the houses of the mourning.
The drama of the week of mourning is the complex interaction between the alienated perspective of the mourner and the attempt of his environment to draw him back into the world. The “work of mourning” is not about forgetting the loss and the slow separation from the dead, as Freud described it in his essay “Mourning and Melancholy.” The mourner does not separate from the dead; rather, he internalizes the dead deep in his consciousness. The problem which the work of mourning is trying to address is the challenge of returning to the world after that loss is internalized. The mourning process is based on a strong ritualistic expression, enacted by the mourner, of the gap that has opened with the world; as the cycle of mourning continues, this expression is gradually moderated. This measured return to the world via the process of mourning is articulated in a Talmudic statement which carefully and physical-ly crafts the norms of relocating the mourner into his world: “Our Rabbis taught: during the first week a mourner does not go out of the door of his house; the second week he goes out but does not sit in his [usual] place [in the synagogue]; the third week he sits in his [usual] place but does not speak; the fourth week he is like any other person” (Moed Katan 23a).
This view of the mourner as isolated and excluded teaches us a great deal about the situation of Job. It is no wonder therefore that Job’s first reaction is a deep and bitter expression of a death wish. This view also magnifies the deep failure and betrayal of his friends, who instead of stretching their hands to Job so as to help him return to the world, blame him and thereby push him further and deeper into his already devastated state.
The problem of evil for the mourner in his state of isolation and banish-ment is not the question of whether or not he still can “believe” but rather if he still can “trust”: Job does not question the existence of God; he simplyloses all trustin him. Job’s situation resembles that of a child punished violently by his father. We can ask for justification: what has the child done wrong that he is punished like that? But from the perspective of the child such justification is not the issue. For him, the problem is the loss of trust in a relationship that should provide security and an anchor. The mourner, in his confrontation with evil, does not attempt to defend metaphysical positions. For him, it is an exis-tential problem, which expresses itself in depression and disinterest in a reality that appears alienating.
As related to the problem of evil from the perspective of mourning, the challenge the mourner faces is his loss of will to combat evil. Fighting evil requires love for the world (amor mundi), and it is exactly this love that is affected by evil. The experience of evil creates in us a stoic position, aimed at simply surviving the world and remaining unaffected by its whims. Such a retreat from the world is reflected in Job’s attempt to be inconspicuous, to
re-Job, the Mourner 43 main unnoticed and not to be tested. In the horror of his visibility, Job yearns for anonymity and admonishes God for being the guardian of humans: “Am I the Sea, or the Dragon, that you set a guard over me? (…) you scare me with dreams and terrify me with visions, so that I would choose strangling and death rather than this body” (Job 7, 12–15).
After all, Job’s misery began the moment someone in heaven directed at-tention to Job, the moment God said to Satan: “Have you noticed my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil” (Job 1:8). Being in the spotlight before power can be terrifying, even in something such as sending a complaint to the tax authorities: files maybe opened and the results are uncertain. In a negative assessment of the presumed piety expressed in vowing, the Talmud states:
“Whoever initiates a vow his file is examined.” The act of vowing as a volun-tary act of acceptance of an obligation (a demand which is beyond the norm) draws dangerous attention.4Job is averse to this attention. He does not want to be noticed and he demands God avert his attention from him. In his most difficult moments, Job reminds us of the stoic nihilism of the bookEcclesiastes, which imparts on humans the cynical yet wise advice not to be noticed, in either a good or a bad way. From the point of view of the one who suffers, the world looks like a place one should try to avoid. Job’s longing for death is not part of an interest to limit evil; it is an element of his desire to retreat from it.
While the problem of the theologian is only a problem for religious people who assume that God is good and almighty, the problem of the mourner is experienced by religious and non-religious people alike, for it is rooted in the gap between the world as it is and as we want it to be. Evil weakens the human will to fight it. And it is important to stress that the distinction between moral evil and natural evil is not useful here. Technological progress has made it highly difficult and problematic to establish a clear boundary between the two.
Today, the distinction between what we can call misfortune and injustice is disappearing, as Judith Shklar has argued.5 In the past, an earthquake was considered a natural injustice; however, with the advent of new building tech-niques, a death caused by an earthquake is no longer always considered a misfortune but instead may be termed an injustice. The increasing capacity to arm ourselves against natural disasters renders many earthquake-related deaths a matter of injustice and unequal distribution of goods.
4Jerusalem Talmud, Nedarim 1:1, 36,4. A similar approach is expressed in the warning that appears in the Talmud against prolonging prayer and the fact that such practice might cause the recording of the petitioner’s sins. See Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 55a.
5Shklar, Judith,The Faces of Injustice, Yale University Press, New Haven 1990, 51–83.
Evil has a numbing effect. It transforms us into survivors, people who pro-tect themselves and at best are not interested in harming others yet have lost the confidence and care required to combat evil itself. The challenge of the Book of Job and the problem of evil is to make Job come alive again. After Job’s opening speech, when he expresses his death wish, his friends begin to accuse him. The first step Job makes in the direction of life is expressed in his persist-ent attempt to establish his innocence before he goes to the grave. It is the malicious friends who paradoxically call him back to life. In the next stage of his awakening Job demands God to appear and account for Job’s misery. God appears – yet his answer might be unsatisfying, and maybe the words God spoke to Job were not especially meaningful to him and did not really solve anything. But as we saw, the abused child does not demand explanation; in-stead, he wishes to be heard, and seeks the caring attention of the father in order to restore some degree of trust. The explanation that is actually provided by the father might in that case be marginal to the fact of his actual appearance and his need provide an explanation which in and of itself is important. In line with this quest, after the appearance of God, Job says “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (Job 42:5). The seeing, the direct encounter, is what makes the difference.