Quarrel & Quandary

by Cynthia Ozick

  Job is not comforted; he is made furious. He has been accused, however obliquely, of having sinned, and he knows with his whole soul that he has not. His friends show themselves to be as inconstant as a torrential river, icy in winter, vanishing away in the heat. Rather than condole, they defame. They root amelioration in besmirchment. But if Job’s friends are no friends, then what of God? The poet, remembering the Psalm—“What is man that thou are mindful of him?”—has Job echo the very words. “What is man,” Job charges God, that “thou dost set thy mind upon him, dost visit him every morning, and test him every moment?… If I sin, what do I do to thee, thou watcher of men?” And he dreams of escaping God in death: “For now I shall lie in the earth; thou wilt seek me, but I shall not be.”

  Three rounds of increasingly tumultuous debate follow, with Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar each having a turn, and Job replying. Wilder and wilder grow the visitors’ accusations; wilder and wilder grow Job’s rebuttals, until they are pitched into an abyss of bitterness. Job’s would-be comforters have become his harriers; men of standing themselves, they reason from the conventional doctrines of orthodox religion, wherein conduct and consequence are morally linked: goodness rewarded, wickedness punished. No matter how hotly Job denies and protests, what greater proof of Job’s impiety can there be than his deadly ordeal? God is just; he metes out just deserts. Is this not the grand principle on which the world rests?

  Job’s own experience refutes these arguments; and his feverish condemnation of God’s injustice refutes religion itself. “I am blameless!” he cries yet again, and grimly concludes: “It is all one: therefore I say, He destroys both the blameless and the wicked. When disaster brings sudden death, He mocks the calamity of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; He covers the face of its judges.” Here Job, remarkably, is both believer and atheist. God’s presence is incontrovertible; God’s moral integrity is nil. And how strange: in the heart of Scripture, a righteous man impugning God! Genesis, to be sure, records what appears to be a precedent. “Wilt thou destroy the righteous with the wicked?” Abraham asks God when Sodom’s fate is at stake; but that is more plea than indictment, and anyhow there is no innocence in Sodom. Yet how distant Job is from the Psalmist who sings “The Lord is upright … there is no unrighteousness in Him,” who pledges that “the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree,” and “the workers of iniquity shall be destroyed forever.” The Psalmist’s is the voice of faith. Job’s is the voice of a wounded lover, betrayed.

  Like a wounded lover, he envisions, fleetingly, a forgiving afterlife, the way a tree, cut down to a stump, can send forth new shoots and live again—while man, by contrast, “lies down and rises not again.” Or he imagines the workings of true justice: on the one hand, he wishes he might bring God Himself to trial; on the other, he ponders man-made law and its courts, and declares that the transcript of his testimony ought to be inscribed permanently in stone, so that some future clansman might one day come as a vindicator, to proclaim the probity of Job’s case. (Our translation famously—and not disinterestedly—renders the latter as “I know that my Redeemer lives,” a phrase that has, of course, been fully integrated into Christian hermeneutics.) Throughout, there is a thundering of discord and clangor. “Miserable comforters are you all!” Job groans. “Surely there are mockers about me”—while Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar press on, from pious apologias to uncontrolled denunciation. You, Job, they accuse, you who stripped the naked of their clothing, gave no water to the weary, withheld bread from the hungry!

  And Job sees how the tenets of rectitude, in the mouths of the zealous, are perverted to lies.

  But now, abruptly, a new voice is heard: a fifth and so far undisclosed player strides onstage. He is young, intellectually ingenious, confident, a bit brash. Unlike the others, he bears a name with a Hebrew ring to it: Elihu. “I also will declare my opinion,” he announces. He arrives as a supplanter, to replace stale wisdom with fresh, and begins by rebuking Job’s haranguers for their dogma of mechanical tit-for-tat. As for Job: in his recalcitrance, in his litanies of injured innocence, in his prideful denials, he has been blind to the uses of suffering; and doesn’t he recognize that God manifests Himself in night visions and dreams? Suffering educates and purifies; it humbles pride, tames the rebel, corrects the scoffer. “What man is like Job, who drinks up scoffing like water?” Elihu points out—but here the reader detects a logical snag. Job has become a scoffer only as a result of gratuitous suffering: then how is such suffering a “correction” of scoffing that never was? Determined though he is to shake Job’s obstinacy, Elihu is no wiser than his elders. Job’s refusal of meaningless chastisement stands.

  So Elihu, too, fails as comforter—but as he leaves off suasion, his speech metamorphoses into a hymn in praise of God’s dominion. “Hear this, O Job,” Elihu calls, “stop and consider the wondrous work of God”—wind, cloud, sky, snow, lightning, ice! Elihu’s sumptuous limning of God’s power in nature is a fore-echo of the sublime climax to come.

  4. The Voice Out of the Whirlwind

  Job, gargantuan figure in the human imagination that he is, is not counted among the prophets. He is not the first to be reluctant to accept God’s authority: Jonah rebelled against sailing to Nineveh in order to prophesy; yet he did go, and his going was salvational for a people not his own. But the true prophets are self-starters, spontaneous fulminators against social inequity, and far from reluctant. Job, then, has much in common with Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah and Amos: he is wrathful that the wicked go unpunished, that the widow and the orphan go unsuccored, that the world is not clothed in righteousness. Like the noblest of the prophets, he assails injustice; and still he is unlike them. They accuse the men and women who do evil; their targets are made of flesh and blood. It is human transgression they hope to mend. Job seeks to rectify God. His is an ambition higher, deeper, vaster, grander than theirs; he is possessed by a righteousness more frenzied than theirs; the scale of his justice-hunger exceeds all that precedes him, all that was ever conceived; he can be said to be the consummate prophet. And at the same time he is the consummate violator. If we are to understand him at all, if we are rightly to enter into his passions at their pinnacle, then we ought to name him prophet; but we may not. Call him, instead, anti-prophet—his teaching, after all, verges on atheism: the rejection of God’s power. His thesis is revolution.

  Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are silenced. Elihu will not strut these boards again. Job’s revolution may be vanity of vanities, but his adversaries have lost confidence and are scattered. Except for Job, the stage is emptied.

  Then God enters—not in a dream, as Elihu theorized, not as a vision or incarnation, but as an irresistible Eloquence.

  Here I am obliged to remark on the obvious. In recapitulating certain passages, I have reduced an exalted poem to ordinary spoken sentences. But the ideas that buttress Job are not merely “expressed in,” as we say, language of high beauty; they are inseparable from an artistry so far beyond the grasp of mind and tongue that one can hardly imagine their origin. We think of the Greek plays; we think of Shakespeare; and still that is not marvel enough. Is it that the poet is permitted to sojourn, for the poem’s brief life, in the magisterial Eye of God? Or is it God who allows Himself to peer through the poet’s glass, as through a gorgeously crafted kaleidoscope? The words of the poem are preternatural, unearthly. They may belong to a rhapsodic endowment so rare as to appear among mortals only once in three thousand years. Or they may belong to the Voice that hurls itself from the whirlwind.

  5. The Answer

  God has granted Job’s demand: “Let the Almighty answer me!” Now here at last is Job’s longed-for encounter with that Being he conceives to be his persecutor. What is most extraordinary in this visitation is that it appears to be set apart from everything that has gone before. What is the Book of Job about? It is about gratuitous affliction. It is about the wicked who escape whipping. It is about the suffering of the righteous. God addres
ses none of this. It is as if He has belatedly stepped into the drama without having consulted the script—none of it: not even so much as the prologue. He does not remember Satan’s mischief. He does not remember Job’s calamities. He does not remember Job’s righteousness.

  As to the latter: Job will hardly appeal for an accounting from God without first offering one of his own. He has his own credibility to defend, his own probity. “Let me be weighed in a just balance,” he insists, “and let God know my integrity!” The case for his integrity takes the form of a bill of particulars that is unsurpassed as a compendium of compassionate human conduct: no conceivable ethical nuance is omitted. It is as if all the world’s moral fervor, distilled from all the world’s religions, and touching on all the world’s pain, is assembled in Job’s roster of lovingkindness. Job in his confession of integrity is both a protector and a lover of God’s world.

  But God seems alarmingly impatient; His mind is elsewhere. Is this the Lord whom Job once defined as a “watcher of men”? God’s answer, a fiery challenge, roils out of the whirlwind. “Where were you,” the Almighty roars, in supernal strophes that blaze through the millennia, “when I laid the foundation of the earth?” And what comes crashing and tumbling out of the gale is an exuberant ode to the grandeur of the elements, to the fecundity of nature: the sea and the stars, the rain and the dew, the constellations in their courses, the lightning, the lion, the raven, the ass, the goat, the ostrich, the horse, the hawk—and more, more, more! The lavishness, the extravagance, the infinitude! An infinitude of power; an infinitude of joy; an infinitude of love, even for the ugly hippopotamus, even for the crocodile with his terrifying teeth, even for creatures made mythical through ancient lore. Even for Leviathan! Nothing in the universe is left unpraised in these glorious stanzas—and one thinks: had the poet access to the electrons, had he an inkling of supernovas, had he parsed the chains of DNA, God’s ode to Creation could not be richer. Turn it and turn it —God’s ode: everything is in it.

  Everything but the answer to the question that eats at Job’s soul: why God permits injustice in the fabric of a world so resplendently woven. Job is conventionally judged to be a moral violator because he judges God Himself to be a moral violator. Yet is there any idea in the history of human thought more exquisitely tangled, more furiously daring, more heroically courageous, more rooted in spirit and conscience than Job’s question? Why does God not praise the marrow of such a man as Job at least as much as He praises the intricacy of the crocodile’s scales? God made the crocodile; He also made Job.

  God’s answer to Job lies precisely in His not answering; and Job, with lightning insight, comprehends. “I have uttered what I did not understand,” he acknowledges, “things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”

  His new knowledge is this: that a transcendent God denies us a god of our own devising, a god that we would create out of our own malaise, or complaint, or desire, or hope, or imagining; or would manufacture according to the satisfaction of our own design. We are part of God’s design: can the web manufacture the spider? The Voice out of the whirlwind warns against god-manufacture—against the degradation of a golden calf surely, but also against god-manufacture even in the form of the loftiest visions. Whose visions are they? Beware: they are not God’s; they are ours. The ways of the true God cannot be penetrated. The false comforters cannot decipher them. Job cannot uncover them. “The secret things belong to the Lord our God,” Job’s poet learned long ago, reading Deuteronomy. But now: see how Job cannot draw Leviathan out with a hook—how much less can he draw out God’s nature, and His purpose!

  So the poet, through the whirlwind’s answer, stills Job.

  But can the poet still the Job who lives in us? God’s majesty is eternal, manifest in cell and star. Yet Job’s questions toil on, manifest in death camp and hatred, in tyranny and anthrax, in bomb and bloodshed. Why do the wicked thrive? Why do the innocent suffer? In brutal times, the whirlwind’s answer tempts, if not atheism, then the sorrowing conviction of God’s indifference.

  And if we are to take the close of the tale as given, it is not only Job’s protests that are stilled; it is also his inmost moral urge. What has become of raging conscience? What has become of lovingkindness? Prosperity is restored; the dead children are replaced by twice the number of boys, and by girls exceedingly comely. But where now is the father’s bitter grief over the loss of those earlier sons and daughters, on whose account he once indicted God? Cushioned again by good fortune, does Job remember nothing, feel nothing, see nothing beyond his own renewed honor? Is Job’s lesson from the whirlwind finally no more than the learning of indifference?

  So much for the naked text. Perhaps this is why—century after century—we common readers go on clinging to the spiritualizing mentors of traditional faith, who clothe in comforting theologies this God-wrestling and comfortless Book.

  Yet how astoundingly up-to-date they are, those ancient sages—redactors and compilers—who opened even the sacred gates of Scripture to philosophic doubt!

  Who Owns Anne Frank?

  If Anne Frank had not perished in the criminal malevolence of Bergen-Belsen early in 1945, she would have marked her seventieth birthday at the brink of the twenty-first century. And even if she had not kept the extraordinary diary through which we know her, it is likely that we would number her among the famous of the twentieth—though perhaps not so dramatically as we do now. She was born to be a writer. At thirteen, she felt her power; at fifteen, she was in command of it. It is easy to imagine—had she been allowed to live—a long row of novels and essays spilling from her fluent and ripening pen. We can be certain (as certain as one can be of anything hypothetical) that her mature prose would today be noted for its wit and acuity, and almost as certain that the trajectory of her work would be closer to that of Nadine Gordimer, say, than that of Françoise Sagan. Put it that as an international literary presence she would be thick rather than thin. “I want to go on living even after my death!” she exclaimed in the spring of 1944.

  This was more than an exaggerated adolescent flourish. She had already intuited what greatness in literature might mean, and she clearly sensed the force of what lay under her hand in the pages of her diary: a conscious literary record of frightened lives in daily peril; an explosive document aimed directly at the future. In her last months she was assiduously polishing phrases and editing passages with an eye to postwar publication. Het Achterhuis, as she called her manuscript—“the house behind,” often translated as “the secret annex”—was hardly intended to be Anne Frank’s last word; it was conceived as the forerunner work of a professional woman of letters.

  Yet any projection of Anne Frank as a contemporary figure is an unholy speculation: it tampers with history, with reality, with deadly truth. “When I write,” she confided, “I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived!” But she could not shake off her capture and annihilation, and there are no diary entries to register and memorialize the snuffing of her spirit. Anne Frank was discovered, seized, and deported; she and her mother and sister and millions of others were extinguished in a program calculated to assure the cruelest and most demonically inventive human degradation. The atrocities she endured were ruthlessly and purposefully devised, from indexing by tattoo to systematic starvation to factory-efficient murder. She was designated to be erased from the living, to leave no grave, no sign, no physical trace of any kind. Her fault—her crime—was having been born a Jew, and as such she was classified among those who had no right to exist: not as a subject people, not as an inferior breed, not even as usable slaves. The military and civilian apparatus of an entire society was organized to obliterate her as a contaminant, in the way of a noxious and repellent insect. Zyklon B, the lethal fumigant poured into the gas chambers, was, pointedly, a roach poison.

  Anne Frank escaped gassing. One month before liberation, not yet sixteen, she died of typhus fever, an acute infectious disease carried by lice. The precise da
te of her death has never been determined. She and her sister Margot were among 3,659 women transported by cattle car from Auschwitz to the merciless conditions of Bergen-Belsen, a barren tract of mud. In a cold, wet autumn, they suffered through nights on flooded straw in overcrowded tents, without light, surrounded by latrine ditches, until a violent hailstorm tore away what had passed for shelter. Weakened by brutality, chaos, and hunger, fifty thousand men and women—insufficiently clothed, tormented by lice—succumbed, many to the typhus epidemic.

  Anne Frank’s final diary entry, written on August 1, 1944, ends introspectively—a meditation on a struggle for moral transcendence set down in a mood of wistful gloom. It speaks of “turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside,” and of “trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if … if only there were no other people in the world.” Those curiously self-subduing ellipses are the diarist’s own; they are more than merely a literary effect—they signify a child’s muffled bleat against confinement, the last whimper of a prisoner in a cage. Her circumscribed world had a population of eleven—the three Dutch protectors who came and went, supplying the necessities of life, and the eight in hiding: the van Daans, their son Peter, Albert Dussel, and the four Franks. Five months earlier, on May 26, 1944, she had railed against the stress of living invisibly—a tension never relieved, she asserted, “not once in the two years we’ve been here. How much longer will this increasingly oppressive, unbearable weight press down on us?” And, several paragraphs on, “What will we do if we’re ever … no, I mustn’t write that down. But the question won’t let itself be pushed to the back of my mind today; on the contrary, all the fear I’ve ever felt is looming before me in all its horror.… I’ve asked myself again and again whether it wouldn’t have been better if we hadn’t gone into hiding, if we were dead now and didn’t have to go through this misery.… Let something happen soon.… Nothing can be more crushing than this anxiety. Let the end come, however cruel.” And on April 11, 1944: “We are Jews in chains.”