We Must Imagine Job Happy
Sam's Point, Minnewaska State Park
Dear friends,
As somehow always happens when you study the Book of Job, we ended up chewing on Job’s final words. We were already in hour three or four of our wonderful Tikkun Leil Shavuot this week, which focused on Job, when the words were spoken:
"לְשֵׁמַע אֹזֶן שְׁמַעְתִּיךָ, וְעַתָּה - עֵינִי רָאָתְךָ, עַל כֵּן אֶמְאַס וְנִחַמְתִּי עַל עָפָר וָאֵפֶר"
Job has lost everything he had, sat silently in his devastation for a week, offered lament after lament. He has heard four of his friends try and talk some good religious sense into him, and then heard God’s voice unleash sweet poetry, that reminds Job of the exquisite beauty of the world. And then we reach this line. I’ve read it hundreds of times in Hebrew, read many different translations of it, translated in myself a few times, heard other translations, argued over it, studied it - but its meaning remains elusive.
The first half of the verse is easier - “I had heard about you with my ears; but now my eyes have seen you.” Stephen Mitchell’s translation stays true to the Hebrew in this case. And all the translators and commentators agree that Job is saying something like that. It’s the second half of the verse that’s harder to grasp. Even when you go word by word and understand each piece of the sentence, somehow by the time you’ve reached the end of it you still aren’t sure what he’s saying.
על כן means “therefore.”
אמאס means something like “I’m sick of it” in modern Hebrew, or “I’ve grown to detest” in some biblical passages, a type of abandoning of an idea or a person or God in others. It is the hardest word to translate in the sentence.
וְנִחַמְתִּי means “I am comforted.”
ּ עַל עָפָר וָאֵפֶר means “over dust and ashes.”
All together it would be something like: “therefore I’m sick of it, and I am comforted over dust and ashes.” Which doesn’t make much sense. Mitchell offers: “Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust.” Raymond Scheindlin suggests: “I retract. I even take comfort for dust and ashes.” As you see, that word אמאס can really be interpreted very differently. Edward Greenstein translates the first half of the sentence “that is why I’m fed up.” King James goes: “Wherefore I abhor myself.”
My rabbi, Jim Ponet used to make a classic rabbinical exegetical move and say that the written word אמאס should actually be understood like another Hebrew word that sounds almost identical, אמס, which means “I melt.” The suggestion is that Job’s final words are a total softening, a renunciation of anything and everything he previously believed and argued, a type of acknowledgement of the emptiness, in the Buddhist vein. His acceptance of what has happened to him comes in the form of losing his mind’s previous form. But in recent years Rabbi Jim’s seemed to have moved on from that understanding.
It was his son, David who in our Tikkun opened up a new vista on the verse for me. David, the School for Creative Judaism’s Philosopher in Residence, brought in some text from Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus is another mythological Job-like character, punished pretty severely: he has to push that huge rock up the mountain over and over again for eternity, watch it roll down and start again. Camus opens his book by asking all of us Sisyphi: how come we don’t kill ourselves, much like Job’s wife asks him in the second chapter of Job. But by the end of his book, he’s managed to embrace the absurdity of the human situation and even find freedom in it. Sisyphus pushes that rock up the mountain. It falls down to the bottom. Sisyphus turns to walk down the mountain again.
“It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me,” Camus writes. “That hour, like a breathing space that returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness.” He imagines him walking down the hill. “If the descent is sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.” In other words, while Sisyphus walks down the mountain to begin pushing that huge rock up again, he might be HAPPY. Is he overstating it? “This word is not too much,” he tells us.
Camus’ final lines are some of his most famous, and probably his most ecstatic:
“This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
And so I ask myself – might one imagine Job happy as well?
I don’t think that’s possible for most of the book. Even Sisyphus' imagined happiness is focused more on the empty pause when he's walking down the hill than on the painful pushing of the rock uphill. Job's arguments with his friends and God are the equivalent of pushing the rock up the mountain. The question is whether at the end, in the 42nd chapter, when he speaks his last lines, we can imagine him happy. Remember, this is before God announces that he was right all along, and before he gets everything he had at the beginning back twofold. For Job “the hour of consciousness” must be that moment during which says:
“I had heard about you with my ears; but now my eyes have seen you."
We must imagine Job happy when he says these words. His “comfort over dust and ashes” must be a warm and beautiful sentiment. He has made peace with death, and in so doing he has made peace with life. That elusive word, אמאס, must be part of that process of finding joy. At the Tikkun I thought maybe it means: “I give up. I raise the white flag. I surrender. No more war. No more fighting. No more demanding that reality conform to my needs. I am now ready to experience comfort, to sit in what is.”
So for today, this Shabbat, I raise the white flag. I give up on trying to understand the best translation of this verse. I give up on understanding, on insisting that this world be different than it is. Instead, I imagine myself happy, surrounded by the sweet-scented summer air, resting in the gift of Shabbat.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha