Job and The Shoah in the Ruins

Job 30:3

Yesterday’s Holocaust Remembrance Day - marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau brought up a lot of painful chatter about the ways this horror and its meaning keeps being manipulated by political parties and agenda on all sides of life. The tragedy of the Shoah is that it isn’t over - not just in the pained memories of survivors still alive - among them some of my relatives - but also in the minds of the generations that come after, the rise in antisemitic sentiments worldwide, as well as all the ways in which the traumatic violence is played out as revenge upon others - again and again.

The Book of Job is not the first to use the Hebrew word ‘Shoah’ - nowadays most often translated as ‘Holocaust’ - but it’s the book that uses this word the most. When it comes to human suffering and historical events that define horror and defy comprehension, the carefully planned industrial scale mass murder of Jews during WW2 earned this horrific label some years after it ended. These days, there are those, including in high places and positions of power, who choose to joke about it in offensive ways, or, much worse, evoke it with nostalgia and zeal. The Shoah, as a multi-generational trauma that is still played out, is also often brought up when dealing with the horrors that are still ongoing in Gaza - Genocides, Mass-murders, human cruelty, vengeance and violence are a recurring and recycled theme that we all so desperately and deeply wish to end.

So what’s Job’s reference of the term Shoah - starting in today’s chapter, got to do with how we make sense of suffering and work towards resolving it, and co-creating more justice, grace and healing in the world?

After going down memory lane in the previous chapter, Job now turns to his tragic presence. He spends long verses lamenting his fall from grace, and the ways in which even the poorest and youngest ridicule and insult him. Everything hurts - especially the fact that the ones lowest on the food chain can now freely laugh at him - who once was way on top.

When he describes the low-status of those who mock him, on the literal fringes of society, Job laments:

וְעַתָּה  שָׂחֲקוּ עָלַי צְעִירִים מִמֶּנִּי לְיָמִים אֲשֶׁר־מָאַסְתִּי אֲבוֹתָם לָשִׁית עִם־כַּלְבֵי צֹאנִי׃ בְּחֶסֶר וּבְכָפָן גַּלְמוּד הַעֹרְקִים צִיָּה אֶמֶשׁ שׁוֹאָה וּמְשֹׁאָה׃

“But now those who are much younger than me have me in derision, those whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock…For want and famine they are solitary; they flee into the wilderness, into a gloomy waste and desolation.”

Job 30:1-3

The Hebrew word Shoah is here translated as ‘gloomy waste’- quite typical of many translations. So what do we do with this reference, today?

Prof. James A. Diamond reflects deeply on the use of this term and the ways with which it echoes now:

“Job introduces the term shoah in this chapter to evoke a bleak existence suffused by “the gloom of desolate wasteland (shoah umeshoah)…” (30:3-9) In its original biblical contexts it translates variously as some extreme form of destruction, including “devastation”, “ruin”, or “waste”.

In our time the term is identified with the greatest disaster in Jewish history, the genocidal madness that engulfed Jews in the twentieth century. The term invited criticism since that catastrophe was of such magnitude as to defy any kind of naming. Indeed, many find the term “holocaust” offensive since its original Greek referred to a wholly burnt sacrificial offering. If sacrifices were brought by priests to appease God, the theological implications of the term applied to this genocide border on the obscene. Does the murder of millions please God?

However, Job’s use of shoah here, and its appearance again at the climax of the book when God finally responds, qualify its appropriation if only for the particular theological dilemma of innocent suffering with which it resonates. On the one hand, God explicitly condemns the friends’ glib response that neatly rationalizes it as punishment, a bankrupt theology shockingly still parroted today despite an entire biblical book’s rejection of it. On the other, God also denies any final neat resolution of the conflict between innocent suffering and divine justice because to ultimately fathom what makes the universe tick is beyond human ken.

For the contemporary reader Job’s and God’s resort to the term ‘shoah’ simply amplify the question mark by orders of magnitude. The book urgently presses us to probe, challenge, demand, and question injustice as Job does, always cognizant of our limitations, rather than complacently accept and rationalize it, arrogantly assuming one can discern God’s mind, as the friends do. That might result in a life of faith informed by concern, anxiety, and doubt, as the Shoah surely must continue to provoke, rather than the mind-numbing comfort the friends offer. Perhaps that is precisely the point of the book.”

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