Job’s Intergenerational Trauma

Job 8:7-19

"We are extremely powerful beings! When we focus our energies intentionally through ritual and meditation, we can dissolve trans-generational traumas and liberate ourselves from negative family patterns."

Tirza Firestone, Wounds into Wisdom

How much power does the past have over our present choices, future flourishing, ongoing challenges and opportunities? How can we handle and heal our intergenerational trauma to liberate the future?

Job’s journey meets us today with these weighty questions, on the cusp of a new year.

Our personal DNA and the collective narratives that we are part of define so much of who we are - and yet there is increasing focus, such as the wisdom of my friend and teacher Tirza Firestone, on the ways we can and ought to face our inherited traits and traumas in order to interrupt some patterns and reimagine a better way of being in the world.

Job, struggling with intense suffering, wants to know the reason and wants someone to blame.

As the drama continues, Bildad, the second of Job’s well meaning but flawed friends comes along to try and help.

Bildad begins a beautifully worded speech that calls upon ancestral wisdom and continues to claim that Job’s troubles - are his own fault, not the righteous deity’s.

As a way to give his friend some perspective, Bildad reminds him that he’s not the first to look for answers and that the previous generation’s wisdom is more worthy than his own, limited, lifespan’s worth of knowledge:

כִּי־שְׁאַל־נָא לְדֹר רִישׁוֹן וְכוֹנֵן לְחֵקֶר אֲבוֹתָם׃ כִּי־תְמוֹל אֲנַחְנוּ וְלֹא נֵדָע כִּי צֵל יָמֵינוּ עֲלֵי־אָרֶץ׃ הֲלֹא־הֵם יוֹרוּךָ יֹאמְרוּ לָךְ וּמִלִּבָּם יוֹצִאוּ מִלִּים׃

Ask the generation past,

Study what their forebears have searched out—

For we are of yesterday and know nothing;

Our days on earth are a shadow—

Surely they will teach you and tell you,

Speaking out of their understanding.

Job 8:7-19

Bildad’s words drip with a kind of well-meaning condescension. To the grieving, suffering Job, he offers not empathy but a directive: look to the past. The answers to life’s greatest questions are not yours to discover anew, Bildad insists. You are but a shadow, a fleeting wisp in the long arc of history. Whatever wisdom exists, it has already been gleaned, polished, and handed down by generations far wiser than you. Stop wrestling with the chaos; the sages of the past have already tamed it for you.

But Bildad’s advice doesn’t land for Job. His suffering is too immediate, too raw. The repository of tradition may offer abstract wisdom, but it cannot explain why his life—a life lived with integrity—has been reduced to rubble. Bildad offers a philosophy that works for detached reflection, not for someone standing on the precipice of despair. Job’s anguish cries out for something more: not inherited answers, but an honest confrontation with the chaos.

This is where Tirzah Firestone’s work on multigenerational trauma offers a valuable counterpoint. Like others in the field, she teaches that the wisdom of the past isn’t always a balm—it can also carry the weight of unhealed wounds. The generations that preceded us didn’t just pass down their insights; they also passed down their pain, their unfinished struggles, their Leviathans. Tradition is not a pristine inheritance but a tangled web of trauma and resilience, chaos and creativity.

Job’s rejection of Bildad’s neatly-packaged answers can be seen as a refusal to accept uncritically the narratives of the past. His cry is a demand for reckoning—not just with God, but with the ways inherited wisdom can sometimes mask, rather than heal, the chaos at our core.

Yet, Firestone also reminds us that this very confrontation with the past can be transformative. When we acknowledge the generational wounds we carry, we begin to weave new threads into the fabric of tradition. Job’s suffering, though unresolved, becomes a testament to the necessity of both honoring the wisdom of the past and challenging it where it falls short.

Bildad speaks of tradition as the final word, but Job’s story reminds us that tradition is a living conversation. To truly understand the justice—or the mystery—of life, we must listen not only to the sages of the past but also to the cries of those in the present. Healing, like faith, is found in the tension between the two. Firestone’s words reminds us -and Job - that

"Trauma changes us in permanent and enduring ways. But we always have a choice about the outcome of our story."

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