Resistance & Faith: Wiesel's Response to Job

I don’t know about you - but I’m finding myself rocking back and forth between despair and some sense of trust - hanging on to every bit of good news - like more hostages coming home and family reunions, and a ceasefire that holds - alongside tragic updates about ongoing violence and the attack on human rights here in the US in the so called name of safety and democracy.

I want to hold on to trust that there is a bigger picture, and that there is purpose to all this even when it hurts, especially then.

And as we make our way through the Book of Job - this epic poem about seeking trust and faith in a world of so much suffering - it’s this sense of good despite the difficulties in which I want to trust -- maybe trust is a stepping stone towards faith? Or maybe it’s a different room inside the mind and heart? In Hebrew Emun means trust, and Emunah means faith - it’s just one letter difference - but such a gap..

Elie Wiesel thought a lot and wrote a lot about these questions. Hewas quoted a lot this past week, as Holocaust Memorial Day was observed - with the many bizarre complexities of the present political moment -- and he was cited not just for his important voice as an eyewitness and survivor but also as keen reader of the human condition and a seeker of answers to life’s biggest questions.

Naturally, he wrote a lot about Job. At a lecture called "Job: Our Contemporary," that he delivered at the 92nd Street Y in NYC in 1983 he said:

“For years, Job would not leave me; he kept on haunting me. His file remained open, the questions unanswered.

It is possible that Job kept his faith—and rebelled against it—at the same time. It is possible that, having reached the height of his despair and torment, he achieved something new: he showed us that faith is necessary to rebellion and, also, that rebellion is possible within faith. There exists a time when the two are intertwined so as to strengthen one another instead of negating one another.”

40 years after Wiesel spoke this, and some 2,500 years after Job was written, we too are finding ourselves wrestling with responses to fast shifting realities - challenging on multiple levels, as we seek the balance or grounding between - faith and resistance, trust and turmoil, passion and patience.

Like Job, Wiesel is talking about finding some way of survival through deep despair in an unjust world that doesn’t always seem to work like right and wrong get equally rewarded. Shift happens to the best of us and suffering skips none of us, sooner or later. Sometimes on epic scales.

And like both of them, we each are trying to figure out how to respond with as much honesty and courage as possible.

Maybe trust in each other’s ability to help each other when the chips are down is a stepping stone towards faith in larger force, inner source, hidden divine reality that has our back, wants our good, and also juggles millions of other needs in the ecosystem that can cause harm?

Maybe trust in our own agency to survive horrors and heal our way back to love is the tool we need most?

Elie Wiesel's exploration of these themes in Job is an expression of his personal brave and lucky story of survival. In these closing chapters we are meeting Elihu - a fiery young man with faith in his bones and words of conviction - that still won’t manage to convince Job that God is good.

It’s a book, and it’s an invitation for us to ask the questions that will help us hold each other’s hands through these challenging times, Job-like in many ways, and cultivate trusting relationships. Perhaps that leads to faith? Perhaps it’s all there is? We have more chapters to read through, more questions to ask, more riddles to unpack and hopefully more secrets to explore here.

Blessed be the captives who are free, the ill who are healed, and those who ask good questions on the path to peace.

Thank you for joining me below the bible belt.

Shabbat Shalom.