For Substack, I am going to post on Monday and Thursday. For the next few months at least, Monday will be John Cheever day and Thursday will be the Book of Job chapter by chapter. Once I finish either, I will start something else. I do this for the following reasons (both related to ADHD)
This gives me structure
I have already written most of these for Tumblr. At very least, I wrote the rough drafts.
So why Job? Job is a messy book that everyone thinks that they understand but few actually read. With any other book in the Bible, I'd be in competition with generations of rabbis and pastors and secular scholars. Maybe not the minor prophets, but the minor prophets aren't terribly exciting. Job is weird and funny and depressing as hell.
Job rubs the reader's face in the horrible truths of life that most of us don't want to deal with. The “Shit Happens” bumper sticker is about as close as we come to it. At one point, Marvel comics decided that Ben Grimm was Jewish and that he could have a bar mitzvah. His bar mitzvah portion was The Book of Job (no one reads the Book of Job at their bar mitzvah but apparently the Marvel writers couldn't find any Jews in New York City who could have set them right) and his only insight was “Gosh, Job had it tough.”
Tragedy comes to everyone. There's nothing we can do to prepare for it. We can barely deal with it. You can end up with mentally ill parents who set the tone for every relationship. You can discover you have stage 4 cancer on your 24th birthday. Children die. Lovers waste years enamored with the wrong ones. People join genocidal militias and elevate the worst monsters to power. You might spout the cliches – everything happens for a reason, God opens a window, it will all work out – but ultimately you know it's bullshit.
Life is suffering and that might be a tenet of Buddhism (or a very western misreading of Buddhism), western culture doesn't accept that. Capitalism is driven by everyone believing that they are temporarily displaced millionaires. Leftwing radicalism sells a non-capitalist utopia. Right-wingers want to return to the “good old days” before they felt personally attacked for their privilege. The happy ending is always just out of reach.
No wonder, Job gets the most puerile interpretations. The story of Job is simple. Job loses everything and argues with some very bad friends about the meaning. Eventually God steps in and tells Job that his friends are wrong and whatever great design hides behind creation involves Job's children dying. Then there's a tacked on happy ending that makes very little sense. The interpretations are even more simplistic.
Confronted with the basic problem of Job suffering for nothing, the rabbis decided to ask “No, really, what did Job do to deserve it?” The most popular answer is that Job didn't advise the Pharaoh to not oppress the Jews in Exodus and therefore suffered. The Christians have decided that it's about faith. If you only read the first and last chapter, you can read Job as a nice fable about how if you keep trusting God you'll get all of your stuff back.
Ironically, both the popular Christian and Jewish interpretations sound like Job's dumb friends. Job's friends tell him that everything happens for a reason, that he should just trust God, that God definitely punishes the wicked and rewards the Good. Only Job is not about any of that. Job outright says that these are garbage ways to approach suffering. Yet, no one listens to Job. Job's friends barely listen to him. Only God takes him seriously and even then God is outright telling Job that he is presumptuous.
Job confronts monotheism with the central paradox. If there is only one God (and not a god of orgies, a god of war, a goddess of hunting, etc.) then the same God that gives humanity life, chocolate and orgasms also gives us cancer, hangovers and Creed. Ultimately, the book says that no matter how many ways that we want to retreat into the comforts of half-truths and pithy sayings, we are going to suffer. There might not be a reason. In fact, it is probably going to be terribly unfair.
Also the Leviathan is the coolest sea monster ever.