Complaints from the Dung Heap
Hamas lies
systematically, instructing civilians to misinform the foreign press. It lies habitually, with a formidable record
of mendacity from previous conflicts.
And it lies guiltlessly, convinced that the objectives of resistance
supersede quaint notions of truth-telling.[i]]
In 1948 Schocken Books printed a translation of
Bernartd Lazare’s Job’s Dungheap
which had first been published posthumously in edited version of various notes
and sketches being prepared by Lazare before his death in 1903 by Emond Fleg in
1928 as Le Fumier de Job. The English
translation by Harry Lorin Binasse has for its sub-title “Essays on Jewish
Nationalism and Social Revolution, with a Portrait of Bernard Lazare by Charles
Péguy,” and also contains as Preface by Hannah Arendt. Why did Schocken Books bring together these
important European thinkers just three years after the Holocaust—an event not
yet then given a specific name, but simply recognized as a major disaster (churban) for the Jewish people and for
all humanity? Who were they, and even
more to the point today, more than a century after Lazare’s brief thirty-eight
year life? And why did this once famous
and influential figure but now forgotten author call his unfinished work Job’s Dungheap? Finally, to mix the minor with the major, how
is it appropriate for me to appropriate Lazare’s my own rambling essay on the
current Gaza Crisis of 2014?
Bernard
Lazare was born Lazar Bernard
and spent much of his early life ambiguous and conflicted as a French Jew,
wanting too often to be a cultured Frenchman more than an assimilated Jew, and thus toying around with anarchism and
Symbolist poetry. When the Dreyfus
Affair burst upon the scene in the late 1890s—or perhaps better, began to leak
into public consciousness—he was one of the first to see through the mists of
false arguments and to speak out for Dreyfus’ innocence and the duplicity of
the Army, the Church, the State and those Jews who were too frightened to take
a stand. Yet the Dreyfus family had to
try to contain him from pushing too hard until they could develop their case
and try to enlist strategic and influential non-Jews on their side. But he had been right all along when others
deluded themselves or cautiously bided their time. Similarly, he could not see beyond his
radical and liberal politics to the importance of Zionism, but then the fog
began to lift and he saw what Theodor Herzl saw, and Lazare came out for the
movement, albeit more to the left than the core leaders in Zionism. To a
certain extent, the Dreyfus Affair was a watershed business, on one side the
virtuous attempt to remain in Europe and become normal Europeans beyond
considerations of nationalism and religion; on the other, a realization that no
matter much a Jew may feel part of the state and the culture, too many others
don’t feel that way, have strong feelings of envy and resentment, and play out
an increasingly violent game of scapegoating the Jew as a necessary other. At the very least, it is salutary for us now
to realize that the arguments developed for and against Zionism from the 1890s
well into the twentieth century were based perceived conditions and real facts
on the ground that for the most part no longer obtain. We have to see the world as it is now, as it
became after World War II, as it developed after the foundation of a Jewish
state of Israel, and as it continues to change following the demographic shifts
within Israel, such as the arrival of large numbers of refugees from the
Moslem-Arab states, the breakdown of the old Soviet Union and the influx of not
very religious olim, a shift still in
progress as plane-loads of Jews come in to Ben Gurion Airport from war-torn
Georgia, Chechnya, Ukraine, as well as from increasingly anti-Semitic parts of
South America, Western Europe and North America.
Job on his Dung Heap (the biblical text)
Though not marked by any
specific Jewish customs or allusions, Job takes on very prescient Jewish
attitudes during the testing that forms the core of the dramatic or operatic
speeches which constitute this biblical book.
In a prologue on the porch of Heaven, God and the Satan (notice the
definite article which makes the character different from the demonic figure in
later Christian literature enter into a compact to test a man whom the special
angelic agent claims only seems true and loyal to the divine precepts and
powers because has been favoured with wealth, strength and security, so that
if those gifts were removed, the Satan
says, God would quickly see a very different kind of Job. The scene then switches to earth where the
patriarchal Job lives with his wife and sons, flourishing on a grand estate and
surrounded by neighbours who honour and respect him. Then one by one the gifts of Heaven are taken
away, including the deaths of his children,
reducing this once proud man to poverty and loneliness.
Nevertheless he does not blame
God and tries to endure stoically what he has suffered. While this seems to satisfy the deity, the
Satan asks for one more attempt to break the human being’s spirit by afflicting
him with disease. This stimulation is
agreed to provided Job is not actually killed.
Now, covered with painful boils and seeking the only comfort that seems
possible by sitting on a pile of dung, Job begins to moan about his life,
wishing he had never been born. At this
point, his wife tells him somewhat ambiguously to curse God and die, that is,
to accept finally that he is no longer God’s friend and recognize that there is
no true justice in the world, and thus no reason to live. Two things happen as a consequence of this
uxorious suggestion: first, Job is roused to anger against a universe he cannot
understand rather than to despair of a capricious and callous God; second,
perhaps prompted by the wife’s desire to see her husband roused from his dung
hill perch, three of his old friends arrive, followed soon by a young man of
the town named Elihu, and eventually by the Voice of Heaven itself speaking
from a whirlwind.
The visitation by these various
characters forms the largest section of the biblical book and the series of
charges and counter-charges that form the main argument of what constitutes
wisdom. The three friends and Elihu speak in a pattern of long accusations
which Job then answers in a crescendo of anger and frustration. The charges are that Job must have done
something wrong to provoke divine rage and therefore he should repent of his
sins, and, when he resists by claiming complete innocence, they take this as
evidence of his arrogance, stiff-necked failure to accept the moral order of
the universe, and when he blames them for misunderstanding the world in
simplistic terms of good and evil, they—including especially the young
Elihu—blame him for threatening the good order and welfare of human
history. Instead of accepting the
language of liturgical and homiletic tradition, as the so-called comforters do
in constructing t heir charges and justifying their self-righteous anger at a
man they once deemed beyond all reproach, Job’s answers pick apart the
superficiality and mechanical insufficiency of their discourses, indicating
that there is no easy correlation between this metaphorical imagery and the
complex truths of cosmic justice.
At this point, the first
breakthrough of the divine occurs, when a voice from the whirlpool asks Job an
apparently unanswerable question: Where were you when I created the world? The
implication is that an all-powerful and omniscient intelligence cannot be
resisted since he (El-shaddai or God) or she (Hochma or Sapientia or Wisdom) or
it (an unknowable and unspeakable deity) made everything and runs the whole
she-bang for purposes unrelated to individual human needs, desires, and fears. Then Job replies ironically, saying in
effect, Well, I guess I can’t answer that since indeed I was mnot there at the
very beginning of things and I can easily be crushed by your overwhelming
strength, while he means—or the author of this book means—this divine speech is
irrelevant to the basic question.
Priority of birth and vast brute power do not explain why the universe
does not run in a just way. This is
question of theodicy or divine justice: Why do good men suffer and evil prosper
in a world created by a supposedly just and compassionate deity?
Though it seems like Job has
been duly shut up and will now retreat into silence against the overwhelming
powers of God, leaving his friends and comforters to smirk in their triumph,
Job’s acceptance of the conditions supposedly operating in the world are
reluctant, disappointed, and insincere: he still expects something better to
come from Heaven. And so it does. The voice from Heaven returns, this time to
admonish the three friends and Elihu, to tell them that Job is right to
complain against their self-serving lack of compassion and priggish
misunderstanding of how divine justice works and spiritual morality is
expressed in the language of sacred discourses.
For that reason, not only will Job be reinstated into his former
positions of wealth and respect, but they themselves will have to compensate
him for his losses, except (though this is a questionable conclusion to the
biblical text that does not appear in the Dead Sea Scrolls version of the book)
in regard to his dead sons who are returned to him in the form of a new
generation he fathers on Mrs. Job (not by resurrection, be it noted).
In brief, then, while for
whatever mysterious purposes God has chosen to allow the Satan to test his
loyal friend almost to the limits of his life, Job, reduced to sitting in the
shit, does not curse God nor blame him for his grief and pains: he questions
the purposes of God’s ways and then has to accept them as beyond his ken as
part of a moral order that remains an aporia,
a place outside the normal range of logic, but this acceptance also requires
him to keep questioning and complaining to God and rejecting the stupid false
logic of the rest of the community who slide along on facile answers and
misunderstood revelations. The world is
a dung heap, to be sure, but as it is the only world we have, we have to keep
working to understand it and make it better, no matter how excruciating the
pains and how frustrating the lack of measurable progress. The smug self-righteous ideologues of
conformity do not speak for God.
Job and the Dung Heap of History (the present crisis)
The smug,
arrogant and self-righteous reporters, editors, academic and human rights
activists, especially those who sit on the United Nations committers to
represent dictatorial, racist and fanatical states keep passing anti-Israel
motions and expect Israel to respect their wishes. The blather of confused, illogical and
made-up stories about genocide in Gaza, indiscriminate targeting of civilians
and children in schools and mosques, and acceptance of Hamas medical estimates
of killed and injured where every corpse is ipso
facto that of a civilian is a pastiche of demonic rhetoric.
Listen to
what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Governor Cuomo of New York State on
13 August 2014:
The UN Human Rights Council gives legitimacy to murderous terrorist
organizations such as Hamas and ISIS. Instead of inquiring into Hamas's attacks
on Israeli civilians and its use of the residents of Gaza as human shields and
instead of inquiring into the massacres that Assad is perpetrating against the
Syrian people or that ISIS is perpetrating against the Kurds, the UN has
decided to come and check Israel – the only democracy in the Middle East, a
democracy which is acting legitimately to defend its citizens against murderous
terrorism.
The report of this committee has already been written. The committee chairman has already decided that Hamas is not a terrorist organization; therefore, they have nothing to look for here. They should visit Damascus, Baghdad and Tripoli; they should go see ISIS, the Syrian army and Hamas – there they will find war crimes, not here.
The report of this committee has already been written. The committee chairman has already decided that Hamas is not a terrorist organization; therefore, they have nothing to look for here. They should visit Damascus, Baghdad and Tripoli; they should go see ISIS, the Syrian army and Hamas – there they will find war crimes, not here.
Sitting on the dung heap of the Middle East, this contemporary Job,
vilified by erstwhile friends and suffering countless losses of wealth, energy
and lives, has a moral right to complain of injustice in the world embodied
theoretically in the United Nations.
Why Go On?
After nearly a month…the media
has belatedly cottoned to the Hamas game.
Over the last week The New York Times, Al Jazeera and the BBC—none of
them traditional redoubts of Zionist fervor—have begun casting doubt on their
own previously reported statistics….It is therefore all the more extraordinary
that journalists cast their usual scepticism to the winds and instead followed
the script of an unrepentant, unreliable terror outfit. .[ii]
I am now
convinced that it is too late to change the minds, not just of the Hamasniks
themselves and the people who live under their oppression, but of the western
media people, the intellectuals, the academics, and the self-proclaimed
guardians of human rights, and this includes, alas, many Jews in Israel and the
Diaspora. If at this point, after so
many revelations of Palestinian perfidy, they do not see what really is going
on, then it would be a waste of time, energy and intellect to try to convert
them. My argument is not at all for
them. I write for the rest of us, Jew
and non-Jew, who need encouragement to persist in our fight for the truth and
justice in this world and who may be interested in some unfamiliar arguments
about the the perfidy and perversion occurs.
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