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Steven Katz, Shlomo Biderman, and Gershon Greenberg's recently published anthology, Wrestling with God, consists of an assortment of essays that deal with Jewish theological responses to the Holocaust. The volume certainly is not the only of its kind,1 but it is unique in that it brings together in one volume the voices of European, American, and Israeli thinkers from the mid-twentieth century all the way to the present, ultra-Orthodox and progressive Jews alike. A reader cannot help but be impressed by the diversity of opinion about how, if at all, this disaster has affected, or ought to affect, the shape and direction of Judaism. What emerges is nothing close to a consensus but a myriad of perspectives, ideas, and interpretations.
One pattern that does develop, however, is one that Katz himself highlights in the introductory essay to the third section of the volume: Jewish thinkers, in their theological ruminations in a post-Holocaust world, have returned with renewed interest to the biblical book of Job (Wrestling 356). Katz is also quick to point out that Job is not the only biblical text that post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers have begun to re-examine (the akedah and the "suffering servant" certainly would be others; 355-57), but the renewed importance of Job in particular is prominent enough that it has caught the critical eye of several other scholars, in addition to Katz (Braiterman 35-59; Tollerton; Mathewson, Death 1-2). Job's appeal to post-Holocaust Jewish thinkers seems obvious enough: Job is the biblical archetype of unwarranted, senseless suffering.
On one level this paper will probe the connection of the biblical Job to Jewish theological reflections on the Holocaust. But there is more. According to Elie Wiesel there is a much deeper connection of Holocaust survivors to the biblical Job, for "[w]henever [Holocaust survivors] attempt to tell our own story, we transmit [Job's]. The opposite is true also: those of his legends we presumed invented, we lived through; those of his words we thought illusory, proved to be true; we owe them our experience of evil and death" (Messengers 227). For Wiesel, Job is a model of protest against an unjust deity, and it is precisely through his relentless protest that Job speaks for the Holocaust survivor. This paper will explore the outer edges...