March 2004 Wisdom From The Whirlwind (Excerpts from Rabbi Kass' sermon of January 26, 2004) By Rabbi Alvin Kass Howard Dean, an aspirant to become the Democratic Party's nominee for President, was asked about his favorite book in the New Testament. He answered that it was the Book of Job and that he was "feeling a little more Job-like recently." Of course, Job comes from the Hebrew Bible, and I leave to others to determine whether his trials are comparable to those of Job. However, Dean is right on target in choosing Job as his favorite book. It is without question the greatest book of the Bible, and arguably the greatest book ever written. It tackles the toughest subject there is: unjust suffering. The answer to Job's complaints about God's injustice is contained in the speeches of the Voice from the Whirlwind. Many have found the author's conclusions unsatisfying. The reason for their unhappiness and that of many others is a failure to understand the meaning of those speeches from the Whirlwind. They describe with incomparable eloquence the magnificence of the physical universe. But their goal is not to overwhelm Job by making explicit how potent God is and how puny human beings are. As Robert Gordis has pointed out, Job never doubted God's power; he questioned God's justice. It is ridiculous to think that Job would have become reconciled to God through descriptions of the Almighty's awesome creative accomplishments. Gordis contends that the real meaning of the God speeches is to be found, not in their "denotation," but their "connotation." Like all great poetry, the words from the Whirlwind transmit their deeper meaning by indirection, by allusion. The message of these descriptions of nature, says Gordis, is to demonstrate that the cosmos is not only a mystery, but also a miracle to be enjoyed and appreciated by man. The beauty of the universe has a therapeutic effect upon people. When a person immerses himself in the glory of the world, it makes his suffering easier to bear, not because one's troubles are insignificant, but because they dissolve within the larger picture. What the speeches from the Whirlwind are essentially saying is that just as there are harmony and order in the physical universe, though only partially understood by mortals, so there are harmony and order in the domain of morality, though often beyond human comprehension. The pain of our suffering distorts our perspective. As Chaim Nachman Bialik pointed out, when our thumb gets caught in the door, our whole personality centers on and gets absorbed into the hurt finger. However, even though the suffering person finds his life concentrated principally upon his plight, he can still believe if he can shift his focus to the joy and the beauty of the world. The author of Job is not satisfied with agnosticism. His message is that there is good reason to believe in the rationality and morality of the universe because one God made everything. If the order and harmony of the natural world are indisputable, a similar order and harmony must pervade the moral realm though we often do not understand it. To be sure, the author of Job provides us with only a partial explanation of human suffering. When all is said and done, the Talmudic dictum of Rabbi Yannai remains unassailable: "It is beyond our power to grasp why the righteous suffer or the wicked prosper." Still those words from the Whirlwind perform a very important purpose. By making a connection between the natural world and the moral realm, the voice strengthens our capacity to confront evil with a mettle derived from our faith in the "essential rightness of things." Just as the Book of Job brings comfort to Howard Dean, it can do the same for us all.